Al Gore’s faulty case for CAGW

Wattsupwiththat have an estimate of Al Gore’s Climate Reality online viewing figures. I posted at the follow-up article

manicbeancounter says:

September 22, 2011 at 12:17 pm

I was one of those who stayed for over 5 minutes.

A video they had justified the case for global warming by re-doing the CO2 in a jar experiment – very nicely as well. Only they did not say what the concentrations were compared to the atmosphere (probably >1000 times the 0.04% at the moment).

Then in the space of a sentence mentioned feedbacks amplifying the effect.

So of the predicted warming up to 6 degrees centigrade this century predicted by the most extreme alarmists, Al Gore’s little video had a flawed experiment to justify the insignificant first 20%, and a “trust the computer models” for the alarming bit.

Don’t take my word for it – I am just a (slightly) manic beancounter. Check out for yourself at http://climaterealityproject.org/video/climate-101/

By the way – don’t worry about the stats – Alexa currently ranks this site at 16,989 and Climate Reality at 64,734.

REPLY: I have a post coming up on this video, which is online here also, without the need to visit Gore’s site: http://vimeo.com/28991442
-Anthony


Outflanking Al Gore & other alarmists

At Wattupwiththat there is a proposal to build a database by

Find(ing) every false, misleading, scary, idiotic, non-scientific statement they have made in the past twenty years. Create an index by name with pages listing those statement with links to the source. Keep it factual. Let their own words come back to haunt them.

My comment was

A database of all the exaggerations, errors and false prophesies on its own will do no good. No matter how extensive and thorough and rigorous, it will be dismissed as having been compiled by serial deniers funded by big oil. Getting a fair hearing in the MSM will be impossible. It the coming battle the alarmists have decided the field of battle and have impenetrable armour.

To be brief, there needs to be two analogies brought to the fore.

First is the legal analogy. If there is a case for CAGW, it must be demonstrated by primary, empirical evidence. That evidence must be tested by opponents. It is not the bits, that may be true – like lots more CO2 will cause some warming. But that there is sufficient CO2 to cause some warming, which will be magnified by positive feedbacks to cause even greater warming, and this substantive warming will destabilize the planet weather systems in a highly negative way. The counter-argument is two-fold – that many of dire, immediate, forecasts have been highly exaggerated and more importantly, the compound uncertainties that have been vastly underestimated. That the case is weak is shown by the prominence given to what is hearsay evidence, such as the consensus, or the proclamations of groups of scientists, or to the image of the hockey stick. In some cases, it has been tantamount to jury-tampering.

Second is the medical analogy. A medical doctor, in proscribing a painful and potentially harmful course of treatment, should at last have a strong professionally-based expectation that post treatment the patient will be better off than if nothing was done. The very qualities that make politicians electable – of being able to make build coalitions by fudging, projecting an image, and undermining the opponents by polarizing views – make them patently unfit for driving through and micro-managing effective policy to reduce CO2. They will of necessity overstate the benefits and massively understate the costs, whether financial or in human suffering. They will not admit that the problem is beyond their capabilities, nor that errors had been made. The problem is even worse in powerful dictatorships than democracies.

I have tried to suggest a method (for those who are familiar with microeconomics) the IPCC/Stern case for containing CO2 here.

https://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/climate-change-policy-in-perspective-%E2%80%93-part-1-of-4/

Also, why there is no effective, global political solution possible.

https://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/climate-change-in-perspective-%E2%80%93-part-2-of-4-the-mitigation-curve/

What is missing is why the costs of global warming have been grossly exaggerated.