Congrats Gore

Who are you talking to? I am not a liberal. Or conservative. I'm from Europe, we have a few more alternatives

and by the way, the going for whoever from the phonebook is not what i said. it's a reference to 2000, when that idea was widely discussed in american media. liberal AND conservative.

Casting aspersions on others is easy job.
Convincing the participants (with rational responses) is not that easy.
Sorry.

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=105323
Here is one more thread about this subject

Gore gets a cold shoulder
Steve Lytte
October 14, 2007

ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

At his first appearance since the award was announced in Oslo, Mr Gore said: "We have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing."

Mr Gore shared the Nobel prize with the United Nations climate panel for their work in helping to galvanise international action against global warming.

But Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

During his speech to a crowd of about 300 that included meteorology students and a host of professional meteorologists, Dr Gray also said those who had linked global warming to the increased number of hurricanes in recent years were in error.

He cited statistics showing there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared to 83 from 1957 to 2006 when the earth warmed.

"The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/13/1191696238792.html

Of Polar Bears and Consensus
By Mona Charen
Friday, October 12, 2007

Consensus can be wrong. So warned The New York Times in a science section piece on Oct. 9. "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus" reviewed the history of our belief that dietary fat was as big a health risk as smoking. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared as much in 1988. He was speaking not for himself but for the scientific community, which was nearly unanimous in fingering fat as the cause of heart disease and cancer.

The trouble was, study after study failed to prove the hypothesis. It was a case, the Times explains, of "informational cascade" -- a phenomenon in which groups tend to reach false conclusions because individuals often assume that the majority must be right.

Thank you, New York Times. It's a good cautionary tale about human psychology and one the Times ought to take to heart in its coverage of the global warming question. That is the issue we are currently "cascading" to conclusions about, the Times no less than anyone else. The climate of opinion on climate is dogmatic verging on hysterical. Kids are coming home from school in tears having been taught that the world they were born into will soon descend into a nightmare of massive storms, swamped cities and dying animals.

The dying animals is a big favorite in the schools, particularly the stranded polar bear on an ice floe searching for land. That one even got to my worldly sons. So I was particularly happy to have Bjorn Lomborg's new book, "Cool It: A Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," on hand.

Lomborg does not deny that global warming is happening, nor that it is the result of human action. But he does apply a necessary damper to the white-hot rhetoric and scare mongering of the global warming fanatics. A political scientist by training and an economist by outlook, the man The Wall Street Journal called the "golden-haired Dane" applies common sense and cost/benefit analysis to a subject brimming with emotion and unreasoning fear.

Along the way, he debunks some of the myths. Pace Al Gore it seems that of the 20 subpopulations of polar bear, one or possibly two are declining in population. But more than half are stable, and two are increasing. Actually, the world population of polar bears has mushroomed over the past several decades, from some 5,000 in the 1960s to about 25,000 today, due to stricter regulation of hunting. As for those two subgroups that are declining in population, they live in regions in which the temperatures have actually been dropping over the past 50 years, whereas the subgroups that have seen an increase in population live in areas that have been getting warmer.

The polar bear example is instructive because the solution being urged upon us to save the bears is a massively expensive but ultimately nearly fruitless effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions. If we follow Kyoto or some other framework, we can at best save .06 bears per year. "But," Lomborg writes, "49 bears from the same population are getting shot every year, and this we can easily do something about."

It's the same with climate change writ large. Drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is hardly cost free. To achieve the goals outlined in the Kyoto accords, for example, would cost the world $180 billion annually for 50 years.

Examined rationally, it is clear that while global warming will do harm to some parts of the world, it will also do good to others. Might not the money be better spent mitigating the negative effects of a warming planet?

Lomborg's book focuses on trade-offs. If we're going to spend a fixed amount of money to improve the world, what makes the most sense? Or to put it another way, which dollar spent produces the greatest benefit? According to a group of economists (including four Nobel Prize winners) who examined this question in 2004, the answer was clear. One dollar spent fighting HIV/AIDS produced $40 in social benefits. One dollar spent on fighting malnutrition yields about $30 in social benefits. Other efforts, like ending agricultural subsidies in the wealthy countries and ensuring worldwide free trade, would net a $15 benefit for a one-dollar cost. Cutting CO2 emissions, by contrast, yields between 2 and 25 cents per dollar invested.

The consensus is wrong on global warming. Wonder when The New York Times will figure it out? In the meanwhile, Lomborg points the way toward clear analysis.

You missed the reports about the out of date Lombard used, Finn - worth reading ,too :wink:

My main point, however, is that obviously no-one who's criticising Gore seems to have ever read why he was awarded that prize.

Supreme Court Gives Gore's Nobel to Bush
by Andy Borowitz
Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on global warming, the United States Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Nobel and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.

For Mr. Gore, who basked in the adulation of the Nobel committee and the world, the high court's decision to give his prize to President Bush was a cruel twist of fate, to say the least.

But in a 5-4 decision, the justices made it clear that they had taken the unprecedented step of stripping Mr. Gore of his Nobel because President Bush deserved it more.

"It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. "But President Bush has actually helped create global warming."

Even as Mr. Gore was being stripped of his Nobel, he received strong words of support from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who said that the former vice president's Nobel win "shows that he is devoting his life to the right thing and should definitely stay the course."

In an interview with reporters in Iowa, Sen. Clinton said that "Al Gore should remain dedicated to the cause of global climate change, at least through November of 2008."

Sen. Clinton suggested that Mr. Gore could further research the source of global warming by immediately boarding a rocket ship to the sun.

Blueflame
""It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. "But President Bush has actually helped create global warming."
This Andy is a fine satirist.

Rama, yes Andy is a fine satarist. Seems Finn dAbuzz thinks he has found some fine satarists too judging from his 2 most recent posts.