Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science, and its many fine practitioners, a lot of who know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."Full story here.
Is Gore giving the movie-going public an impartial account of global warming, or is he, as is concluded in this particular article, merely using a controversial topic to gain political points? Admittedly, I’m far from being qualified to answer any such question definitively, but I’d also dispute Gore’s expertise in global climatology considering that his academic background was not in the sciences but in government studies. The bottom line is that it makes good sense to be skeptical of any scientific claims made by a politician, or, for that matter, anyone else without extensive scientific training.
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