Gore: Climate Change Real, Mistakes Were Made

A recent spate of embarrassing details of climate change research have climate change deniers giddy with the possibilities, characterizing the entire field of study as a "hoax." Hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia seem to imply that researchers there never read Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and manipulated the look of their data in a chart. Anecdotal evidence about some alpine glacier melt snuck into an IPCC report. But Al Gore, Nobel-winning PowerPoint presenter, is firing back.

"I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion," he wrote in a February 27 New York Times op-ed piece. "But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Gore underscores the global part of global warming as well, noting that even though it was cold in January in much of the U.S., it was the second-warmest January on record worldwide. Warm Januaries make for wet Februaries, as moisture evaporates from the oceans. In the winter, wet means snow. Guess what happened last month?

The remainder of Gore's article is devoted to other aspects of climate change we all wish would just go away, like actual glacier melt, stronger storms, drought, flooding, and mass extinctions. But wishing does not make it so. That's why we're watching the new energy bill like an endangered hawk.

Stay tuned.