So did March of the Penguins. They were sketchy on a few things... but I still learned a lot about penguins. Gore's not a trained climatologist. He put together a team to bring an important issue before a wide audience and he did a great job of it. He's he's done a lot to get it before the people. He could have picked the rain forests or the lack of females for future chinese generations or breast cancer or model trains, but he chose climate. Gore didn't do the research, compile the information, or write the script any more than Oppenheimer did the wiring on the Manhattan Project. Did he miss some things? I have no doubt. It's an explosive field and incredibly complex. All I know is we'll rue the day we let politicians trump the scientists when it comes to technical data analysis.
It's official: Al Gore and the IPCC win the Nobel Peace Prize
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So did March of the Penguins. They were sketchy on a few things... but I still learned a lot about penguins. Gore's not a trained climatologist. He put together a team to bring an important issue before a wide audience and he did a great job of it. He's he's done a lot to get it before the people. He could have picked the rain forests or the lack of females for future chinese generations or breast cancer or model trains, but he chose climate. Gore didn't do the research, compile the information, or write the script any more than Oppenheimer did the wiring on the Manhattan Project. Did he miss some things? I have no doubt. It's an explosive field and incredibly complex. All I know is we'll rue the day we let politicians trump the scientists when it comes to technical data analysis.
Sounds a bit like the last brave souls who stuck around to defend Flat Earth Theory. I read the Crichton book. I rated it, 'not good.'
I loved The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man though. He wrote some good books 20 years ago, but it's gonna take more than an M.D. from the 60's to impugn the IPCC in my eyes.If you are talking about "State of Fear" by Crichton, I also read it, and wasn't impressed.
Okay, at least you have finally compared Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with something comparable, March of the Penguins.
Al Gore isn't being listed as a concerned citizen about global warming. He has put himself at the forefront of this cause. He testifies before congressional committees. He gives lectures on the subject. He earns millions of dollars as the spiritual leader of this movement. He produces a movie that he then propagandizes and has gotten to be shown in classrooms. He is absolutely responsible for the factual validity of what he is putting out there. Especially if he is going to use his statements to denounce those who disagree. He has just earned a Nobel peace prize for his role in pushing the cause of controlling anthropogenic global warming. If, as you suggest, he is no climatologist and cannot be held accountable for not exactly getting his facts straight, then he has no business putting himself up as an informed expert on the subject and collecting the money he does. As Mark Steyn pointed out, he earns more money denouncing oil company executives than do these current oil executives he excoriates. But only their financial motives are called into question.
If you aren't an expert on a subject, fine, join the group. Post your comments on blogs. But if you are going to accept the approbation of the "enlightened" world for championing a subject, you had better get your facts straight.
Okay, at least you have finally compared Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with something comparable, March of the Penguins.
Al Gore isn't being listed as a concerned citizen about global warming. He has put himself at the forefront of this cause. He testifies before congressional committees. He gives lectures on the subject. He earns millions of dollars as the spiritual leader of this movement. He produces a movie that he then propagandizes and has gotten to be shown in classrooms. He is absolutely responsible for the factual validity of what he is putting out there. Especially if he is going to use his statements to denounce those who disagree. He has just earned a Nobel peace prize for his role in pushing the cause of controlling anthropogenic global warming. If, as you suggest, he is no climatologist and cannot be held accountable for not exactly getting his facts straight, then he has no business putting himself up as an informed expert on the subject and collecting the money he does. As Mark Steyn pointed out, he earns more money denouncing oil company executives than do these current oil executives he excoriates. But only their financial motives are called into question.
If you aren't an expert on a subject, fine, join the group. Post your comments on blogs. But if you are going to accept the approbation of the "enlightened" world for championing a subject, you had better get your facts straight.
I personally have some issue with the global warming models, as do some of the scientist in the field who have published their concerns in Science. The issue has to do with some of the parameters in the model, and how sensitive the output is to the parameter values.
This is an exaggeration of the current situation, but say changing a parameter in the model 1% changed the output by 2000%. It's nowhere near as bad as that, but there are some very serious scientists who believe that the error bars need to be much bigger in some of the publications, and that there are some perfectly non-disastrous outcomes comfortably within the prediction interval.
Aside from that, as an engineer, I like to see plans, projections, etc. Something along the lines of "If we can lower global emissions by 5%, this is how it will impact the model output". This way, we have a goal to work for, not some random chicken little plan. This way, if the scientist work out the numbers and tell us there's no way to stop this, we can have a last big party in any case.
Anyone else here read "The Sheep Look Up"??
This is an exaggeration of the current situation, but say changing a parameter in the model 1% changed the output by 2000%. It's nowhere near as bad as that, but there are some very serious scientists who believe that the error bars need to be much bigger in some of the publications, and that there are some perfectly non-disastrous outcomes comfortably within the prediction interval.
Aside from that, as an engineer, I like to see plans, projections, etc. Something along the lines of "If we can lower global emissions by 5%, this is how it will impact the model output". This way, we have a goal to work for, not some random chicken little plan. This way, if the scientist work out the numbers and tell us there's no way to stop this, we can have a last big party in any case.
Anyone else here read "The Sheep Look Up"??
Regular people do not read and are rarely qualified to respond to scientific journals. He's a spokesperson for the issue. So what? You think Charlton Heston is a bona fide firearms expert? It's a movie about a scientific issue made for a wide audience. I suspect Mr. Gore knows more about climate change than Morgan Freeman knows about penguins - but they both did a good job.
Also, you must know that Gore donated all the proceeds from the film to The Alliance for Climate Protection. To insinuate that he somehow netted more than the top oil execs is absurd. What did it do in its theater run - 25 million or so total?
(http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inconvenient_truth/numbers.php)
Forget for a moment that number is gross and has no promotion costs, production costs or theater fees subtracted... Then you can double it for fun and leave all the costs in if you want - Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum made 64 million BY HIMSELF in 2005.
http://www.equilar.com/NewsArticles/050306_Bloomberg.pdf
And there were 3 more in the 40 mil category. So I don't know where Mr. Steyn is getting his info, but it doesn't jibe with what I'm seeing.
I was not referring to what he made off of the film, but what he earns total for his efforts from all of these activities.
Big difference between Morgan Freeman and Al Gore. Morgan Freeman, I believe (not having seen the movie) merely provides the narration for his movie. He has never put himself forward as some kind of penguin expert.
It just stuns me that you see no problem with the fact that Al Gore puts himself forward as the leader of this movement, and it is upon his word that we should all accept this idea of anthropogenic global warming and change our actions, and yet you don't think that his putting forth errors, serious errors that seriously hinder his claims, is really relevant at all.
What I am hearing is that you are going to believe this idea of anthropogenic global warming regardless of what is presented to the contrary, so really, whether the leaders of the movement are telling the whole truth is irrelevant.
We are not talking here about him simply getting a few facts wrong. He has been presenting the information presented in An Inconvenient Truth for some time now. He is supposedly constantly in contact with the true experts in this field (at least the ones who support his view). Surely they have informed him of some of the errors he has reported. His co-winner, the IPCC, which he firmly supported, laid out information that contradicted his assertions. It is completely inconceivable that he is not aware of it. Even if he did not read the IPCC report himself, with all the media that has covered all of this, word has to have gotten to him of the errors. He is a college-educated man, and nobody is saying he isn't intelligent. So how about a little fact checking?
It is disturbing that he would go present his message without getting his facts straight. But it is more disturbing that, even when it becomes obvious that he has gotten some big things wrong (not just based on reports from contrarian opinions, but based on raw data from those on his side of the issue), he still will not acknowledge those errors, but continues to broadcast them.
Tell you what, as soon as Al Gore brings his annual home energy consumption down from ~220,000 kWh to the average citizens' ~10,000 kWh and starts flying commercial, I will start worrying.
Sorry, Scotto, all that shows is that the barest amount of digging will give you access to junk issued by extreme right wingers with no background in this area of science. Who is Ms. Gilder? Who is her father? Who stands to gain by maintaining the status quo of oil consumption?
Why should anyone believe any factual assertions made by this proudly uneducated pundit? Have you seen Gore's tax returns? Could anyone really believe what you said about the earnings of oil executives?
But of course, none of that matters. Either human beings are such bad stewards of the planet that we need to decrease emissions and consumption, or the oil companies and their paid pseudo-scientists are right, and there's nothing to worry about. I think the oil companies have more to gain on the answer to that question than Al Gore.
Did you read it? The point is that anyone with a few brain cells and a computer (or a library) can look in peer-reviewed scientific journals and easily refute a lot of the so-called facts out there. Unfortunately, this rarely happens, and instead we get the same nonsense repeated over and over again without ever asking some fundamental questions. Alas, this is the way of the world.
Whether you believe any of the individuals stating their positions out there, be they Gore or otherwise, the data is out there for all of us to make our own decisions. Personally, I believe the earth is a lot more resilient than the doomsayers give it credit for.
Oh, I don't know. I think they are both profiting quite nicely.
But your characterization that it is either one or the other is not necessarily accurate. What if it is a little of both? What if the truth, as so often is the case, lies somewhere in between? What if global warming is, in fact, occurring, but humans are not contributing to it quite as much as the Al Gore extreme faction asserts? After all, the fact that the earth's climate fluctuates is actually unchallenged. We know that it has gone through cycles of warming and cooling. The glaciers that we now see were once part of larger ones that extended further south, cutting many valleys that we now have. So to put all of the blame on humans and their consumption of fossil fuels is being a bit simplistic. You see, this is why Al Gore is so harmful to this topic. To listen to it his way, there are only two options. Option A is to be a global warming "denier," a nice bit of demagoguery to paint images in peoples' minds of people who are the intellectual equivalent of holocaust deniers. Option B is to believe that we are causing all of this, and if we don't cut our energy consumption to pre-industrial revolution levels, we are sending this world to an ecological oblivion within the next decade (and, according to Gore, this will also drastically impact the universal balance - said Gore, "We are altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe." Nice to know only the deniers engage in hyperbole and emotional manipulation!).
Al Gore makes $100,000 per speaking engagement. His documentary grossed ~$20 million domestically and ~$40 million internationally. The much-touted carbon offsets he claims to purchase to offset his excess energy consumption (which means someone plants a tree somewhere that at some point in the not too near future will be able to absorb some of his expended carbon dioxide) is also a sham. He "purchases" these offsets from a company that he co-founded, a company that provides all of its people with the fringe benefit of, you guessed it, carbon offsets.
One of his top advisors is James Hanson, an actual scientist that has been pushing the idea of anthropogenic global warming since the '80s, and he says that the information Gore is spreading has "flaws." So I don't buy this line that some people are claiming that Gore shouldn't be expected to get it perfect since he isn't a scientist. He has scientists advising him.
Yes, I read it. And I wondered who Ms. Gilders is, and who was behind the website. See http://www.nashvilleistalking.com/2...climate-change-denialist-cites-bogus-sources/
I hope you're right about the earth's resiliency. But I'm not going to take the word of the lunatic fringe on something that important.
But you are willing to take the word of a man who has been proven to report exaggerations and falsehoods and whose assertions are in disagreement in some key areas with the IPCC?
I don't know that carbon offsets are a sham (I do THINK, however, that carbon offsets are a sham, and one way that people are going to try to turn the green initiative into the green in their pockets), but it would be hard to argue that planting trees to offset your carbon use is anywhere near as good as reducing your carbon footprint, and planting the trees anyway!
I just sponsor some poor person in Africa. I send them a box of saltines and a tin of sardines once a month and in exchange they don't drive a car or use electricity.
Finally, Castle Craver rescues us from ourselves with the voice of reason.
I am fairly convinced that it is the snake oil scam of the 21st century. First of all, it will not be effective. It will allow those wealthy enough to purchase them to pollute as much as they want. Only those who cannot afford them will be required to conserve. In that sense it is very elitist. It allows hypocrisy, potentially even encourages it. It is the equivalent of the sale of indulgences that allowed wealthy individuals to purchase grace from long dead saints who had a surplus of good deeds, thus allowing them to sin with impunity as long as they could afford these handy dandy get out of hell cards.
If Gore is serious in his claims, then action needs to be taken now. How many trees do you need to plant to offset his carbon footprint? And how long until those trees have grown to the necessary size to actually be able to remove the carbon dioxide he has introduced into the environment? A decade? More? And where will all these trees be planted? Sure, there are currently obvious places. But what about when land to plant trees becomes scarce? Will we then disturb natural habitats by introducing trees not native to the area, and displace other species in the process? Some animals are not adapted to live in forests. Will they be forced out, or simply die out? And what if everybody on earth simply forgoes conservation and simply purchases carbon offsets? Will that actually slow down global warming? Or is this only available to Al Gore and a few other elites who like to talk the talk but would rather not walk the walk, because it would cause them to curb their luxurious lifestyle of heated pools, multiple homes, private jets, and limousine rides?
Will we ever have a decent poltical conversation not turn into a shouting match here?
Some (including me) would argue that this is exactly what Gore has done.
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