Al Gore's Op-Ed

I have been asked, several times, why I have not blogged about Al Gore's Op-Ed in Sunday's New York Times.  The reason was that there are so many things wrong with it, I hardly knew where to start. However, because so many have asked, let me offer a few comments on the "science" aspect of his editorial.

Mr. Gore appeals to 'science' early in his piece,


We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 


Two errors?

Here is a list of the errors (courtesy Hot Air ):

• University of East Anglia e-mails that exposed data destruction, attempts to hide contradictory data, and conspiracies to sabotage the work of skeptical scientists
• The East Anglia CRU threw out their raw data, undermining any effort to check their work
• NOAA/GHCN “homogenization” falsified climate declines into increases
• East Anglia CRU’s below-standard computer modeling
• No rise in atmospheric carbon fraction over the last 150 years: University of Bristol
• IPCC withdraws claim that AGW will wipe out Himalayan glaciers by 2035
• IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri knew Himalayan claim was bogus for months before exposure
• Amazonian rainforest conclusions not based on scientific research but on advocacy group claims
• Mountain glacier claims based on unsubstantiated student theses and anecdotes from climber magazine
• Search of IPCC report footnotes exposes ten more student dissertations presented as peer-reviewed research
• Medieval Warming Period temperatures may have been global, undermining entire AGW case
• Measurements used for AGW case were influenced by urbanization, poor location, bad data sets
• African-crop claims exposed as false
• IPCC researchers excluded Southern Hemisphere data to exaggerate effects of warming on hurricanes
• Hurricane claims further exposed as false by actual peer-reviewed research — including by some AGW researchers
• Major scientific group concludes IPCC-linked researchers “complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices“

But more important to me is that his argument is one of 'religion,' not science.

We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings ...


...From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption...

"Redemption" is a religious concept, not a scientific one.  That is all that needs to be said.