IPCC Lead Author – Al Gore Is Doing A Disservice To Science

Al Gore's Climate Reality Project is a disservice to science

Al Gore’s 24 hours of Reality Goregasm was not the success Gore had hoped for.

Mocked by Climate Skeptics for the junk science and the linking of everything that has ever happened to man made climate change, and greeted with despair by warming alarmists for exactly the same reasons as the skeptics, Gore claims 8.6 millions hits on the Climate Reality web site, but there are significant doubts due to the inconvenient truth of the real hit rate on the site.

Gore is rapidly becoming an serious embarrassment to the warming alarmist industry

When Al Gore said last week that scientists now have “clear proof that climate change is directly responsible for the extreme and devastating floods, storms and droughts that displaced millions of people this year,” my heart sank. Having suggested the idea of “event attribution” back in 2003, and co-authored a study published earlier this year on the origins of the UK floods in autumn 2000, I suspect I may be one of the scientists being talked about.

Gore is right that it is possible, in principle, to quantify the role of human influence on climate in specific weather events, and that this has to involve probability: how much has human influence “loaded the weather dice” to make a particular event more likely? Such questions can be answered, and because the impacts of climate change are overwhelmingly felt through changing risks of extreme weather, the answers matter. People deserve to know how much climate change is affecting them, and not be fobbed off with banalities like: “this is the kind of event that we might expect to become more frequent.”

That would be banalities like we have to stop a 2 degree C temperature rise, obscene amounts of CO2 emissions, peak oil, just meaningless sound bytes.

But this question can be answered: in principle, using exactly the same models that are used for weather forecasting, not the much-derided low-resolution variants that are used to predict the climate of 2200. And it deserves to be answered properly: the autumn 2000 flood study took us five years and tens of thousands of detailed simulations, all performed using computing capacity kindly donated by the public. We’re hoping to get a bit quicker off the mark in future, but it is frustrating when Gore claims to know the answer before we have even asked the question.

What is even more frustrating Myles Allen, is that the IPCC which is supposed to give objective results allows itself to be infiltrated by the WWF and then publishes the IPCC 2007 Report using the same unfounded scare tactics, Glaciergate, that Gore is criticised for using.