An Inconvenient Truth

Scotland is good for two things. McCallan 18 and golf. Also Al Gore is an idiot. Well maybe not, he did invent the internet.

You forgot the sixteen men of Tain..

This from a sheep?

Makes sense. Let Gore be your "Shepherd"... I"ll pass.

I'm not defending Al Gore nor am I a proponent of his. You leapt to that conclusionwith no assisstance from me.

However, Gore's message is a righteous one and there is righteousness in the darkest havens (ala LBJ "The Great Society").

Btw, Mr. Gore, a fellow Tennessean, I am familiar having grazed his acreages with the Senior many times. Still have neither love nor distaste for the family, aristocraps are ever so protective of who they really are.

Scotland is good for two things. McCallan 18 and golf. Also Al Gore is an idiot. Well maybe not, he did invent the internet.

Oooh, only an idiot would believe that. DARPA didn't find that funny either.

Tennessee Policy.org is a right wing organization that appears to have some ulterior motives and spreading a little miss information on its mind. Not to say that the Gore family does not have high energy bills. I have read a couple of dozen articles from various news sources, most of which seized on the information provided by the Tennessee Policy.org ambush. The attached CBS article seemed a bit balanced. The AP had a similar one yesterday. I have provided the link below. Apparently, he is paying a higher rate in order to buy the energy from green sources. In addition, it appears that Tennessee Policy.org might have collected their information through none legitimate means.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/28/politics/main2522844.shtml

Now that we have been looking at a war that has provided us well over 3000 dead young American soldiers as well as many thousands more injured and maimed, all due to a prior campaign of misinformation, maybe we should start being more cautious about jumping so quickly onto all of these sound bites provided by less than honest special interest groups of all kinds.

Fockin' got that right.

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DOC > NOAA > NESDIS > NCDC Search Field:


Climate Monitoring / Climate At A Glance / UNITED STATES / Help

UNITED STATES
Climate Summary
February 2007

The average temperature in February 2007 was 32.9 F. This was -1.8 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 34th coolest February in 113 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

1.56 inches of precipitation fell in February. This was -0.46 inches less than the 1901-2000 average, the 16th driest such month on record. The precipitation trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.00 inches per decade.

:roll:

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DOC > NOAA > NESDIS > NCDC Search Field:


Climate Monitoring / Climate At A Glance / UNITED STATES / Help

UNITED STATES
Climate Summary
February 2007

The average temperature in February 2007 was 32.9 F. This was -1.8 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 34th coolest February in 113 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

1.56 inches of precipitation fell in February. This was -0.46 inches less than the 1901-2000 average, the 16th driest such month on record. The precipitation trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.00 inches per decade.

:roll:

I didn't know they measure global precipitation too. That can't be easy.

Heads Up!

An Inconvenient Truth is now being shown on Showtime.

Sunday
SHOw 10pm

Monday
SHOTe 8pm
SHOTw 11pm

Tuesday
SHOe 5:10pm
SHOHD 5:10pm

Wednesday
SHOTw 8:45am
SHOTe 3:45pm
SHOTw 6:45pm

Friday
SHOe 5:45pm
SHOHD 5:45pm
SHOw 8:45pm


Looking further into the schedule it seems as if it will continue to be shown in the weeks to come.

From today's New York Times...setting the stage for damage control



From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype
Eric Lee/Paramount Classics
Al Gore?s film on global warming depicted a bleak future.

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By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007
Hollywood has 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.

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Stuart Isett for The New York Times
Don J. Easterbrook, a geology professor, has cited ?inaccuracies? in ?An Inconvenient Truth.?
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.?

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. ?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.?

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.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for ?getting the message out,? Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were ?overselling our certainty about knowing the future.?

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.?

?An Inconvenient Truth,? directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. ?Unless we act boldly,? he wrote, ?our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.?

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. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA?s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, ?Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,? adding that Mr. Gore often did so ?better than scientists.?

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president?s work may hold ?imperfections? and ?technical flaws.? He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

?We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,? Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. ?On the other hand,? Dr. Hansen said, ?he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.?

In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. ?Of course,? he said, ?there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.?

He said ?not every single adviser? agreed with him on every point, ?but we do agree on the fundamentals? ? that warming is real and caused by humans.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. ?I have received a great deal of positive feedback,? he said. ?I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.? He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, ?I think that I?m finally getting a little better at it.?

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of ?shrill alarmism.?

Some of Mr. Gore?s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe?s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore?s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world?s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches ? down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. ?Climate change is a real and serious problem? that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. ?The cacophony of screaming,? he added, ?does not help.?

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore?s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

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.?

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.

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.?

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.

?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.?

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.

?On balance, he did quite well ? a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,? Dr. Oppenheimer said. ?For that, he deserves a lot 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.?





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Even if the Goremeister is totally wrong, ridding ourselves of burning oil and coal for energy will immeasurably clean our environment. We can treat the Middle East like we do South America or the in-laws. We will ignore them.

CLIMATE REPORT WAS 'WATERED DOWN'
08 March 2007 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Fred Pearce

"reference to possible acceleration of climate change [was] consistently removed" from the final report.

"New evidence estimates a 40 to 50 per cent amplification of global mean warming."

"..global warming is accelerating the discharge of ice from major ice sheets such as the Greenland sheet. This would dramatically speed up rises in sea levels and may already be doing so."

British researchers who have seen drafts of last month's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claim it was significantly watered down when governments became involved in writing it.

David Wasdell, an independent analyst of climate change who acted as an accredited reviewer of the report, says the preliminary version produced by scientists in April 2006 contained many references to the potential for climate to change faster than expected because of "positive feedbacks" in the climate system. Most of these references were absent from the final version.

His assertion is based on a line-by-line analysis of the scientists' report and the final version, which was agreed last month at a week-long meeting of representatives of more than 100 governments. Wasdell told New Scientist: "I was astounded at the alterations that were imposed by government agents during the final stage of review. The evidence of collusional suppression of well-established and world-leading scientific material is overwhelming."

He has prepared a critique, "Political Corruption of the IPCC Report?", which claims: "Political and economic interests have influenced the presented scientific material." He plans to publish the document online this week at www.meridian.org.uk/whats.htm.

Wasdell is not a climatologist, but his analysis was supported this week by two leading UK climate scientists and policy analysts. Ocean physicist Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge, who made the discovery that Arctic ice has thinned by 40 per cent over the past 25 years and also acted as a referee on the IPCC report, told New Scientist: "The public needs to know that the policy-makers' summary, presented as the united words of the IPCC, has actually been watered down in subtle but vital ways by governmental agents before the public was allowed to see it."

Crispin Tickell, a long-standing UK government adviser on climate and a former ambassador to the UN, says: "I think David Wasdell's analysis is very useful, and unique of its kind. Others have made comparable points but not in such analytic detail."

Wasdell's central charge is that "reference to possible acceleration of climate change [was] consistently removed" from the final report. This happened both in its treatment of potential positive feedbacks from global warming in the future and in its discussion of recent observations of collapsing ice sheets and an accelerating rise in sea levels.

For instance, the scientists' draft report warned that natural systems such as rainforests, soils and the oceans would in future be less able to absorb greenhouse gas emissions. It said: "This positive feedback could lead to as much as 1.2 ?C of added warming by 2100." The final version does not include this figure. It acknowledges that the feedback could exist but says: "The magnitude of this feedback is uncertain."

Similarly, the draft warned that warming will increase atmospheric levels of water vapour, which acts as a greenhouse gas. "Water vapour increases lead to a strong positive feedback," it said. "New evidence estimates a 40 to 50 per cent amplification of global mean warming." This was absent from the published version, replaced elsewhere with the much milder observation "Water vapour changes represent the largest feedback."

The final edit also removed references to growing fears that global warming is accelerating the discharge of ice from major ice sheets such as the Greenland sheet. This would dramatically speed up rises in sea levels and may already be doing so. The 2006 draft said: "Recent observations show rapid changes in ice sheet flows," and referred to an "accelerating trend" in sea-level rise. Neither detail made the final version, which observed that "ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica... could increase or decrease in future". Wasdell points out recent findings which show that the rate of loss from ice sheets is doubling every six years, making the suggestion of a future decrease "highly unlikely".

Some of the changes were made at the meeting of government invigilators that finalised the report last month in Paris. But others were made earlier, after the draft report was first distributed to governments in mid-2006.

Senior IPCC scientists contacted by New Scientist have not been willing to discuss how any changes took place but they deny any political interference. However, "if it is true, it's disappointing", says Mike Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and a past lead author for the IPCC. "Allowing governmental delegations to ride into town at the last minute and water down conclusions after they were painstakingly arrived at in an objective scientific assessment does not serve society well."
From issue 2594 of New Scientist magazine, 08 March 2007, page 10
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I was looking forward to the data on global warming that was to be provided on a recent expedition to the artic. Unfortunately, the expedition was aborted after one of the members developed frostbite.

I was looking forward to the data on global warming that was to be provided on a recent expedition to the artic. Unfortunately, the expedition was aborted after one of the members developed frostbite.

What about last month's global warming meetups in Minnesota and Washington DC that were scrapped secondary to snow?:funn:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- This has been the world's warmest winter since record-keeping began more than a century ago, the U.S. government agency that tracks weather reported Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the combined global land and ocean surface temperature from December through February was at its highest since records began in 1880.

A record-warm January was responsible for pushing up the combined winter temperature, according to the agency's Web siteexternal link.

"Contributing factors were the long-term trend toward warmer temperatures, as well as a moderate El Nino in the Pacific," Jay Lawrimore of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said in a telephone interview from Asheville, North Carolina.

The next-warmest winter on record was in 2004, and the third warmest winter was in 1998, Lawrimore said.

The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1995.

"We don't say this winter is evidence of the influence of greenhouse gases," Lawrimore said.

However, he noted that his center's work is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process, which released a report on global warming last month that found climate change is occurring and that human activities quite likely play a role in the change.

"So we know as a part of that, the conclusions have been reached and the warming trend is due in part to rises in greenhouse gas emissions," Lawrimore said. "By looking at long-term trends and long-term changes, we are able to better understand natural and anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change."

The combined temperature for the December-February period was 1.3 degrees F (0.72 degree C) above the 20th century mean, the agency said.

Lawrimore did not give an absolute temperature for the three-month period, and said the deviation from the mean was what was important. He did not provide the 20th century mean temperature.

Temperatures were above average for these months in Europe, Asia, western Africa, southeastern Brazil and the northeast half of the United States, with cooler-than-average conditions in parts of Saudi Arabia and the central United States.

Global temperature on land surface during the Northern Hemisphere winter was also the warmest on record, while the ocean-surface temperature tied for second warmest after the winter of 1997-98.

Over the past century, global surface temperatures have increased by about 0.11 degree F per decade, but the rate of increase has been three times larger since 1976 -- around 0.32 degree F per decade, with some of the biggest temperature rises in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

I knew I shouldn't have eaten those bean burritos in January.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob
Embarrassing, but the disclosure of his private affairs is a well timed hatchet job. Would you be more willing to accept the idea of global warming because the proponent lived in a cave?.

yes

So you say that you are more willing to accept an idea if it is presented by someone who lives what they preach 100%. Wait a minute, just two or three pages ago you were arguing with AZalace that it wasn't important who was saying what, but rather what was being said.
Now that you have had a change of heart for the 1000th time, lets see if you will stick with it. Osama Bin Laden lives in a cave and his message goes along with the carbon based global warming issue. Laden says that Americans are evil and are destroying his land for their greed of oil. Well there you have it TripleB. The man lives in a cave and he wants you dead. I guess you only have one option in your new stance; a barrel in your mouth with your toe on the trigger.

Scotland is good for two things. McCallan 18 and golf. Also Al Gore is an idiot. Well maybe not, he did invent the internet.

Santiago- this was a pretty strong statement having just come onto the scene. So you say that Scotland is only good for two things, interesting. Now that you have moved to degrading nationalities, let me ask you a question. "Santiago" is a spanish based name isn't it? So where are you from? Better yet, are you even a legal citizen? Unfortunately many of your brethren are not. I am going to just assume you are from South America somewhere. I happen to love South America, and the majority of the people I have met from there. Having said that, I could lower myself a couple of levels and write ten pages on how your homeland is only good for one thing, sending wet backs across the rivers to be indentured servants. I am not going to do that though. I highly recommend you keep your ethnic stereotypes to yourself. If you want to discuss the issues in an intelligent fashion then bring it on, but if you want to challenge the integrity of the Scots you better watch yourself. This Scot won't hesitate to kick your a** any day of the week. :nono1: :nono1:

From global warming to racial/ethnic slandering ... what happened here?

Yeah, that really jumped up there a few levels. I think there was a bit too much reading between the lines and I quite like Scotland. The Highlands are a sight to behold.

From global warming to racial/ethnic slandering ... what happened here?

Not really sure, but I like it. And I agree, don't pick on the Scots-without them we might never have seen men in skirts or rednecks. Not to mention bagpipes, golf, Fat Bastard or Nessie. Hooray, Scotland. Too bad the heather will be wilting in that darn global warming:roll:

Skunky and I are kindred spirits. Scotty will be beaming me to SoWal tomorrow. Hope to see ya there!

Skunky and I are kindred spirits. Scotty will be beaming me to SoWal tomorrow. Hope to see ya there!

hopefully you're bringing your mittens and scarf.

hopefully you're bringing your mittens and scarf.

No kidding! I can't remember a colder St Paddy's day

No kidding! I can't remember a colder St Paddy's day

Should have worn a sock or a BOX under that kilt my boy!

Should have worn a sock or a BOX under that kilt my boy!

:nono1:

No kidding! I can't remember a colder St Paddy's day

i think we're looking at snow for tomorrow. it must be that cooling cycle thing.