What Gore Missed When He Broke His Silence

Al Gore ... broke his silence on Sunday in the New York Times with his 1,900+ word op-ed piece. Although some of the piece responds to recent scandals involving the "e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain" and the errors found in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, much of the response is filled with snide remarks about "climate deniers."

Gore concedes "at least two mistakes" ...but he avoids addressing the other serious problems.

1. The IPCC warned that, due to global warming, the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s." They cited one study to support their claim, but when the research was finally published in 2008, it had a different conclusion than reported by the IPCC: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

2. The IPCC warned that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming, but the sole source for that claim was a non-refereed report authored by two people who the Sunday Times of London referred to as “two green activists,” one of them with the World Wildlife Fund.

3. The IPCC also asserted that, by 2020, global warming could have reduced crop yields in some African countries by 50 percent. It was one of the report's most widely quoted and sensationalist warnings, but, again, there was no published scientific evidence that backed it up. The original source was merely a position paper issued by the environmentalist group, the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The institute had looked at studies from three African governments, but none of those government studies linked global warming and crop disasters. As Britain’s The Telegraph reported: "The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, 'agricultural production will more than double by 2020.'" Even these calculations were not explicitly based upon based on global warming considerations.


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Of course none of this surprises me coming from the Left Wing Times.