Sunday, October 14, 2007

I’ve been asleep, And I need to wake up now

(Picture from South Bay Mobilization)

There's nothing worse than a Right-wing partisan prick, except a Right-wing partisan prick who tries to seem reasonable, while still spouting clear and provable crap:
Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He follows a long line of illustrious humanitarians who have selflessly and with no thought of personal reward, served the needs of humanity through the sheer goodness and purity of their souls. Or, in Gore’s case, those who have shamelessly promoted themselves as saviors of the planet when they have been proven in a court of law to be nothing more than alarmist charlatans.

Dude, always a flying agenda in search of a landing strip. First, you might want to check out some of the actual, you know, reporting, that tells the accurate story of the British Court ruling. Here's the definitive source, previously linked to here earlier:
A UK High Court judge has rejected a lawsuit by political activist Stuart Dimmock to ban the showing of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in British schools. Justice Burton agreed that

"Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate."

There were nine points where Burton decided that AIT differed from the IPCC and that this should be addressed in the Guidance Notes for teachers to be sent out with the movie.

Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific errors. Let me name some of the journalists who got it wrong: Sally Peck in the Daily Telegraph, Nico Hines in the Times, Mike Nizza in the New York Times, James McIntyre in the Independent, PA in Melbourne's Herald Sun, David Adam in the Guardian, Daniel Cressey in Nature, the BBC, Mary Jordan in the Washington Post, Marcus Baram for ABC News, and (of course) Matthew Warren in the Australian.

Never able to resist the urge to trample the truth in reverent quest of the last ounce of hackery, our Right-winger still tries to appear reasonable:
I simply don’t know if the scientists who posit catastrophe are right. I do know that every “sign” pointed to as “proof” their theories are correct by global warming advocates today is not indicative of long term climate change. But I do not reject out of hand the idea that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in order to prevent (or mitigate) drastic changes in the climate.

In short, I’m an agnostic on the subject. I am not a scientist. I can’t examine the evidence the way a climate modeller or a atmospheric physicist can and reach an intelligent conclusion. We must base our beliefs on explanations of that data by scientists themselves.

No, I am not a scientist. But neither is Al Gore. And the Nobel Committee’s curious choice of the former Vice President for the Peace Prize is perplexing indeed. Global warming is a scientific phenomena. To give it to someone whose scientific acumen has been questioned both by scientists and the courts strikes me as incomprehensible.

That's perhaps because the scientific studies, and years of data analysis reported on in An Inconvenient Truth come from actual scientists, with advanced degrees other than bought-and-paid-for Harvard MBAs.

I'm sorry if science is too hard for you. And no, this isn't a collision between the Middle-Ages church and Galileo. It's more like a collision between the road runner and the coyote.

Rick, look down. You're falling.


Addendum: This Right-wing prick has blocked me from commenting at his site, and I never left a comment, however critical, that wasn't cordial and courteous.

Bastard.

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