Washington Post Blog:
Last Friday, shortly after Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, we posted an item on a recently concluded court case in Britain that questioned some of the facts in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. We are now giving Gore’s spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider, the opportunity to respond to the criticisms of the British judge. Kreider also serves as Gore’s environmental adviser.
The Gore response
With a column titled “Fact Checker,” it is difficult not to lose the forest for the trees. First and foremost, An Inconvenient Truth presented thousands and thousands of facts. We stand by our initial statement. We were gratified that a UK High Court judge, a layperson with a full docket, found the film worthy enough to be shown in British schools. A generation of schoolchildren will become more educated about global warming and what can be done to solve the climate crisis.
A number of other broader points need to be addressed from the Fact Checker’s last two postings:
Read all about it here.
World Climate Report’s take is entitled ‘Sensational.’
Thanks to Marc Morano for the links.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
But there is a fundamental flaw in the logic of the Gore’s defense.
He produced a film claiming global warming is entirely or mostly (it’s hard to tell) due to human generated CO2 and is an imminent catastrophe facing us.
To justify this chilling claim he cites specific examples, eleven of which have been shown to be ‘errors’ and the judgement does use that word.
Now he says that although these eleven prominent claims were wrong, AGW, self evidently, makes these supposed environmental problems worse.
This is classic circular logic (petitio principii).
The use of vague, ill-defined and ambiguous words/phrases like ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ and ‘pollution’ doesn’t help.
Put an asterisk by Gore’s name in the record book for cheating.
I have to wonder if there’s a misunderstanding about what it means to receive the Peace Prize.
Yasser Arafat got it, too.
It’s probably a prize for telling ‘noble lies’ (or, hereafter, ‘Nobel lies.’
A ‘noble lie’ is defined as “a lie promoted for its effects. A related tactic in rhetoric is to argue for a statement based not on its truth but rather on the supposed effects of belief in the statement.” From: http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/The_Noble_Lie
Thus, Gore may be honored for uniting world leadership on an issue. The naive will easily assume that unity is automatically a good thing.
The automatic assumption that unity is a good thing makes it easy to overlook that the unity is built on lies. Or that the policies built upon these lies tend ineluctably in the direction of neo-Stalinism.