The Gore hath (finally) spoken. And of course, the NYT gives this person, who has no particular scientific, let alone climatological training have access to their op-ed page. That says a lot more about the NYT than about Gore.
Be that as it may, the central issue is a few “mistakes”. I could put a lot of effort into debunking this, but Christopher Booker at the Telegraph did it for me. The difficult thing about debunking someone as ignorant as Gore, is that it becomes impossible to distinguish honest ignorance from dishonest propaganda. Either way, what Gore refers to as “mistakes” are nothing of the sort; they were improper conclusions from improper sources, very deliberately placed in the report in order to support their summary conclusions.
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
Which gets to the second excuse; the “fake but accurate” argument that none of this disproves the science. Heads up. They’re moving the goalposts. You don’t get to buttress a weak case with phony arguments, lose the phony arguments, and then say that the case still stands. The truth is that the warmists have never had a solid argument in physics from first principles, and have always been arguing that any warming signal seen in the data must be proof that “it’s worse than we thought”. But then when the earth stops cooperating with them, and the warming (for practical intents) ceases, they demand that the basic physics is still beyond doubt.
Sorry, no dice. You can’t play that one both ways. Either the physics stands on its own (in which case they can’t defend their high climate sensitivity claim), or your case is based on the data (in which case they just lost the argument).
But I believe that Mr. Gore is too ignorant to even see that. He’s a poster boy for our political elites – privileged, mediocre, and too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is.
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Gore rambles about a lot of things in his three pages, but there’s one in particular that needs to be addressed:
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil.
This argument is nonsense, because carbon caps don’t reduce oil imports, they reduce domestic coal consumption. There’s a very simple, straightforward way to reduce dependence on imported oil: remove restrictions on domestic production.
And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
This is the Van Jones “green jobs” mirage. These things, like all things, will happen on their own if they make economic sense, and if they don’t make economic sense, let the Chinese toil fruitlessly.
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Tags: Al Gore
