"Black Elk" <windriver2000@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:68e64$46009098$43889780$29334@DIALUPUSA.NET...

House Panel Investigates Bush's Climate Science Manipulations

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LOL! bush cant Manipulate Science you stupid ***** . Al Gores is doing that
al by himslef !

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin



March 13, 2007

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

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.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology
Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing
backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for "getting the
message out," Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were
"overselling our certainty about knowing the future."

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the
idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely
to blame for the globe's recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore
has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

"He's a very polarizing figure in the science community," said Roger A.
Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at
the University of Colorado center. "Very quickly, these discussions turn
from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore."

"An Inconvenient Truth," directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last
May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing
documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best
seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt,
seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. "Unless
we act boldly," he wrote, "our world will undergo a string of terrible
catastrophes."

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his
popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he
spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a
reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

"He has credibility in this community," said Tim Killeen, the group's
president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a
top group studying climate change. "There's no question he's read a lot
and is able to respond in a very effective way."

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.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists
against his work. "I have received a great deal of positive feedback," he
said. "I have also received comments about items that should be changed,
and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments." He
gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global
warming, "I think that I'm finally getting a little better at it."

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of
global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a
climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of
the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about
dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of
"shrill alarmism."

Some of Mr. Gore's centrist detractors point to a report last month by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that
studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying
that humans were the main cause of the globe's warming since 1950, part of
Mr. Gore's message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed
climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world's seas in this century would rise a maximum of
23 inches - down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular
time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New
York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the
waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long
skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article
that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering.
"Climate change is a real and serious problem" that calls for careful
analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. "The cacophony of screaming,"
he added, "does not help."

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."

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore's claim that the energy industry
ran a "disinformation campaign" that produced false discord on global
warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists
agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social
anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or
CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters,
challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed
disagreement.

"Hardly a week goes by," Dr. Peiser said, "without a new research paper
that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,"
including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for
global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge
Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

"Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he
describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our
planet," Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in
Australia, said in a September blog. "Nor does he present any evidence
that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its
historical pattern of constant change."

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society
meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore's claim that "our
civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely
similar to this" threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide
that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted
10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he
said, were up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore's assertion that scientists agreed on
global warming except those industry had corrupted. "I've never been paid
a nickel by an oil company," Dr. Easterbrook told the group. "And I'm not
a Republican."

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an
active skeptic of global warming's effects and director of the insects and
infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr.
Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

"For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the
unsubstantiated claims," Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald
Tribune. "We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they
continue to ignore the facts."

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs
at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that
reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that
the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished
himself for integrity.

"On balance, he did quite well - a credible and entertaining job on a
difficult subject," Dr. Oppenheimer said. "For that, he deserves a lot of
credit. If you rake him over the coals, you're going to find people who
disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right."