Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row. Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore...read more

Several years ago makes these figures "fresh" according to Gore. One more lie.

Update Al Gore's citation of a scientist predicting an ice-free Arctic within a decade appears to have been accurate. It appears the scientist Gore cited, Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, did in fact make this prediction and it was published on December 2, 2009 by the Danish Climate Centre, lending support to Gore's claim that the “figures are fresh.”...read more

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