Scientist forces Al Gore to back down on global warming!
CHICAGO, Illinois - March 16, 2009 - For years, Al Gore has predicted that man's sins of carbon dioxide will bring calamity and apocalypse. He cited an increase in natural disasters.
Gore quietly dropped the contention that the increase is connected to manmade global warming this week after being called on it by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.
"Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation," reported Andrew Revkin on a blog for The New York Times.
"When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels."
The slide has since disappeared from the show, Revkin wrote.
This was not happenstance. Pielke called Gore on his assertions. The link between manmade activity and natural disasters has not been established.
CRED, the source cited by Gore, even said so.
"Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one - even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future," CRED said about its own database.
In other words, we don't actually know what effect human activity is having on the climate.
I do not discount that better record keeping makes it appear as if conditions are getting worse. It seems as if every rainstorm in the Atlantic in September gets a name now.
