Judge Chides Gore on Eve of Nobel Word

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The New York Sun

As the Nobel Prize committee was pondering whether Vice President Gore deserved a peace prize for his work in raising awareness about the dangers of climate change, a British judge has castigated the former vice president for a catalog of errors in his Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The Nobel decision was due to be announced overnight by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is responsible for the peace prize. The prospect of Mr. Gore winning the award has fueled a wave of speculation about the vice president’s lingering presidential ambitions.

However, Mr. Gore’s hopes of leveraging a Nobel Prize into a winning late presidential run have been severely dimmed by the judge’s remarks, which list nine cardinal errors and misleading statements in Mr. Gore’s film manifesto and provide ready ammunition for Mr. Gore’s opponents.

While conceding that much of the film was “broadly accurate,” High Court judge Michael Burton derided Mr. Gore’s movie as “one-sided” and “distinctly alarmist.” He sided with the parent who brought the case, who said the film contained “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda, and sentimental mush.”

Justice Burton ruled that if the film is to be shown in British schools it should be accompanied by a warning that Mr. Gore’s argument may be flawed and that teachers should always offer a contradictory point of view.

The judge was asked by a state school governor in Kent, Stewart Dimmock, to decide whether it was lawful for the government to distribute to state schools a film that contains what some believe to be misleading and inaccurate information. Mr. Dimmock maintained that allowing the arguments in the film, which has been a box office success around the world, to be shown in schools was tantamount to “brainwashing” children.

Although he declined to ban the film outright, the judge listed nine substantial errors in Mr. Gore’s film. The first was his claim that due to the melting of ice in Antartica or Greenland, sea levels would rise 20 feet “in the near future.” The judge said: “This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr. Gore’s ‘wake-up call.’ It was common ground that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water … but only after, and over, millennia.”

As for Mr. Gore’s contention that low-lying Pacific atolls were “being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming,” the judge said there was no evidence that the atolls were being evacuated.

Mr. Gore’s claim that global warming was “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” the means by which the Gulf Stream travels over the North Atlantic to western Europe, was met by the judge with a quote from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that it was “very unlikely” the conveyor would be shut down, though it might slow.

The judge also knocked down one of Mr. Gore’s central arguments, illustrated in the film by graph lines suggesting that the rise in carbon dioxide and the rise in the earth’s temperature over 650,000 years showed “an exact fit.” While conceding that there was general agreement among scientists that there was a correlation between the two events, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts,” the judge said.

Mr. Gore’s statement that snow on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya had melted and disappeared because of global warming was also contradicted by the judge, who said scientists had not determined a specific link between the melting of the snow and global warming caused by humans.

The sixth error highlighted by the judge was Mr. Gore’s use of the drying up of Lake Chad in Africa as an example of how global warming was changing the planet in a catastrophic way. “It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution,” the judge said. “It is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.”

Similarly, Mr. Gore’s belief that Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans was attributable to global warning was met by the judge’s verdict that there is “insufficient evidence to show that.”

Mr. Gore referred in his film to a study that reported the melting of the polar icecap had led to the drowning of polar bears “swimming long distances — up to 60 miles — to find the ice.” “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm,” the judge said. “It plainly does not support Mr. Gore’s description.”

Finally, the judge cast doubt on Mr. Gore’s statement that coral reefs were bleaching because of global warming and other factors. The judge countered that although an IPCC report warned that coral bleaching and the death of the reefs would take place if temperatures were to increase by between 1-3 degrees centigrade, it was difficult to determine whether the coral was endangered by global warming or other factors, such as over-fishing and pollution.

Mr. Gore was due to attend a fund raising party for Senator Boxer in San Francisco last night. He sparked speculation that he had been informed in advance that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize when he briefly cancelled his appearance, due to what Mrs. Boxer described as “the most urgent global warming mission” abroad.

“I just got a call from Vice President Al Gore,” Mrs. Boxer wrote to her supporters. “He told me that he needs to travel abroad tomorrow for an exciting and urgent mission that could result in a major breakthrough in the fight against global warming.” Speculation that Mr. Gore had won the Nobel prize quickly turned to speculation that his change of heart indicated that he had been informed that he had not won.


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