By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked-online
Al Gore’s doom-mongering documentary An Inconvenient Truth - in which he turned his rather drab PowerPoint presentation on climate change into a cinematic warning to the world about man’s toxic impact on the planet - has generated miles of newspaper column inches. He’s won widespread praise from greens for converting ‘ordinary people’ (ie, the previously uncaring popcorn-chomping masses) to the green cause. He’s been given a telling-off by some climate scientists for twisting the data in order to send a moral message about mankind’s destructiveness (1). Others have accused him of being a hypocrite: apparently Gore, who has two very big homes, used 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in 2006, 20 times the American national average (2). And now, in the latest post-Truth twist, Gore has been challenged to a $20,000 wager that he is wrong on global warming.
The aim of the bet is really to promote the proper use of science, rather than the opinion-led science we have seen lately.’ Scott Armstrong is professor of marketing at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an international expert on forecasting methods. Last week he faxed and posted (to be on the safe side) his ‘Global Warming Challenge’ to Gore. He challenged the former US vice-president to a 10-year bet in which both parties will put forward $10,000. Gore would put his money on his forecasts that temperature will rise dangerously in the coming decade, while Armstrong will put his money on what is referred to as the ‘naïve model’: that is, that temperatures will probably stay the same in the coming years. ‘Gore says there are scientific forecasts that the Earth will become warmer very rapidly. But I have not found a scientific forecast that supports that view. There are forecasts made by scientists, of course, but they are very different from a scientific forecast’, says Armstrong.
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Meanwhile, Al also ignores challenges to debate from Lord Monckton (and see details here) and Dennis Avery.
By Steven Milloy, Junk Science
In the cover story of the June 25 National Review, software company CEO Jim Manzi wrote that conservatives should stop “denying” that humans are warming the planet and instead figure out how to use global warming to “peel off” 1 percent of the vote in the 2008 presidential election. Manzi claims that this strategy could represent a “principled stand” for a “clever candidate.” But Manzi’s strategy, in fact, represents the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory — and all for relatively few votes of uncertain, if any, political value.
Manzi says conservatives should believe in global warming, not because of “liberal scaremongering … but because of the underlying physics” — which he apparently doesn’t grasp in the least. “All else being equal, the more carbon dioxide molecules we have in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets,” writes Manzi.
Wrong. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not likely to significantly contribute to the greenhouse effect. Clouds and greenhouse gases (GHGs), like water vapor and carbon dioxide, absorb radiation of varying wavelengths emitted by the earth. Some of these absorption bands overlap. In a sense, clouds and the various GHGs “compete” to absorb the earth’s radiation. Because of this competition, the heat-trapping potentials of clouds and GHGs don’t simply add up in a linear fashion.
No doubt this phenomenon explains, at least in part, why global temperatures can decline as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels steadily increase — as happened, for example, during the period from 1940 to 1975. And let’s not forget Antarctic ice core samples indicate that increases in global temperature have historically preceded increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide by hundreds of years.
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