A false charge by Pielke: You’ll probably end up watching the whole video a few times because you’ll find it hard to believe how Pielke spun a perfectly reasonable presentation into a vicious assault not just on Gore, but on the integrity of the hundreds of scientists in the audience....
On February 15, two days after the talk, our old friend Roger Pielke, Jr, wrote a blog post titled, “Not A Peep from Scientists” in which he quoted the CRED report just as I did and then not only sharply criticized Gore for using that slide to make his argument, not only attacked Gore for supposed “blatantly” misleading the audience with “scientific untruths,” but attacked every single member of the audience for not objecting:
And of all of those scientists in attendance, here is a list of those who sought to set the record straight on blogs and in the media: OK, I couldn’t find any, but if you know of any such reactions, please share in the comments…. But as the non-response to Al Gore’s in-your-face untruths shows, the misrepresentation of climate science for political gain has many willing silent collaborators.
So for Pielke the entire audience of three thousand scientists are “willing silent collaborators” in the “misrepresentation of climate science” because of their supposed “non-response to Al Gore’s in-your-face untruths” shows. But this string of “in-your-face untruths” doesn’t exist. Please listen to the video yourself and try to find them. I challenge any credible person to find them. Remember, we aren’t talking about one or two ambiguous word choices here. You need to find a bunch of blatant in-your-face untruths.
Good luck.
Pielke writes:
In his speech Gore attributed a wide range of recent weather events to human-caused climate change including floods in Iowa, Hurricane Ike, and the Australian bush fires.
No he doesn’t.... Gore does show a picture of Ike and say
It is the view of many scientists that the intensity of hurricanes is affected by the warming issues.
That is a fact. I interviewed many such scientists for my book. Indeed, that carefully worded sentence should be a strong clue to any listener that Gore understands the science, that he understands the debates over what can and can’t be attributed directly to global warming right now, and is working hard not to make any inaccurate statements. Gore doesn’t attribute the 500-year flood in Iowa to human-caused climate change. He does refer to the “heat that puts more moisture into the atmosphere that causes longer downpours,” but that is such a well-confirmed impact of warming that even the Bush report cited above acknowledges it.
As for bushfires, Gore says the fires have “ignited a nationwide debate that is very much focused on global warming.” That is also a fact. Many Australians who are suffering through a once-in-a-thousand year drought make the climate connection explicitly. For instance, Australia’s climate change minister Penny Wong recently said, “All of this is consistent with climate change, and with what scientists told us would happen” (see “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in”). So far the non-response of the audience to Gore’s quite reasonable statements does not seem very shocking at all. They heard what Gore said, not what Pielke claimed he said.
It is quite clear that Gore is not attributing every single extreme event that he shows to climate change — that is clear from his wording. Gore is making a statistical argument that we are seeing more extreme weather events and more intense (i.e. record-breaking) weather events — which is why he has so many “anecdotal” or individual extreme weather event slides — and that “many can be linked to factors that are worsened by human emissions.”
How do I know this is the case Gore is making? Because I went to the page (102) in the book An Inconvenient Truth where Gore has his original figure from Munich Re and other insurers (whose “science experts have made the attribution” of rising extreme events to climate change as Kalee explained to Revkin). Gore writes of ” hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires,” and says:
Many can be linked to factors that are worsened by global warming.
All this is quite in the mainstream of scientific analysis. And has been for a long time...
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