Gore Emits Hot Air in Norway

Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today for....well I'm not sure exactly what he did to promote world peace but it must have been something. Oh yeah, global warming fear mongering.

I do not view global warming or climate change in general as an imminent problem that requires massive government intervention to save us from ourselves. Maybe that's because I'm old enough to remember that the same folks who are now warning about global warming were warning about global cooling back when I was an impressionable teenager.

I am concerned about the response to global warming though. The various proposals may not affect the global climate but they will surely affect the global economy. If we are to enact Kyoto or some successor economic suicide pact, I think we need to be damn sure about the science and whether we really need to do this.

That being said, here are a few things that I find troubling:

1. This website is surveying all the temperature monitoring sites to see if they meet the criteria set forth by NASA and NOSA. The vast majority so far do not. Monitoring stations are near parking lots and other heat sources that make the temperature measurements inaccurate.
2. Many in the global warming industry like to say that recent years were the warmest on record. The only problem is that it isn't true. NASA had a programming error in one of the programs they use to crunch the raw data. Once that was fixed the warmest year of the 20th century turned out to be 1934. And 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004 were cooler than 1900.
3. Scientists are hyping any data that supports their preconceived conclusions. Al Gore and others have said publicly that it is okay to exaggerate because its the only way to get the public to pay attention. Al Gore: "Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."
Stephen Schneider of Stanford University: "To reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change, scientists must capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Al Gore is a self interested charlatan who deserves our scorn, not the Nobel Peace Prize.