by Douglas Gregory
September 21, 2011


You may have heard of Al Gore’s “24 Hours of Climate Reality,” which appeared as a live feed on Wednesday, September 14. It featured 24 hours of live video presentation discussing the “cataclysmic [climate] events so regular it’s a new ‘normal.’”[sic]

While the presentation may have had new material to point to, the argumentation and (il)logic are essentially the same as the 2006 Oscar Winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”: that climate change is causing more frequent, more intense floods, droughts, hurricanes, and every other type of storm you can imagine. [You can see some refutations of the film here.]

All of this targets people’s emotions, using visual cues to tear-jerk rather than consider a plurality of evidence and letting weaker thoughts be excised. It’s not as if compassion doesn’t have its place. Orphaned children stranded after typhoons should certainly receive empathy and kind charity, but their specific situation is not a basis for government policy. Economist Walter E. Williams states, “Truly compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis.”

More to the point, the fact of a tragedy isn’t proof of its cause. Gore’s consistent fallacy is assuming that just showing that tornadoes have caused havoc here, a hurricane there, or a drought over here demonstrates that manmade global warming caused them all. But sound science disproves that assumption.

Consider Dr. Judith Curry, Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President (co-owner) of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), who was featured in last week’s Cornwall newsletter. She published a blog-post that demonstrated storms have not become either more intense or more frequent in recent decades or associated with rises in temperature. The decades of the 1930s and 1950s both saw so-called “extreme weather.” Other research demonstrates cyclone energy is actually decreasing in recent years, and as far as Cardiff University can tell “normal weather” doesn’t exist.

Particularly egregious, especially because calculated to play on still-raw emotions, is Gore’s claim that the unusually large number of tornadoes in the U.S. earlier this year was tied to global warming. As meteorologist/climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, of the University of Albama, Huntsville, pointed out, the number of strong tornadoes has fallen as global average temperature has risen, “stronger tornadoes are usually associated with unseasonably cool conditions, and... there has been a decrease in strong tornadoes during a period of average warming,” and “if anything, global warming causes FEWER tornado outbreaks…not more.”

It’s not just weird weather that’s at stake here, though. Life-saving industrialization and possibly life-ending government policy hang in the balance. Both these topics have long been a major target of environmentalists. Marlo Lewis points out that modern technological and societal developments have lowered “deaths and death rates related to extreme weather ... by 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920’s. [This is] remarkable, given that global population is more than three times larger than it was in the 1920s.” So before we cast off the evils of our Carbon Footprints let’s consider what we gain. Aside from the fact that carbon dioxide concentration often trails rises in temperatures (see here also), crops grow more efficiently in higher carbon dioxide environments, as well as aquatic plants and animals.

As if misleading people and playing to emotion, not science, weren’t bad enough, Gore made sure to run subliminal political messages in his presentation. Many Republican politicians got some prime spotlight for their “denialist” views, but absent were significant scientific voices that reject catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (31,487 listed here, and 1,000 here). One might assume Gore is trying to poison the well for the next election.

Thankfully, the former Vice-President’s presentation was extremely boring and repetitive. Even climate change alarmists are displeased. Perhaps Gore should stop trying to scare people and try to do a little good with his influence. The faulty science of the Green movement, while strengthening in some areas, is frequently shown to be bunk. With God’s help, The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation will continue to stand against the pagan presuppositions, faulty science, and totalitarian government espoused by climate alarmists.

Douglas Gregory is Research and Communications Specialist for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He earned a B.S. in Microbiology from The Pennsylvania State University.