Stewart Dimmock, the lorry driver, school governor and father of two school-age children who was the plaintiff in the case. There is also a reference to a document of the IPCC, but its documents are not independently peer-reviewed in the usual understanding of the term. Gore was acting in good faith.
However, in this connection it is significant that each of the 35 errors listed below misstates the conclusions of the scientific literature or states that there is a threat where there is none or exaggerates the threat where there may be one.
Not one of the errors falls in the direction of underestimating the degree of concern in the scientific community. Gore has accordingly exaggerated the official sea-level estimate by approaching 10, per cent.
She fails to point out that this amounts to less than 2 ft, not the 20 ft imagined by Gore. And she fails to state that the IPCC, faced with a stream of peerreviewed articles stating that sea-level rise is not a threat, has reduced this upper estimate from 3 ft in to less than 2 ft i.
ERROR 2 Pacific islands "drowning" Gore says low-lying inhabited Pacific coral atolls are already being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming, leading to the evacuation of several island populations to New Zealand. However, the atolls are not being inundated, except where dynamiting of reefs or over-extraction of fresh water by local populations has caused damage.
It is not by some accident or coincidence that so many atolls reach just a few feet above the ocean surface. There are several coastlines the east coast of England, for instance where the land is sinking as a consequence of post-ice-age isostatic recovery, or where as in Bangladesh tectonic subduction is similarly causing the land to sink. But such natural causes owe nothing to sea-level rise.
There have been no mass evacuations of populations of islanders as suggested by Gore, though some residents of Tuvalu have asked to be moved to New Zealand, even though the tide-gauges maintained until recently by the National Tidal Facility of Australia show a mean annual sea-level rise over the past half-century equivalent to the thickness of a human hair. The problem with the Carteret Islands, mentioned by Ms. Kreider, arose not because of rising sea levels but because of imprudent dynamiting of the reefs by local fishermen.
In the Maldives, a detailed recent study showed that sea levels were unchanged today compared with years ago, though they have been higher in much of the intervening period, and have very seldom been lower.
A well-established tree very close to the Maldivian shoreline and only inches above sea level was recently uprooted by Australian environmentalists anxious to destroy this visible proof that sea level cannot have risen very far.
It will not. Indications of a sustained thermohaline circulation weakening are not seen during the last few decades. Instead, a strengthening since the s is observed. Kreider, for Mr. Disruption, perhaps: shutdown, no. ERROR 4 CO2 "driving temperature" Gore says that in each of the last four interglacial warm periods it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that caused changes in temperature.
It was the other way about. The judge found that Gore had very clearly implied that it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that had led to changes in temperature in the palaeoclimate, when the scientific literature is unanimous save only for a single paper by James Hansen, whom Gore trusts to the effect that the relationship was in fact the other way about, with a carbon dioxide feedback contributing only a comparatively insignificant further increase to temperature after the temperature change had itself initiated a change in carbon dioxide concentration.
The significance of this error was explained during the court proceedings, and was accepted by the judge. It is not. The melting of the Furtwangler Glacier at the summit of the mountain began years ago. Temperature at the summit never rises above freezing and is at an average of —7 Celsius. The mere fact of warming or melting, therefore, tells us nothing of the cause.
It did not. Katrina was only Category 3 when it struck the levees. They failed, as the Engineers had said they would. Gore has never addressed the issue of climate change and hurricane frequency. Hurricanes Jean, Francis and Ivan were among them. In the same year we had that string of big hurricanes; we also set an all time record for tornadoes in the United States. The previous record was seven.
Here are all ten of the ones they had in They had died in an exceptional storm, with high winds and waves in the Beaufort Sea. The amount of sea ice in the Beaufort Sea has grown over the past 30 years. A report for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that polar bears, which are warm-blooded, have grown in numbers where temperature has increased, and have become fewer where temperature has fallen. Polar bears evolved from brown bears , years ago, and survived the last interglacial period, when global temperature was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present and there was probably no Arctic ice-cap at all.
In , there were just 5, polar bears worldwide. Now that hunting is controlled, there are 25, She does not say that the North-West Passage, a good proxy for Arctic sea-ice extent, was open to shipping in , or that Amundsen passed through in a sailing vessel in There was some bleaching in , but this was caused by the exceptional El Nino Southern Oscillation that year.
Two similarly severe El Ninos over the past years also caused extensive bleaching. Temperature changes by up to 12 degrees C between glacial minima and interglacial maxima, but CO2 concentration changes by no more than ppmv.
Gore is accordingly implying that ppmv can cause a temperature increase of up to 12 degrees C. Not one of the errors falls in the direction of underestimating the degree of concern in the scientific community. The likelihood that all 35 of the errors listed below could have fallen in one direction purely by inadvertence is less than 1 in 34 billion. The remaining 26 errors are just as inaccurate or exaggerated as the nine spelt out by the judge, who made it plain during the proceedings that the Court had not had time to consider more than these few errors.
The judge found these errors serious enough to require the UK Government to pay substantial costs to the plaintiff. Gore says that a sea-level rise of up to 6 m 20 ft will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland. Though Gore does not say that the sea-level rise will occur in the near future, the judge found that, in the context, it was clear that this is what he had meant, since he showed expensive graphical representations of the effect of his imagined 6 m 20 ft sea-level rise on existing populations, and he quantified the numbers who would be displaced by the sea-level rise.
Gore has accordingly exaggerated the official sea-level estimate by approaching 10, per cent. She fails to point out that this amounts to less than 2 ft, not the 20 ft imagined by Gore.
And she fails to state that the IPCC, faced with a stream of peer-reviewed articles stating that sea-level rise is not a threat, has reduced this upper estimate from 3 ft in to less than 2 ft i. Gore says low-lying inhabited Pacific coral atolls are already being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming, leading to the evacuation of several island populations to New Zealand.
However, the atolls are not being inundated, except where dynamiting of reefs or over-extraction of fresh water by local populations has caused damage. Furthermore, corals can grow at ten times the predicted rate of increase in sea level.
It is not by some accident or coincidence that so many atolls reach just a few feet above the ocean surface. There are several coastlines the east coast of England, for instance where the land is sinking as a consequence of post-ice-age isostatic recovery, or where as in Bangladesh tectonic subduction is similarly causing the land to sink.
But such natural causes owe nothing to sea-level rise. There have been no mass evacuations of populations of islanders as suggested by Gore, though some residents of Tuvalu have asked to be moved to New Zealand, even though the tide-gauges maintained until recently by the National Tidal Facility of Australia show a mean annual sea-level rise over the past half-century equivalent to the thickness of a human hair.
The problem with the Carteret Islands, mentioned by Ms. Kreider, arose not because of rising sea levels but because of imprudent dynamiting of the reefs by local fishermen. In the Maldives, a detailed recent study showed that sea levels were unchanged today compared with years ago, though they have been higher in much of the intervening period, and have very seldom been lower. A well-established tree very close to the Maldivian shoreline and only inches above sea level was recently uprooted by Australian environmentalists anxious to destroy this visible proof that sea level cannot have risen very far.
It will not. Indications of a sustained thermohaline circulation weakening are not seen during the last few decades. Instead, a strengthening since the s is observed. Kreider, for Mr. Disruption, perhaps: shutdown, no. Gore says that in each of the last four interglacial warm periods it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that caused changes in temperature. It was the other way about.
The judge found that Gore had very clearly implied that it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that had led to changes in temperature in the palaeoclimate, when the scientific literature is unanimous save only for a single paper by James Hansen, whom Gore trusts to the effect that the relationship was in fact the other way about , with a carbon dioxide feedback contributing only a comparatively insignificant further increase to temperature after the temperature change had itself initiated a change in carbon dioxide concentration.
The significance of this error was explained during the court proceedings, and was accepted by the judge. The melting of the Furtwangler Glacier at the summit of the mountain began years ago. More of the glacier had melted before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in than afterward.
Temperature at the summit never rises above freezing and is at an average of —7 Celsius. The mere fact of warming or melting, therefore, tells us nothing of the cause. Katrina was only Category 3 when it struck the levees. They failed, as the Engineers had said they would.
Gore has never addressed the issue of climate change and hurricane frequency. Hurricanes Jean, Francis and Ivan were among them. In the same year we had that string of big hurricanes; we also set an all time record for tornadoes in the United States. The previous record was seven.
Here are all ten of the ones they had in For the record, however, the number of Atlantic hurricanes shows no trend over the past half century; the number of typhoons has fallen throughout the past 30 years; the number of tornadoes has risen only because of better detection systems for smaller tornadoes; but the number of larger tornadoes in the US has fallen.
They had died in an exceptional storm, with high winds and waves in the Beaufort Sea. The amount of sea ice in the Beaufort Sea has grown over the past 30 years.
A report for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that polar bears, which are warm-blooded, have grown in numbers where temperature has increased, and have become fewer where temperature has fallen.
Polar bears evolved from brown bears , years ago, and survived the last interglacial period, when global temperature was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present and there was probably no Arctic ice-cap at all. In , there were just 5, polar bears worldwide. Now that hunting is controlled, there are 25, She does not say that the North-West Passage, a good proxy for Arctic sea-ice extent, was open to shipping in , or that Amundsen passed through in a sailing vessel in There was some bleaching in , but this was caused by the exceptional El Nino Southern Oscillation that year.
Two similarly severe El Ninos over the past years also caused extensive bleaching. Temperature changes by up to 12 degrees C between glacial minima and interglacial maxima, but CO2 concentration changes by no more than ppmv. Gore is accordingly implying that ppmv can cause a temperature increase of up to 12 degrees C. However, the consensus as expressed by the IPCC is that ppmv of increased CO2 concentration, from to ppmv, would increase radiant energy flux in the atmosphere by 2.
But air temperatures were the coldest in 25 years. The air was so much colder than the water that it caused a heat flux from the water to the air similar to that which fuels hurricanes in warm seas. Gore says that set a new record for the number of typhoons striking Japan. It did not. The trend in the number of typhoons, and of tropical cyclones, has fallen throughout the past 50 years.
The trend in rainfall from cyclones has also fallen, and there has been no trend in monsoon rainfall. Over the past 60 years there has been no change in the strength of hurricanes, even though hydrocarbon use went up six-fold in the same period.
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