NYT CLIMBS IN BED WITH GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTICS IN AL GORE HITPIECE --

[DeepModem Mom]

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html

[Erika]

1. Enough is enough. The shit has to stop.

I don't care about the scientists. Our temps are shooting straight up. We're 20 degrees higher than normal, the snow is melting. The drought will start.

[BayCityProgressive]

2. I stick completely to

CommDreams, foreign news, 3rd party newspapers, indy media ect..you can't even read the corporate press anymore.

[nolabels]

6. In So.Cal. we are now having a year with the least recorded rain EVER

Fucking corporate press, stick a fork in it, your done already x(

[FourScore]

3. Disgusting

But let's not forget, this is the same paper that brought us Judith Miller!

[Botany]

4. The old Grey Lady she ain't what she used to be.

The 2004 election .....

and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen


As for science and proof of Global Warming ......

[blm]

10. Corpmedia, inc NYT will target Gore and Kerry as long as they breathe because they

both have continued to do the work over the last two decades that an honest newspaper would be doing IF it had any integrity left.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Direct lie by the NYT here

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

The reality of that report:

The Earth is hotter today than it has been in four centuries and likely warmer than it has been in the past 1,000 years, according to a review of surface temperature research released Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Science.
...
Committee chair Gerald North said the panel's review of instrument and proxy data affords "a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries."
...
Some of these changes, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, "appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years," North told reporters at a briefing in Washington, DC.

The panel said it had less confidence that warming was unprecedented over the last thousand years because of a lack of precisely dated proxy evidence for temperatures prior to 1600, in particular in the Southern Hemisphere.

"The picture is much murkier before 1600 and considerably murkier when you go further back in time," said committee member Kurt Cuffey, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "We start losing sources of information ... and start relying more and more on data from fewer and fewer geographic locations."

http://www.albionmonitor.com/0606a/globalwarmingnasreport.html

The point is that it's easier to measure the temperatures from the past 400 years. The 600 years before that also appear to be cooler than now - but because there are less records (eg not so many wooden buildings in the southern hemisphere, so not so many records of tree growth), but the certainty of the measurements is less. To say Gore is 'contradicted' is a lie. The IPCC Summary for Policymakers from 2007 says:

Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is
unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer
than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4
to 6 metres of sea level rise.

• Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher
than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.
Some recent studies indicate greater variability in Northern Hemisphere temperatures than suggested in the
TAR, particularly finding that cooler periods existed in the 12 to 14th, 17th, and 19th centuries. Warmer
periods prior to the 20th century are within the uncertainty range given in the TAR.

[DeepModem Mom]

7. Thank you for this post!!! nt

[KittyWampus]

8. Easterbrook must have a personal ax to grind then. Perhaps he can't stand someone successfully

taking a complex subject and making it palatable for the rest of us.

Easterbrook is most likely one of the Scientific Elite- one of those who fancy themselves as High Priests and who zealously guard their academic fields. Of course there are those scientists who'd lash out at Gore's work. Gore's film threatens their sense of power.

[shield20]

9. And there are ancient maps of Antartica with no ice,

so what does all those "nuances" have to do about the fact that the earth IS getting warmer?

[DeepModem Mom]

11. I wanted to add the response of Gore adviser, Dr. James Hansen, and Gore himself --

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. “On the other hand,” Dr. Hansen said, “he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.”

In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. “Of course,” he said, “there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.”

He said “not every single adviser” agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals” — that warming is real and caused by humans.