Lord Monckton, a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK has challenged Al Gore to a public debate of global warming saying, "A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore's film, 'An Inconvenient Truth', is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide."
Here is Lord Monckton's challenge to Gore as quoted by Breitbart.com:
"The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley presents his compliments to Vice-President Albert Gore and by these presents challenges the said former Vice-President to a head-to-head, internationally-televised debate upon the question, 'That our effect on climate is not dangerous,' to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President's choosing."
"Forasmuch as it is His Lordship who now flings down the gauntlet to the Vice-President, it shall be the Vice-President's prerogative and right to choose his weapons by specifying the form of the Great Debate. May the Truth win! Magna est veritas, et praevalet. God Bless America! God Save the Queen!"
My guess is that Gore will find some way to avoid the confrontation, as he isn't the kind of guy who likes a fair fight.
Read the entire story here
You think? I thought Gore bowed out of the race very gracefully when he ran. And you can tell from all of his speaches that he is not bitter at all about losing the presidential election.
ReplyDeleteOkay, enough of being facetious. The link below is slightly irrelevant, although I think that you might appreciate it. He's got my vote, for sure.
http://www.specialfarm.net/macgyver2008.html
you guys are still making the same mistakes....and the only thing i learned from this blog is what redux means.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jason, and GreenGirl, for the links and the insights. It is true that Gore has a history of avoiding any debate with global warming skeptics. (I thought we conservatives were the "narrow" ones...hmm...) The brilliant Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of business at Copenhagen University and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, has also challenged Gore to a public debate on the issue, but not surprisingly, Gore bid a hasty retreat from the challenge. Gore and his ilk are petrified to tilt lances with scientists who doubt their theories. WHY?
ReplyDeleteTK, what "mistakes" are you talking about? Specificity is in order here. Whenever someone dares call into question the "evidence" of global warming, they're dismissed as being mindless extensions of the GOP or fundamentalist zealots. Ad hominems and one-liners do not a sound argument make.
It's worth mentioning that scientists have been able to determine that the temperature on other planets in our solar system is rising as well. I'm no expert, but the last time I checked, there was a stark paucity of SUVs on Mars...What's so radical about suggesting that these temperature increases have more to do with the sun and less to do with Kyoto?
All we're asking for is a serious public debate on the issue by scientists. Maybe we're wrong, maybe we're right, maybe Gore is wrong, maybe he's right. But where is the debate? The way most of the public has absorbed this stuff like sponges, just because Al Gore said so, is astonishing to me. It's why I'm convinced that there's more to the story than just caring for the environment (which is a noble thing after all). Radical environmentalism is an ideology, filled to the brim with sophistry. When reputable scientists, not attached to international agencies or other special interest groups, call for a discussion on the issue, the real zealots (like Gore) scatter.
1: Rank of 2005 as hottest year on record
ReplyDelete(tied with 1998), according to NASA.
100%: Increase in intensity and duration
of hurricanes and tropical storms
since the 1970's, according to a 2005 MIT study.
100 Billion: Estimate of damage caused by
hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast in
2005 alone, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
2030 Year by which Glacier National Park will have no glaciers left, according to the U.S. Geological Survey predictions.
400,000: Square miles of Arctic sea ice that have melted
in the last 30 years (roughly the size of Texas), threatening polar bear habitats and further accelerating global warming worldwide, according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.
15-37%: Amount of plant and animal species that global warming could wipe out by 2050.
1: Rank of the United States as a global warming polluter
compared to other large nations.
6: Number of former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency leaders who say the U.S. is not doing enough to fight global warming.
0: Number of bills passed by Congress to cut global
warming pollution.
The previous comment is flawed from the beginning, as it presumes that the rising global temperature is directly manmade. This conclusion is unproven and it evinces an unfortunate disposition by many to ignore the study of causes. The neatly arranged copy and pasted talking points seen above merely point out that temperatures have risen. That is not, and has never been, the point of the discussion. No one doubts that temperatures have risen. The Gordian knot lies in whether or not this increase is tied to human initiatives.
ReplyDeleteHere are some interesting observations pulled from an article by Saul Singer. The address to the entire article is included at the end.
________
Climate change is natural. Global temperatures have been generally rising since the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago, when the River Thames would regularly freeze over. Most of this rise preceded global industrial activity, which only kicked in about 1940. And from 1940 to 1975, global temperatures dropped slightly.
A thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period, the climate was warmer than today, and vineyards grew even in northern England. And 8,000 years ago, during the Holocene Maximum, it was considerably warmer than today. Yet polar bears, which are supposedly threatened by current warming, survived through both of these periods.
The Greenland icecap, ice-core sampling shows, goes back at least 11,000 years, meaning it too existed even through these warmer periods.
Rising CO2 is caused by rising temperatures, not the other way around. The dramatic graph that Gore displays in his movie, showing the correlation between CO2 and temperatures over hundreds of thousands of years based on ice core samples, is accurate. What Gore doesn’t say is that the same graph shows that peaks in CO2 lag behind the temperature peaks by hundreds of years.
The explanation: The main source and sink for CO2 is the oceans, which emit this gas as they warm, and absorb it as they cool. Oceans take centuries to change temperature, so atmospheric concentrations of CO2 also take time to catch up with temperature changes.
Solar activity seems to be the main driver of climate change. The new film shows compelling graphs demonstrating the tight correlation between sun spots and cosmic rays — both measures of solar activity — and earth temperatures. CO2 is a side show compared to the sun.
Greenhouse gases are a very minor part of the atmosphere, but of these, water vapor comprises 95 percent. The atmosphere contains only 0.054 percent CO2 from all sources, human and natural.
The IPCC, the United Nations body of scientists examining climate change, has become politicized. Former National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz has charged that inconvenient statements by scientists were simply deleted by the IPCC staff, such as: “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to the specific cause of greenhouse gases.”
All the global-warming models predict that if the warming is caused by the greenhouse effect, it should be more pronounced at the top of the greenhouse, namely in the troposphere, about 10 km. above the equator, where the heat is being trapped. Instead, the evidence shows either no additional warming there, or even slower warming than on the surface.
IPCC reports have claimed that “mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16 to 18 degrees centigrade.” The Pasteur Institute’s Paul Reiter resigned from the IPCC over this lie, pointing out that mosquitoes are “extremely abundant” in the Arctic, and that a major malaria epidemic occurred in the 1920s Soviet Union, infecting 13 million and killing 60,000 people.
As late as 1974, a BBC documentary, The Weather Machine, warned of the coming global ice age, since at that time the globe had indeed been cooling for the previous 35 years.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDg5ZGU0MTFjY2E2ZWIzMmFmMjU4MzIyZDRiZTM3ZDE=
When all is said and done I'm just amazed at the amount of attention this topic has received in the last 6 months to a year. Global warming is in your face verywhere you look, and I can't help but thinking that there are more important issues to worry about.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, doesn't it all come down to who controls the purse strings? If the environmentalists can tell industry what they have do to meet certain regulations and how to run things according to their agenda they control POWER & money.
Machiavellian? Yes. Far fetched, not really.
My roomate and I rented "An Inconvenient Truth" the other night and watched it as a drinking game, for which it served its purpose well. It has everything; drama, violins, scenes of nature, CGI, an elevator, and graphs that look like someone's very unhealthy heartrate. I have little respect for Gore, but I actually felt embarassed for him. The entire focus was his personal opinion, period. He proceeds with the assumption that we should trust his logical conclusions and his scientist friends (whom he "conveniently" refrains from identifying). Not to mention the dramatic intermission where he discribes, with profound dramatic pauses, what a blow to the universe Bush's win was, as was evidenced by Katrina.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, a friend of mind wrote the following blog article that you might find enlightening: http://steakrules.blogspot.com/2007/03/kerry-speaks-at-dc-global-warming-rally.html