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October 23, 2007

Gore's Nobel & the Politicization of Science

By Jack Kelly

Adam Penenberg, the reporter for Forbes Digital who uncovered the spectacular fabrications of New Republic writer Stephen Glass, was asked by his editor if there was anything in Mr. Glass's story "Hacker Heaven" that checked out.

"There does appear to be a state in the union named Nevada," Mr. Penenberg replied.

The day before Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a British judge gave a Penenberg-like endorsement of accuracy to Mr. Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," for which he won the prize.

High Court Judge Michael Burton was required to pass judgment on the film because a parent objected to it being shown to his children in school. The judge found nine "significant errors."

Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, put a positive spin on Judge Burton's ruling: "Of the thousands of facts, the judge seemingly took issue with only a handful," she said.

Some of the errors Judge Burton found are relatively minor. Polar bears aren't drowning because they have to swim long distances, as Mr. Gore claimed. And global warming isn't the reason why the snow on top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa is disappearing.

But two are huge.

In "An Inconvenient Truth," Mr. Gore claimed sea levels will rise by 20 feet over the next 100 years if nothing is done to curb global warming. But the current "worst case" scenario envisioned by the scientists who took part in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is 23 inches. It's more likely global sea levels will rise by no more than a foot (about what it did in the last 150 years) the IPCC scientists said.

Judge Burton also found erroneous Mr. Gore's claim there is a direct correlation between the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the rise in global temperatures over the last 650,000 years. This undermines Mr. Gore's thesis that the activities of man are chiefly responsible for global warming.

Recent developments have not been kind to global warming alarmists. In August, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies acknowledged that the hottest year on record in the United States was not 1998, as previously claimed, but 1934. Only one year in the last five is among the ten hottest. Two adventurers from Minnesota who planned to hike to the North Pole in May to highlight concerns about global warming had to turn back because of extreme cold.

ABC "reporter" David Wright fretted on the evening news that "even the Nobel Prize is not going to be enough to silence the naysayers, some of whom still believe that man is not responsible for global warming."

Indeed, on the very day the Nobel committee bestowed the honor on the former vice president, one of those naysayers told meteorology students at the University of North Carolina that the movie Mr. Gore made about global warming was "foolish," and "propaganda."

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr. William Gray, 78, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.

Dr. Gray is considered by many to be the world's foremost expert on tropical storms. He was scornful of Mr. Gore's claim that rising global temperatures were causing more, and more powerful, hurricanes. There were 101 hurricanes between 1900 and 1949, when global temperatures were cooler, Dr. Gray noted, but just 83 from 1957 to 2006. (This was an error Judge Burton missed.)

Dr. Gray's scorn is shared by Dr. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin, considered to be the father of scientific climatology. When asked in an interview in June what he thought of Mr. Gore's documentary, Dr. Bryson responded: "Don't make me throw up. It's not science. It is not true."

Al Gore refuses to debate skeptics, perhaps because he knows he cannot defend his alarmist claims. In March, a debate was held at the Cooper Union in New York City between three prominent supporters of Mr. Gore's thesis, and three skeptics. In a poll taken before the debate, two thirds of the audience said global warming was a crisis. At debate's end, the audience sided with the skeptics, 46 percent to 42 percent.

But, say journalists like Mr. Wright, we should ignore the opinions of scientists such as Dr. Gray and Dr. Bryson, and the facts themselves, because five Norwegian political appointees gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Gore.

Mr. Wright sees the Nobel as a vindication for Mr. Gore. I see it as further evidence of the politicization of science, and the prostitution of journalism.

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