GeologyRocks

I'm angry. I've counted to ten and I'm still angry. Al Gore, politician and climate change hyper and hypocrite has won the Nobel Peace Prize (of all things - what's peace got to do with it?) along with the arch-hypers of climate change, the IPCC. At least a British court has seen through some of the hype this week.

Al Gore is someone who flies around the world in a private jet to promote his "shockumentary" propaganda film and lives in a house in Tennessee with an annual electricity bill of $19,200 (Source AP). He will probably claim that all of this profligacy is carbon-offset but in my opinion carbon-offsetting is a cop-out by the rich so than they can keep on doing what they want to do but us little people should take the hit of travelling less and reducing our energy consumption.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a political award and some claim that this was done as a political snub against George Bush as anything else, but couldn't they have come up with someone a bit more deserving than a man who has made a film that contains so many factual inaccuracies that when it now shown to British school children it has to be accompanied by a government health warning (well, at least an explanation of where the film is incorrect).

The government had sent copies into British schools in order to indoctrinate our youth into the cult of climate change. I call it a cult because it is becoming a belief based system where true science of debate, analysis and rigorous testing is being stifled by the likes of the IPCC and the rest of the climate change evangelists. The showing of this film in schools as scientific fact was challenged in court and the judge decided that it when against mainstream scientific thinking in nine areas. I understand that there were another thirty points that the judge didn't have time to examine, the nine were sufficient for him to order the instruction for counterbalance to be given.

The nine points which the judge said had come in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration"were

• Low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls "are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming" - but there was no evidence of any evacuation
• Global warming would result in the "shutting down the ocean conveyor". Even the IPCC think that this is "very unlikely".
• Two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed "an exact fit". This has been a topic of a previous blog post of mine. The judge said that "the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts"
• The judge said that the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro which was was expressly attributed to human-induced climate change could not be established.
• Lake Chad drying up was used as an example of global warming. The judge said: "It is apparently considered to be more likely to result from ... population increase, over-grazing and regional climate variability"
• Hurricane Katrina was attributed to global warming, but there was "insufficient evidence to show that"
• Polar bears were being found that had drowned "swimming long distances to find the ice". The judge said: "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 bleaching of coral reefs was due to global warming. The judge stated that separating the impact from over-fishing, and pollution, was difficult
• A sea-level rise of up to 20ft would be caused by melting of either west Antarctica or Greenland in the near future; the judge ruled that this was "distinctly alarmist"

(Source: The Guardian)

... and they give the man a Nobel Prize. I'm still angry but feel a bit better now.