Gore Science Versus Real Science

Joe Bell

Once upon a time the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to individuals who dedicated their lives to the betterment of humanity. They focused on real world issues and championed real world solutions. In 1952, Dr. Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work. Dr. Schweitzer founded a hospital in French Equatorial Africa. He would later expand the facility and by the 1960’s the hospital would serve more than 500 patients at any one time.

In 1964, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. won the award for his leadership during America’s civil rights movement. Between 1957 and 1968 Dr. King had traveled more than 6 million miles and spoke more than 2,500 times as he advocated equal rights for all people.

In 1986, Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel received the award for his human rights activities. He is the founding president of the Universal Academy of Cultures, in Paris, and chairman of the Eli Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife established to combat intolerance and injustice.

Things have changed. This year the award went to former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” What any of that gibberish has to do with promoting human rights or advancing world peace remains a mystery. Giving Gore an award for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge” has turned the Nobel Peace Prize into the Nobel Party Line Prize. Depositing the blame for global warming at the feet of mankind and its automobiles and factories has become one of the favorite pastimes of the left, but Gore’s effort to convince the world that global warming is man-made is being met with increasing resistance from the scientific community.

Gore has been a tireless advocate of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases. Yet a large number of scientists have looked at the evidence and concluded Kyoto is unnecessary. In April 2006, 60 scientists sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper stating Kyoto is unwarranted. They wrote, “It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth’s climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”

The signatories included Dr. Ian Clark, professor of isotope hydrology and paleoclimatology at the University of Ottawa; Dr. G. Cornelis van Kooten, professor of climate change and environmental studies at the University of Victoria; and Dr. Roy Spencer, research scientist at the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Numerous scientists who initially sounded the alarm about global warming being a man-made phenomenon have changed their minds as new information is uncovered. Dr. Claude Allegre is one of France’s most prominent scientists. More than a decade ago he was one of 1,500 who signed the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” letter that declared global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”

But in a series about global warming, run by The National Post earlier this year, Dr. Allegre said he changed his mind about the risk. The Post reported, “With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, many of the climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes from natural phenomena.”

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works web site mentions a number of scientists who have shifted their position regarding global warming, including Dr. Reid Bryson, founder of the Department of Meteorology (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences) at the University of Wisconsin. Bryson was listed on the U.N. Global 500 Roll of Honor and was named by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. The committee web site offered this quote from Bryson, which appeared in the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News: “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing… All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s … because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

The committee web site offers these views from paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, from Carlton University, in Ottawa. Patterson has reversed his view about climate change and said his conversion to skeptic “came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Strategic Project Grant where I was principle investigator. Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances. As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time, (geochemist) Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate.”

Patterson said rejecting his previously held doctrine “probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where the science takes me and not where activists want me to go.”

Patterson’s statement summarizes the difference between scientists seeking truth and liberals seeking to advance a political agenda. By honoring Gore, the Nobel Committee cast itself as more an organization that celebrates left-leaning causes than an organization that, in the words of its own web site, is dedicated to honoring those whose work has been “of the greatest benefit to mankind.”

The world is now anxiously anticipating reports of Al Gore hitting a game-winning home run in game seven of the upcoming World Series.

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

jbellopedresponse@hotmail.com