IBD Editors weigh in on Palin v. Gore

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The editors of Investors Business Daily on the matter of Palin v. Gore:

The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity.

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So fact-challenged is Gore on the subject that when he criticized Palin's position on global warming, he claimed: "I haven't read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus." Oh, yes they do, Al, and the word is "conspiracy," not "consensus."

As Anthony Watts' Web site Watts Up With That shows, one Climate-gate e-mail was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on Nov. 12 — just a month ago. East Anglia Climate Research Unit director Phil Jones' infamous e-mail urging other Climate-gate scientists to delete e-mails is from last year.

As for the disappearing polar ice cap, according to the National Snow And Ice Data Center, second-year ice — the ice that survives the annual and normal summer melt — this summer made up 32% of the total ice cover on the Arctic Ocean compared with 21% in 2007 and 9% in 2008. Clearly, Arctic sea ice is not following the consensus touted by Gore and the warm mongers.

Despite pictures of floating polar bears taken in summer, data reported by the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center show global sea-ice levels the same as they were in 1979, when satellite observations began.

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In this fight, we'll side with Gov. Palin, who says: "Saying no to Copenhagen and cap-and-tax are first steps in 'restoring science to its rightful place.'"

A growing number of Americans are becoming skeptical of what Gore says on the subject, and it's not simply because some data was cooked. Gore doesn't help his own cause when he says stupid things such as his recent claim that the temperature deep within the interior of the planet is "millions of degrees." we wonder how much longer can Gore get away with with his climate scam. Granted, there's no controlling legal authority to regulate his hot air emissions, but it's long past time that this charlatan was shut up, if not shut down.

Read the full IBD editorial here.

- JP

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

Sarah Palin's Copenhagen Op-Ed in the Washington Post

An opinion piece by Sarah Palin which will appear in Wednesday's Washington Post appears to be an expansion on her Facebook op-ed from Thursday, December the 3rd. Here are some prime cuts from the new article: 

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

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Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it.

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But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real.

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What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Read Sarah Palin's full Washington Post op-ed here.

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #21: David Warren on Climategate

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No sooner had John McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be his running mate, the Democrat opposition research machine shifted into overdrive. They intrepid diggers thought they had struck gold in an Palin interview for the September, 2008 issue of NewsMax. In that discussion, the then-governor of Alaska, said that she did not believe climate change is caused by human behavior:

“A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made,” Palin said in the interview, which was posted online Friday.

AGW (Anthropogenic global warming) true believers are convinced that the earth is warming and that change in the climate is the result of human activity on the planet. AGW skeptics, however, argue that the earth has experienced alternating cycles of warming and cooling, both prior to and after the dawn of man. The warming and cooling, they say, can be attributed to variations in the sun's activity as the earth orbits around its star.

For more than a year the AGW true believers (i.e., most all liberals, Democrats and Palin-haters) have ridiculed former Gov. Palin and anyone else who doesn't adhere to their beliefs. Skeptics have long claimed that the "science" used by the true believers is in reality "junk science," and the data AGW proponents have relied upon to push their theories has been manipulate. Recent events tend to give credence to the skeptics and to vindicate Sarah Palin:

A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which "human-induced global warming" claims have been advanced over the years.

By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia -- in some respects the international clearing house for climate change "science" -- he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.

More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various "progressive" causes require a particular scientific result.

There is little doubt that the e-mails were real. Even so warmist a true-believer as George Monbiot led his column in the Guardian yesterday with: "It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The e-mails extracted ... could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them."

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Nigel Lawson (a.k.a. Baron Lawson of Blaby), the former British chancellor of the exchequer, who is among prominent persons demanding a full and open public inquiry, summarized the content of the e-mails in this way:

"Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals."

Why would they cook the data? Just follow the money. AGW has been a big money maker. Just ask Al Gore.

- JP