Al set to pick up his Nobel Prize

J

jerseyfinn

Senior
Mar 19, 2006
304
0
NJ USA
Everyone likes to talk a good game about the environment and the greenhouse effect. A lot of frenetic assertions that doom is on the horizon if we don't act now as sea levels will swamp us and lands dry up. Yet the media, and those so-called "experts" who claim to know better than any of us are a little lean with the facts in terms of what science really does and does not know.

I've been toasted that Al Gore gets a free ride from the press and the public about his self-professed environmentalism. More specifically, just what are the facts which Gore, scientists, & the media conveniently ignore?

This editorial at least raises the question as Gore is set to pick up his Nobel prize.

Climate change is indeed serious stuff. But Al doesn't take any of us or the facts seriously-- it's all a big game to politicos and media hacks with an agenda & an ax to grind.

Barry



DEROY MURDOCK: Al Gore, global warming and convenient untruths

Published Thursday, November 29, 2007



When Nobel laureate Al Gore collects his peace prize in Oslo on Dec. 10, he should tell the gathered Norwegians exactly what he meant when he remarked about global warming:

"I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are," Gore said in the May 9, 2006, issue of Grist magazine.

"Over-representation"? Is that anything like "misrepresentation"?

Gore's approach infects the debate and even the methodology of so-called global warming. From the former vice president to unseen academics, some who clamor for statist answers to this alleged climate crisis employ dodgy measurement techniques, while others embrace hype and fear-mongering to promote massive government intervention to combat an entirely questionable challenge. Worse yet, this applies to reputedly objective researchers, not just opinionated activists.

For starters, U.S. temperature data suffer from the "garbage in, garbage out" syndrome. As surfacestations.org meteorologist Anthony Watts discovered, numerous NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature sensors are situated not in open fields at uniform heights, as required, but near parking lots, beside central-air exhaust ducts, and even above barbecue grills. These artificially elevate temperature reports.

Since 1970, previously whitewashed temperature sites have been painted with semi-gloss latex. Because it absorbs more heat, Heartland Institute scholar James Taylor wrote in November's Environment & Climate News, "latex paint at official temperature stations may account for half of the U.S. warming reported since 1970." Thus, America could reverse half the detected post-1970 warming that aggravates climate activists simply by stripping this latex paint and whitewashing these observation structures.

Stranger still, NASA adopted a new technique in 2000 to calculate average annual temperatures. NASA essentially gave a 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit (0.15 degrees Centigrade) "bonus" to readings for the last seven years.

However, Canadian statistical analyst Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org caught NASA's mathematical mistake. After the space agency admitted and corrected its glitch, America's warmest year shifted from 1998 to 1934.

Global-warming enthusiasts should clarify why America was hotter during the less-developed Great Depression, yet cooler in purportedly carbon-choked 1998. In fact, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 were cooler than 1900 -- three years before the launch of the Ford Motor Company.

"The alarmists who trumpeted recent years as 'warmest ever!!!' in the United States (by a mere tenth of a degree) now dismiss this reversal -- 2000 and subsequent years being cooler than 1900 -- as just being a tenth of a degree or so," said Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Horner. "Well, either that's a big deal whichever direction it falls, or it isn't. Which time are you lying?"

Meanwhile, the British High Court of Justice ruled Oct. 10 that Gore's picture, "An Inconvenient Truth," peddles convenient untruths. Mr. Justice Burton determined that "some of the errors, or departures from the mainstream, by Mr. Gore ... in the course of his dynamic exposition, do arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis." The court ordered that British secondary schools could present Gore's movie only if students receive a guidance note distancing the Education Department from "the more extreme views of Mr. Gore" and admitting there are two sides, not one, to global warming.

Burton cited nine points in Gore's "political film" that either were "apparently based on nonexistent or misunderstood evidence" or "upon lack of knowledge or appreciation of the scientific position." Among them: Despite Gore's contrary claims, melting polar ice caps will not raise sea levels by 20 feet any century soon, global warming is not melting the glacier atop Mount Kilimanjaro, nor did it intensify Hurricane Katrina, nor are polar bears dying due to melting ice.

University of California-Santa Barbara professor emeritus Daniel Botkin recently lamented in The Wall Street Journal that some of his warming-oriented colleagues believe "the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate ... 'Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?' one said to me recently."

Oslo's applause notwithstanding, egregious errors, distortions and lies have no place in what is supposedly unbiased scientific inquiry regarding one of Earth's most controversial questions.
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at [email protected].
Click to expand...


<link for above article is here >
 
Consider the source.

Wikipedia:
Deroy Murdock is a conservative syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and a contributing editor with National Review Online.

Deroy Murdock's columns appear in The New York Post, The Boston Herald, The Washington Times, The Orange County Register and many other newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad. His political commentary has aired on ABC's Nightline, NBC Nightly News, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, PBS, other television news channels, and numerous radio outlets.

Murdock is also a Media Fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. He is a veteran of the 1980 and 1984 Reagan for President campaigns and was a communications consultant with Forbes 2000, the White House bid of publisher Steve Forbes.

Murdock's conservatism is of a libertarian bent. He opposes governmental involvement in issues relating to both gay and heterosexual marriage. Murdock himself is gay. He also opposes the War on Drugs.

He said on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on September 16, 2007 that he believes Saddam Hussein was involved in perpetrating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America. Murdock cited Smith v. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan., 262 F. Supp. 2d 217, a federal case heard by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer, Jr.. On May 7, 2003, Judge Baer ruled that Hussein and his Baathist government, as well as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, provided "material support" to the September 11 conspirators. As Judge Baer's decision stated: "I conclude that plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, 'by evidence satisfactory to the court' that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda." Judge Baer, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in April 1994, ordered Hussein, the former Iraqi government, and the other losing defendants in this civil case to pay $104 million in damages to the families of George Eric Smith and Timothy Soulas, both murdered in the World Trade Center. Judge Baer's decision added: "Again, since the al Qaeda defendants and Iraq are jointly and severally liable, they are all responsible for the payment of any judgment that may be entered." A CBSNews.com story on this case led with the headline: "Court Rules: Al Qaida, Iraq Linked -- A Federal Judge Orders Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein To Pay Millions."

Murdock details this case, and presents extensive additional evidence of Saddam Hussein's philanthropy of terror on a webpage he developed called HUSSEINandTERROR.com.

Murdock was named runner-up to Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann after writing an article titled "Three Cheers for Waterboarding", in which he called waterboarding "something of which every American should be proud."

Murdock received his AB in Government from Georgetown University in 1986 and his MBA in Marketing and International Business from New York University in 1989. A native of Los Angeles, California, Murdock currently resides in New York City. Murdock is a second-generation American. His parents are from Costa Rica. Afro Costa Ricans comprise approximately 3% of that nation's population.
Click to expand...
 
... the Brits aren't too impressed with former Vice President Al Gore's sci fi flick, An Inconvenient Truth. The British high court ruled Gore's Academy Award winning global warming film cannot be shown in any public school in England without an explicit disclaimer. The high court ruled that students must be warned that the film is partisan, political advocacy, not a factual representation of what is actually happening with the climate of the world. The disclaimer must stipulate that misleading exaggerations permeate the film. The court said the film contained far too many factual errors to be shown in the public school system without a disclaimer.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Ryter/jon203.htm
 
MMB said:
The British high court ruled Gore's Academy Award winning global warming film cannot be shown in any public school in England without an explicit disclaimer. The high court ruled that students must be warned that the film is partisan, political advocacy, not a factual representation of what is actually happening with the climate of the world. The disclaimer must stipulate that misleading exaggerations permeate the film. The court said the film contained far too many factual errors to be shown in the public school system without a disclaimer.
Click to expand...

Actually, this is what the judge wrote:
"It is now common ground that it is not simply a science film although it is clear that it is based substantially on scientific research and opinion but that it is a political film."

Time Magazine
Click to expand...

And from the BBC:
Mr Justice Burton said he had no complaint about Gore's central thesis that climate change was happening and was being driven by emissions from humans. However, the judge said nine statements in the film were not supported by mainstream scientific consensus.

The nine errors alleged by the judge included:
  • Mr Gore's assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future". The judge said this was "distinctly alarmist" and it was common ground that if Greenland's ice melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia".
  • Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.
  • Mr Gore's reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned "swimming long distances - up to 60 miles - to find the ice". The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm."
Click to expand...

The court's ruling did not exactly challenge the main premise of Gore's film.
 
Question to you:
How much of Earth's atmosphere is carbon dioxide?
How much of that is human caused by artificial means?
Is the earth's environment a static or a dynamic system?
Can you name one alternative to fossil fuels that the other environmentalist nuts would accept? (Careful, several groups just moved to block a wind farm in the Gulf.)
Are you one of the nuts who were screaming about global cooling 30 years ago?
How much CO2, water vapor, and other greenhouse gasses were put into the atmosphere by the fires in California that were made *much* worse by irrational environmental restrictions forced by nutcase activist groups like the Sierra Club?
How many people are going to die during next spring’s mud slides caused by those same policies?
What kind of car(s) do you and your family drive?
How do you heat/cool your home?
Do you know where your electricity comes from?
...
 
Very simple questions. What if they are right? What if they are only partly right. How can 9 billion people not have an adverse affect on the planet we inhabit? What happens when we get to the point (if we have not already crossed it) when the affect that we have on the planet is not reversible. Does anyone know where the do over button is? We only get one planet. If we mess this one up (more than we already have) we do not just get to move on to another one (at least not yet) so why not err on the side of caution and do the most that we can to make sure this one stays healthy.

I do not worry about winning the lottery. That would be a good thing. I do worry about the bad things that can happen and do the best that I can to safe guard against them.

So if one of you yaa hoos can explain to me how 9 billion people (and growing) cannot have an adverse effect on mother earth, I am all ears.
 
Garfield1966 said:
... How can 9 billion people not have an adverse affect on the planet we inhabit? What happens when we get to the point (if we have not already crossed it) when the affect that we have on the planet is not reversible. ...
Click to expand...
You are absolutely correct.
How many should we kill?
 
MMB said:
You are absolutely correct.
How many should we kill?
Click to expand...


Perhaps your reading comprehension is off today. I do not recall advocating homicide anywhere in my post (perhaps I missed it and you could point it out to me?). I do recall advocating that if our existence on the planet is causing an adverse and possibly irreversible affect on the planet, that perhaps we should do all possible to try and stem, if not reverse the changes. Does that not sound like a reasonable idea to you? Or are you one of those me first and screw the rest type of people?
 
delldude said:
As I once asked before....what is a credible source?
Click to expand...


Well, to start off, use some good judgement. To use FOX as a source to support a ‘rightwing’ idea would not be credible IMO. To use FOX to support a left wing idea would be more credible (for someone to support an idea that they normally do not support seems to indicate it is more likely to be true). FOX in general seems to be caught quite often citing things or reporting things that are factually incorrect, as I recall (no I do not have an example). One can exchange FOX for other ‘news’ sources as well but IMO FOX is the least credible one out there.

If you are arguing a scientific issue, quoting a scientific journal would be suffice I think.

Quoting a talking head or a politician (I know its redundant) does not seem like it is worth while since they are not held to any standards are on par with rocks as far as intelligence is concerned (sorry if I insulted any rocks out there).

There are ‘scientific’ groups out there who are not scientific at all. I recall seeing a few of them when discussing ID. They were religious organizations masquerading as science.

I look at it this way. If you were against the idea that you are promoting, would you accept your source as valid?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top