Who Needs the Cold Facts? - February 24, 2009
When it comes to hot-button issues like global warming, advocates often play fast and loose with facts. A few examples of that trend have popped up in recent weeks, with different outcomes.
The syndicated columnist George Will argued in the Washington Post this month that scientists were suffering from “eco-pessimism” and were wrongly predicting calamitous effects from climate change. As evidence, he pointed to the case of sea-ice and whether recent trends are attributable to human-induced global warming. Will referenced the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, claiming that this outfit reported “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
Many bloggers have followed this issue, including Carl Zimmer at The Loom, who has diligently followed the data and--apparently unlike Will or his fact-checkers--corresponded with researchers at the Illinois center. It turns out that global sea ice levels are now significantly lower than in 1979. The Washington Post has repeatedly swatted away calls to issue a correction.
Al Gore took a different approach when it was revealed he had made a mistake with data about weather-related disasters. As Andy Revkin pointed out at Dot Earth Gore has pulled a slide he used in a recent talk at a meeting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In that talk, Gore referred to data showing a rise in weather calamities and attributing them to humans. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, but that center in its report has cautioned that it would be misleading to attribute the upward trend in “hydro-meteorological” disasters to climate change, a point Roger Pielke Jr., quickly noted at Prometheus.
Still, it’s not natural for politicians (current or former) to truly admit mistakes. Gore’s spokesperson said the ex-veep was no longer using the slide from the Belgian center. But at the same time, she supported his overall argument that the human fingerprint is showing up in extreme weather events.
Comments
AGW is bunk. And now the AGW conspirators shot down the CO2 satellite because they do not want the truth about CO2 to ruin their religion.
Posted by: larrydalooza | February 24, 2009 08:51 PM
Gore and his global warming scare tactics are a fraud.
Posted by: disinter | February 25, 2009 06:03 AM
As noted by Richard C. J. Somerville, Will's problems with the truth go beyond a single error about sea ice data: "Gore is imperfect here and there. Will is just 100% plain dead wrong throughout."
Furthermore, Will is repeating substantive errors from past columns that have been explicitly disputed by their purported sources -- misrepresenting the UN World Meteorological Organization, the Arctic Climate Research Center, and climate scientists and journals like Science.
Most of the content in Will's recent column was copied with minimal editing from a 1992 column.
A comprehensive analysis of Will's errors and distortions is available here.
Posted by: Brad Johnson | February 25, 2009 11:55 PM
Al Gore is completely wrong on a huge number of "facts" in his presentation. For a start, he could remove the big wall chart which strongly implies that rises in CO2 produces rises in temperature. In fact, as even Gore must know, CO2 changes follow temperature changes by several centuries.
But, then, if Gore removed all the inaccurate slides in his presentation, there'd be nothing left but him and Tipper.
Posted by: Paul MacRae | February 27, 2009 06:55 PM