What he does, believes and says is completely irrelevant to whether climate change is real. This ad homonim attack is really pointless and just makes you look like an idiot.
A person’s motivation only applies to their actions. He didn’t cause global warming nor did he create the hypothesis. What he is like is completely immaterial.
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The same reason that ALL the "skeptical" arguments here are so poor. They have little else, the advancing juggernaut of scientific data and understanding is mowing down their more serious arguments one by one, and they’re really desperate.
Take the twenty or so posts about the one sentence error about the exact date when the Himalayan glaciers will totally disappear, while simply ignoring by the proven (and much more important) fact that they ARE disappearing, and threatening the water supply of millions of people.
By me, that’s even worse, since it masquerades as "science". But I suppose it’s a matter of taste.
EDIT – The inflammatory rhetoric below is also enlightening. When people’s arguments have been refuted by the facts, all that’s left is to appeal to emotion. It’s why "skeptics" want to abandon science in favor of a debate, with two people behind lecterns flinging rhetoric at each other.
EDIT 2 – From below: "Personally, I do not condone the use of inaccuracies being used what I would call quite recklessly to frighten people into following a course of action."
I completely agree. But I’d also apply it to people who make mountains out of molehills, trying to cast doubt on the underlying truth. Extremists on either side do not point the way to understanding.
Because they don’t have a clue, or they’re trying to brainwash other people who don’t have a clue.
actually people should know that alarmists with their global warming scare tactics are killing the production industry and starving the entire global population.
Like Bob pointed out, it is similar to the Himalayan error. Just one example from Gore is his graphic of half of Florida being flooded.
Those two small "errors" are quite obvious to anyone who has looked into this issue. However, they are not obvious to the general public who trust authorities like Gore and IPCC to tell them accurate statements.
Personally, I do not condone the use of inaccuracies being used what I would call quite recklessly to frighten people into following a course of action. If the course of action has truth, then this sort of thing is not needed. And what’s even worse, when the inaccuracies come to light whether immediately or through some investigation, they are tossed aside since the main goal is still noble.
It’s a disingenuous way of offering an argument and if you like the argument in the first place, you may just overlook the level of deceit and also the level also of conceit). Those on the other side of the argument and even those who are neutral feel quite the opposite.
People incapable of righteous indignation are probably righteous themselves.
Good question.
It’s because in his panic to find himself a role and a living, he has made himself a guru regarding AGW whilst at the same time being a pratt who every time he opens his mouth makes it quite obvious he is talking through his backside.
This is not to say that his whole message is phoney, it’s not, but he daft way he sets himself for a fall by spouting rubbish (in amongst the good stuff) makes him and his message an easy target for deniers who would rather bury their collective heads in the sand.
Have a nice day!
It is more of the fact that while he does cite science that he is not a scientist he in my opinion tries to act like he knows more than he does, this however does not change the fact the global warming is an issue though.
lets see. did we bring Algore into the GW fiasco or did he bring himself into it aligning himself with his GW guru J Hansen
Criticism of his hypocrisy is relevant to the political question of whether we should all be held accountable to rules when those who lobbied for and created the rules do not live according to them – particularly when they also profit by them. Al Gore uses more electricity than you and ten other people and then spends the money he generates speaking about global warming buying carbon credits from a firm he co-owns.
Mr. Gore was also for a long time the primary advocate for the theory man-made global warming. When he makes an argument, and it is torn apart by a skeptic, that is entirely relevant to the issue at hand. Indeed, the main reason Mr. Gore is no longer the primary advocate for global warming is that his arguments have been torn apart so many times that his followers threw him under the bus.
As for glacial retreat, it’s happened before. The Alpine glaciers are retreating as well – and revealing artefacts left behind during past warm periods that the IPCC now says didn’t happen – and that Dana now says were never believed to have happened.
he is an easy target and I really wish he hadn’t got a share of the Nobel peace prize when he did nothing about AGW when he was in power.
But ad hominem is easy. It also plays into American political binary thinking; Gore – liberal – bad – climate change – government – bad. There are some pretty pathological examples on display right here.
Most people never heard of the problem until the movie came out. They believe that Al Gore made it all up because he felt so bad being cheated out of winning the election.
It’s both ad hominum and red herring. Man made CO2 only has to reach 400ppm to get into the ‘tipping point’ range. That’s only 14ppm and a decade from now. The science on that is solid. Then what?
He’s just an easy target, and it’s a classic debate tactic. When you don’t have any substance behind your arguments, you have to resort to another strategy. Ad hominem is an easy one – attack the opponent instead of his argument. There are other such strategies which global warming deniers often use, the main one being stawman. Construct an argument which your opponent isn’t making but which is easy to disprove, pretend he’s making it, then disprove it.
Al Gore is an easy target because he’s a politician, so they can pretend global warming is political. He’s not a scientist, so they can pounce on him when he makes a minor error when discussing climate science. He travels a lot and lives in a large home, so they can criticize him and pretend that all global warming ‘believers’ are just hypocrites. They can point out how much money was made from his movie (even though his proceeds were all donated to a non-profit) and claim he’s just in it for the money.
These are all arguments to distract from the fact that global warming deniers don’t have any valid scientific arguments. So instead they engage in pathetic distraction tactics like ad hominem attacks on Al Gore.
<<he is an easy target and I really wish he hadn’t got a share of the Nobel peace prize when he did nothing about AGW when he was in power.>>
Gore was actually never president of the U.S. Bill Clinton, a former governor of Arkansas was president from January 1993 to January 2001. Afterwards George W. Bush , a former governor of Texas and son of an earlier president became president after the Supreme Court stopped the state of Florida from counting votes in Florida in the 2000 elections. This was in all the newspapers, and you can look it up in wikipedia.
Why do so many of the non-Deniers think they are being "fair" by being unfair to Gore? Are you auditioning for jobs at the NY Times? Do you think the Washington Post is "fair" by allowing George Will to write things they know are untrue?
That would be the case if he were not the poster child for the AGW scare-mongering tactics. It may also be the case if every freakin’ week some idiot didn’t come on here and say that AGW has to be true and site Gore’s pathetic excuse for a "science-based" movie as the rationale.
But speaking of ad homonim attacks, you AGWers have been infamous for said attacks, so if such attacks makes you look like an "idiot", then the AGW religion is looking really idiotic by now.
@Bob,
What truth are you speaking of? The "truth" of London under water, temperatures increasing by 7 degrees in the next 100 years, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, the end of the world as we know it? These are the "truths" that the scare-mongers have been passing off as science.
You say we are being overwhelmed with scientific data? If you mean that there is a lot of scientific data suggesting that the global temp has increased by 0.7 degrees in the last 100 year and that the seas are rising by 2 mm/year, then you are right and I would not deny it. If you think creating a new set of models to add to you already expansive set of models, is really "scientific data" then you are wrong. You have documentation of "climate change", but the climate has always changed and I see no analysis suggesting that rate of change is any different.
Bottom-line is that you do not and have never had the evidence to go on the scare-mongering campaigns that seem to be the AGWers bread and butter and you are certainly not trying to scare people with a 2mm per year sea level rise, nor a 0.7 degree increase in 100 years.
The standard claim of certainty has also been foolhardy as shown by the fact that in the AR5, the uncertainty will increase INCREASE, because of a better understanding. What does this mean of your first claims of certainty. When I said that the CIs were way to narrow, evidently I was correct. Though at the time of me saying that, I was called an idiot and arrogant for thinking I understand more than the scientists. I may not understand the climate as well as the scientists, but I KNOW CIs.
What you don’t understand is this. If you all would have made claims that were believable, used confidence intervals that were correct, presented yoru data correctly, avoided the gloom and doom, end of the world scenarios, and jsut focused on what we know, you would have had me sold. The fact that the AGW movement including many of the scientists involved, have not upheld good standard practices of scientists, has lead me to question everything you AGWers do.
The fact that a person that held great political power is a snake oil salesman and is the chief architect of this political fraud is relevant. They show that propaganda to children and that is offensive. You are the one bringing up the liar in chief.
Because he has become the poster boy of the global warming movement. He won a Peace Prize and an Oscar, but it’s true that most of the "facts" in that movie are fabricated.
He stands to make billions off the AGW scam, but it may not work out so good now that the whole thing has been exposed a giant fraud.