The NY Times is normally happy to lead the liberal charge in it’s editorial  content, but an OP Ed piece this week takes Al Gore to task for falsities and alarmism on Global Warming.

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype

Hollywood hass a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Finally, someone noticed.  Prof Easterbrook appeared on the Bryan Suits show today and he was very compelling.

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want.

Every time I hear a politician use the word nuance I want to scream.  Science has facts, theories and proofs.  It does not have nuance.  Politics has nuance, except we usually call it lies or rationalization.

“The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

Translation:  “People are too dumb for science, so I just scare them.”

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”

Gore’s defenders hide behind the “blaming the messenger” defense, but Al defies that defense with his claims of authority and consensus.

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician.

How scary is that, that he has credibility despite obvious exaggerations and omissions.  The overall message matter more then a factual representation.

Once again, the facts don’t matter, just the feel.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

And that is the key to Al’s alarmism:  Find the worst case scenarios and report them as if they were the most likely scenarios.

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Of course those reports often face ridicule and scorn.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

The professor told Bryan the last Republican he voted for was Eisenhower.

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

Maybe if they hadn’t banned DDT…

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Yup. 

UPDATE

A commentor noted that I had ommitted the last paragraph of the article which contained this quote:

You forgot this quote:

“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a ddifficult subject,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lott of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”

Posted by harold | Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 8:36 AM edit

I omitted it because I had already used too many quotes and was brushing the limits on fair use, plus it wasn’t relevant to the rebuke aspect of the story.   But I have to say in retrospect that I should have, because like the section above where he gets rock star treatment, this is an illustration of the disconnect between truth and or facts, and the political aspects of the issue.  Since Oppenheimer advocates the human caused “consensus” mantra, it does not matter how inaccurate Al was or how alarmist he was.  No matter how the conclusions is reach, no matter what methods, as long as the conclusion is proper and aligns with his beliefs, it is ok.

I clearly should have included it just to illustrate how someone like Al can lie, misstate, use faulty data and present incorrect conclusions but still “get it right” according to the peers who support the alarmism mantra. 

Truth is, again not as important as the conclusions are.

Oppenheimer’s statement is absurd on its face and is patently unscientific.

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