Gore corrects Monckton

Consider me impressed that at least the paper published Gore's response (low expectations).

None of these facts are correct. Al Gore delivered them.

There. See how simple it is to debunk global warming? Next up: the earth as oblate spheroid.

Best,

D

Later on in his letter, Gore says this about the NAS PAnel chaired by Gerry North:

The NAS stated that the late 20th-century warming in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the past 1,000 years and probably for much longer than that.

That statement is false, and a complete misrepresentation of the Panel's findings.

James, here is [their own statement](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/06/nas_report_on_hockey_stick_rel…)

>The Research Council committee found the Mann team's conclusion that warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years to be plausible, but it had less confidence that the warming was unprecedented prior to 1600; fewer proxies -- in fewer locations -- provide temperatures for periods before then.

They hedge it a bit more than Gore does, but I don't see that he is misrepresenting their conclusions. Monckton, on the other hand, does misrepresent what they concluded:

>The US National Academy of Sciences has since issued a statement that the "hockey-stick" graph was defective.

Gore says:

And with regards to some of the financial implications suggested by the Stern report, one need only look to the insurance industry for validation of the potential costs of global warming.

LOL! Now alarmists are putting all their faith and trust in the insurance industry. What's next, a reversal of your faith in tobacco companies?

"LOL! Now alarmists are putting all their faith and trust in the insurance industry. What's next, a reversal of your faith in tobacco companies?"

What ideological hogwash! Haven't you seen the reports the reinsurance companies (of which Munich Re, Swiss Re, etc. are examples) have undertaken? These reports show that property damage due to extreme weather and climate events is increasing at a high rate.

Your buddy Bush says that measures taken to curb global warming will harm the economy. He believes (falsely) that millions or billions of dollars will be lost as a result of action. You both fail to realise that billions or trillions MORE dollars will be lost as a result of an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events, which is one of the likely results of global warming as stated by the IPCC (the largest peer-review project in history).

Nanny, uncover your eyes of your ideological blinders!

Tim, I couldn't give a toss about what a press release says, tell me the page number of the NAS report where it says "the late 20th-century warming in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the past 1,000 years and probably for much longer than that." Or anything like that.

I would add that's "plausible" that I will win the lottery next week.

James is here employing the classic strategy of denialists - if a problem is not 100% proven, with every scientist on Earth proclaiming complete assurance in the science underpinning the problem - then it doesn't exist. In addition to AGW, I've seen this trick used by the denial crowd to deny the deleterious effects of acid rain, other forms of pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Speaking as a senior scientist, I can assure the likes of James that science is never that absolute. It never will be. Scientists rarely agree on anything, and for any kind of panel to produce what I see as a clear statement is quite an achievement. Their summary statement can be seen pretty well as a complete vindication for Mann et al.

Jeff, I'm not employing a classic strategy of anything. I'm pointing out that Gore has made a false assertion. Of course, you can easily disprove this, by showing where the NAS panel said anything like:

"the late 20th-century warming in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the past 1,000 years and probably for much longer than that."

Stephen, you are defending statements from the insurance industry! Are you feeling OK?

Moreover, direct observations from the 20th century, from the last ice age and from the atmosphere's response to volcanic eruptions,

Where are these direct observations from the last ice age?

"LOL! Now alarmists are putting all their faith and trust in the insurance industry."

Actually, some faith is being put in insurance companies' sense of self-presesrvation. Do you want to argue whether or not insurance companies want to look after themselves?

James, this is exactly what you are doing because you are aiming to dilute the severity of message the NAS Panel was making. Again, as a scientist I write the same kind of stuff you see in the NAS summary for reasons of expediency, but the fact is that Gore has it right; 'plausible' is about as far as any scientist is going to go in describing evidence based on proxy measurements.

But your arguments are nothing more than a red herring. What is so utterly frustrating is having to argue in favor of evidence for AGW when by now the evidence is in; the debate should now be focussing on how much the temperature will increase in the coming years, to evaluate the effects on natural and mamaged ecosystems, and to find ways to (a) wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, and (b) find ways to deal with the more serious environmental consequences of AGW.

Nanny, you, of course, know better than to place your faith in those insurance slicksters, I'm sure you've refused absolutely to be conned into shelling out good money for any of their so-called "policies".

Then again I doubt that they write much business for GI Joe doll collections and dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged with embarassing stains in any case.

Jeff wrote:
to find ways to (a) wean ourselves off of fossil fuels
Honest question Jeff: what in your opinion is currently the best alternative for natural gas central heating and cooking?

This is the biggest slice of individual fossil fuel in NL, as most commuters are paid by their companies. Also gas reserves in western europe are rapidly depleting, which increases the dependency on Russia.

Hans,

We have no choice in the mid term. Even if climate change weren't the very real problem that it is, then we'd have to face up to the fact that proven reserves are in decline. Or should we ignore these two scenarios and happily whistle until the sunset?

As for alternatives, I really don't know. It is a good question, but certainly there must be alternatives. How long do you think we can continue to depend on these non-renewable resources anyway? Why, in the face of the points I made above, do you think that there has hardly been the political will to alter out lifestyles and to avoid the necessary changes that must, inevitably, come? The answers are fairly straightforward, and have everything to do with power, the concentration of wealth, and retaining the status quo.

Hans,

There are several alternatives to natural gas for space heating in the Netherlands.

1. Heat pumps.

2. The new household-scale microturbines and fuel cells both of which can generate both heat and electricity, radically reducing the amount of natural gas needed.

3. Under-road solar thermal. Put a series of pipes under road-beds and use the roads as solar collectors by running a working fluid through them.

Of course, if you use carbon trading and sequestration credits you would only reduce your emissions if this were cheaper than paying someoneelse to reduce theirs.

Shorter Hans:

We're not capable of innovating.

Nags, please go easy on Hans when you argue that we can innovate our Simonian way out of anything.

Best,

D

The sooner the carbon cuts, the more time we will have to innovate.

Thanks Ian, Dano stop trolling.

I was thinking of a cost effective way per household. If a gas boiler is replaced by an electric boiler running on emission-free electricity, this would make the investment per household low (read: make it easier for people to switch over). The pressure would then be on the electricity generators to produce emission-free, which centralised would be more efficient. This switch-over also would need a tremendous investment in new power generators, not a priori ruling out nuclear by the way.

A geothermal seasonal heatpump investment is typically EUR 20,000 with a braek even time of 20 years, only the most ecological inspired family would do this in an existing house without extra subsidy.

Do you have examples of under road thermal and microturbines?

Are microturbines more efficient than centralised power plants?

So far, the omens for Micro-CHP generation are not promising. See here. Quote: "While it is still relatively early in the trial, at the current
state of development of Micro-CHP, the emerging trial
data indicate there is unlikely to be a significant carbon
emissions reduction opportunity from wide deployment
of the technology at this stage in its evolution."

Sorry, that should have been here.

Tony - your link appears to be broken.

Hans:

The principal advantage of microCHP is not that either microturbines or fuel cells are more efficient than power stations at generating electricity, it's that they can recover the waste heat which accounts for 50% or more of the energy content of the original fuel.

In powerplants, this heat goes up the smokestack or into the waste steam, microCHP recovers that energy and uses it for space heating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroCHP

That's the theory anyway, Tony's reference will hopefully tell us how close the prototypes are to that objective.

In the UK at least, gas utilities are interested in leasing the units to consumers and adding the lease charge to their gas bill, allowing them to complete directly withe the electricity utilities.

A link, from the Netherlands, appropriately enough, to a group working on the solar road concept.

http://www.ooms.nl/english/pages/divisie_gww/road_energy_systems.html

Their approach (store the heat in hot water for several months for use in winter)may be superceded by United Technologies' work on efficient electricity generation from low-grade heat sources. (The technology has so far been used to extract energy from geothermal resources but the temperatures required are easily achieved by solar thermal
systems.) In that case, you could burn less fossil fuel in summer to offset your continuing use of natural gas in winter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17524/

Another approach would be solar coal gasification:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980SoEn...24..313G

This is a hybrid fossil/renewable system which still emits CO2 but less than from conventional sources.

Using solar-generated steam to produce gas from coal (or, in theory from renewable biomass such as wood) also gets away from the intermittency problem since the resulting gas can be stored indefinitely.

You could also retain most of the current distribution and end-use infrastructure.

Micro-CHP information: http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/Publications/publicationdetail.htm?product…

"LOL! Now alarmists are putting all their faith and trust in the insurance industry."

Gotta wonder what goes on in the heads of the "last throes" climate change deniers, as every one of their idols, from the US Defense Department to BP, gives up the denialist stance. Stay the course, eh?

When Duke Energy and Exxon throw in the towel, it really is all over.

[link](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR20061…)

Facts:

the role of CO2 in global warming has NOT been proven.

the IPCC models are based on economic growth NOT real fossile fuels sources. Using real known (used and not used) sources of fossile fuel will not even produce the mildest outcome of the different scenarios. Come on IPCC, where is all the oil, gas and coal You seem to have secret knowledge about.

the IPCC models are useless when trying to explain in retrospective what has happened. To me an evidence that the phrase saying that the model result cannot be explained without anthropohenic influence is nonsense. What was the AGW effect 100 yrs ago?

the effect of aerosols is vastly underestimated and not properly understood.

the oceans will NOT rise any substancial level if the North Pole would melt. The ice is already in the water. The South Pole need such an amount of heat to melt (because it is thick and is on land), that no living thing would survice if such a heat would emerge.
The sea-leel rises because of thermodynamic expansion, nothing else. Nothing to get alarmed about, it has done so since the last ice-age. The rate has NOT increased.

The frequency of extreme weather has NOT increased.

The oceans are COOLING not heating up. They have done so now for three years in a row!! No IPCC model predicted that!

The Svensmark effect can explain at least 85% of the supposed effect of CO2 (which needs a "forcing" of a not proven 2.5 times!)

The medieval warm period was NOT a local phenomenon. There are traces of it all over the globe. The proxy studies cannot prove that this period was colder than today. Neither can the proxy studies show at which rate the cliamte changes took place. We simply do not know if todays changes are extraordinary (probably not).

The insurance companies get higher costs because people are getting richer having moore expensive houses, cars, summer houses, electronics a.s.o People also tend build near the sea, rivers etc Places not exploited before. For instance, why is there no traces of indian permanent settlements in Florida? The insurance argument has been withdrawn long time ago.

I am sorry to say that there are no convincing scientific arguments for the AGW only speculations and theories. Should we then do nothing? Of course not. There are 1000 of reasons why we should not burn our fossile resources. Climate change is NOT one of them.

Jan's comment reminds one of Sam Spade, sitting in Tijuana's Golden Horseshoe and reading this sign:

Only genuine pre-War American and British Whiskeys Served Here

"I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when interrupted ..."

Jan, you've wandered into the wrong place. Get out while you can.

Jan, I assume that you are not a real person or if you are, those are not your real opinions. If you feel that your statements are true, I am sure that some around here would be pleased to discuss them with you.

For example, do you really understand what you are saying with the North Pole ice comment?

Oooh! Oooh! John, let me! Me too! Ahem:

For example, Jan, do you really understand what you are saying with the extreme weather comment?

I mean, besides no? IOW: what Eli said.

Best,

D

Facts:

The goldfish is really a bird.

Mt. Everest is only ten feet high.

Sarah Bernhardt was actually two midgets, one seated on the other's shoulders.

John F Kennedy was actually killed by a meteorite.

What? I've got just as much evidence to back up these claims as does Jan.

If only we in the United States were as willing as you in Britain are to base our opinions on solid evidence. Unfortunately, the right wing has taken over the policy debates by effectively conveying that those who disagree with them are 'cowards', 'reactionaries' and worse.

Former Vice President Gore has made it his mission to spread the word, in the hope that he will live to see humanity accept that we do indeed leave an enormous footprint on this Big Blue Marble, and it is left to us to care about that.

Off topic here, but wow! I thought "nanny's" funding ran out long ago. I guess Exxon Mobil still has the budget to pay him to repeat the same rebutted crap on every climate related website out there.