Former Vice President Al Gore had been conspicuously absent from the public eye recently. Following on the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit and new revelations of errors in key climate science reports, the Nobel Laureate was nowhere to be found. On Sunday he returned with an op-ed in the New York Times discussing the ‘attacks’ on the manmade climate change theory.
As is the norm for his work, Gore as always takes the opportunity to use over-the-top language to push for action against what he describes as an “unimaginable calamity” that will be visited on the earth. He used the liberal ‘Old Gray Lady’ to discuss his thoughts on the errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) work, the Climategate email scandal and took jabs at news organizations like FOX News.
In recent weeks numerous errors in the IPCC’s seminal AR4 report have been discovered. Statements of disappearing Himalayan glaciers, rain forests threatened by global warming, loss of mountain ice and more have been shown to be grossly exaggerated at best or patently false at worst. Further, dozens of citations in the work come from political and activist sources, not scientific research. All of this in what is supposed to be the ‘gold standard’ of research from which leaders are supposed to draw conclusions.
Gore only concedes two of the many errors – the one concerning Himalayan glaciers and another comical one about the Netherlands finding itself flooded. He says science will “never be completely free of mistakes” and says that “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.”
Few would argue that science is perfect in any area of study. However, many would simply expect that if drastic measures are to be taken to combat the purported threat of manmade climate change, the science should be sound before jumping in.
