Palin v. Gore on Warming (Updated)

In an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Al Gore tried to rebut Sarah Palin's Washington Post op-ed on Copenhagen and made a complete fool of himself:

In response, Gore said that "the deniers are persisting in an era of unreality. The entire North Polar icecap is disappearing before our eyes... What do they think is happening?"

Before opening his big caldera, the former vice president should have checked with scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close. ...Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC's Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

But Big Al wasn't finished beclowning himself:

Asked about Palin's charge on Facebook that these are "doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood," Gore replied that the scientific community has worked on this issue for 20 years. "It's a principle in physics. It's like gravity. It exists."

We have never heard a more ridiculously stupid statement, with the possible exception of Gore's claim about the temperature of the earth's interior:

"People think about geothermal energy - when they think about it at all - in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot..."

As NRO's John Derbyshire has pointed out:

"If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was "several million degrees," we'd be a star."

Thousands of scientists have not only expressed a contrary opinion to Gore's crackpot global warming nonsense, they have signed their names to it. And unlike global warming, the theory of gravity is not disputed by even a few scientists, much less thousands of them.

Which calls into question what Al Gore knows about physics. His academic record suggests that Gore doesn't know much about science of any kind:

For all of Gore's later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT. As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A's to C's as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.

When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil's college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.

"Four eighty-eight! Terrible" Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president's 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.

Sarah Palin has warned us that:

"Policy should be based on sound science, not snake oil."

What Al Gore is selling is not sound science. We're not buying the snake oil.

h/t: Free Republic

More: from Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft here.

Update: Sarah Palin has answered Al Gore by appending the follong to her Washington Post op-ed and posting the expanded opinion piece on her Facebook Notes page:

Steven Hayward has a great article in The Weekly Standard on the Climategate scandal. Be sure to check it out.

The response to my op-ed by global warming alarmists has been interesting. Former Vice President Al Gore has called me a “denier” and informs us that climate change is “a principle in physics. It’s like gravity. It exists.”

Perhaps he’s right. Climate change is like gravity – a naturally occurring phenomenon that existed long before, and will exist long after, any governmental attempts to affect it.

However, he’s wrong in calling me a “denier.” As I noted in my op-ed above and in my original Facebook post on Climategate, I have never denied the existence of climate change. I just don’t think we can primarily blame man’s activities for the earth’s cyclical weather changes.

Former Vice President Gore also claimed today that the scientific community has worked on this issue for 20 years, and therefore it is settled science. Well, the Climategate scandal involves the leading experts in this field, and if Climategate is proof of the larger method used over the past 20 years, then Vice President Gore seriously needs to consider that their findings are flawed, falsified, or inconclusive.

Vice President Gore, the Climategate scandal exists. You might even say that it’s sort of like gravity: you simply can’t deny it.

- Sarah Palin

- JP