Al Gore And Artic Ice: Truth Is VERY Inconvenient

The gods in charge of exposing scientific liars and fraud must be working overtime these days.

In addition to the giant treasure trove of deceit known as “Climategate,” we now have Al Gore – last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Science – revealing what a lying demagogue and fraud he is:

December 15, 2009
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.

World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.

Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.

Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling.  […]

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge. […]

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

First of all, the “developing countries” want “progress” toward a deal that would see TEN TRILLION DOLLARS in Western wealth flow to them.

And given the fact that the United States underwrites about a quarter of the U.N.’s budget, and given that most of the world has decided that the United States is mostly responsible for global warming, you can bet that America will be assessed a fair amount more than $2.5 trillion as “our share.”

Then you start to find out that the left really want a tax of $145 trillion to “fight” global warming.  And your head just starts spinning around on your neck.

You’d think we’d really want to have our science iron clad before agreeing to such a massive commitment.  But not so much.

What we have in place of science is “scientism,” science as a religious commitment, science exploited to serve the ideological cause of socialist redistributionism.  And socialism has been disguised as “saving the planet.”

Former prime minister and current global warming alarmist Tony Blair says that we need to destroy our economies so that developing nations might enjoy our wealth “even if the science is not correct.”

And the science that blames man as the cause of global warming is not even close to correct:

Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.

“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.

Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans. […]

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.

Is it really “science” to completely ignore 97% of the CO2, and ignore 99.9% of the greenhouse gasses in general, and even ignore the sun itself as the cause of global warming?  Is it really “science” to ignore thousands of years of geologic history, not to mention the fact that “Greenland” was called Greenland because it used to be green during a previous warming period?  Is it really “science” to allow a scientist who was caught red-handed perpetuating scientific fraud years ago to continue to dominate the climate change debate?

Is it really “science” to simply relabel “global warming” to “climate change” when the actual science started to demonstrate – contrary to the global warming lobby’s shrill claims – that global warming hasn’t happened the last ten years?

And is it really anything even remotely close to “science” to claim that “the science is settled and the debate is over” when that is simply false?  If the science is so settled, then why on earth is it that these global warming alarmist feel the need to so routinely misrepresent the facts?  Why do they deliberately destroy data?  Why do they refuse to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests?  Why do they abuse the peer-review system to undermine fellow scientists?

Al Gore has been playing a hysterical alarmist game with bogus facts and figures for years now.  That alarmist propaganda was actually why he won the Nobel Prize.  In fact, Gore has been screaming that all our ice would melt for years.  Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard writes a good article demonstrating how disgraceful and despicable Al Gore and many others have been in this regard.

Another good article details that the polar ice caps actually AREN’T melting.  Arctic ice is currently decreasing, but Antarctic ice is actually increasing.  And when you put the two ice caps on a chart, you see that the overall ice level is quite stable, just as it has been for the past 150 years.

The thing that most bothers me is that documented liars and frauds such as Al Gore and Michael Mann have been allowed to continue to be liars and frauds.  The postmodernist left does not even regard truth as a valid or meaningful category anymore, and all that remains is “the will to power.”  By any means necessary.

The inconvenient truth for the left is that “climate change” has been documented by their own scientists to be little more than a gang of thugs manipulating the data to suit their agenda while using their power to punish any would-be modern Galileo who disagrees with them.  The inconvenient truth for the rest of us is that “truth” doesn’t even matter to the left — which is why liars and frauds remain to perpetuate more lies and more fraud.  All that matters to them is raw political power. And nothing but nothing would perpetuate leftist power than imposing massive socialist redistributionism in the name of “saving the earth.”

Tags: $10 trillion, $145 trillion, 75% chance, Al Gore, Antarctic, anthropecentric, Arctic, ballpark figure, climate change, co2, Copenhagen, even if the science is not correct, global warming, greenhouse gasses, ice, ice-free, Inconvenient Truth, man-caused, Maslowski, north polar ice cap, North Pole, redistributionist, Tony Blair