Al Gore on Climate Change

Reposted via Daniel Bird facebook.

An inconvenient peace prize

Reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bjrn_lomborg/2007/10/an_inconvenient_peace_prize.html

While the IPCC painstakingly establishes what the world should expect from climate change, Al Gore only tells us what to fear.

Björn Lomborg

October 12, 2007 3:36 PM

This year's Nobel peace prize justly rewards the thousands of scientists of the United Nations climate change panel (the IPCC). These scientists are engaged in excellent, painstaking work that establishes exactly what the world should expect from climate change.

The other award winner, former US vice-president Al Gore, has spent much more time telling us what to fear. While the IPCC's estimates and conclusions are grounded in careful study, Gore doesn't seem to be similarly restrained.

Gore told the world in his Academy Award-winning movie (recently labelled "one-sided" and containing "scientific errors" by a British judge) to expect 20-foot sea-level rises over this century. But his Nobel co-winners, the IPCC, conclude that sea levels will rise between only a half-foot and two feet over this century, with their best expectation being about one foot - similar to what the world experienced over the past 150 years.

Likewise, Gore agonises over the accelerated melting of ice in Greenland, but overlooks the IPCC's conclusion that, if sustained, the current rate of melting would add just three inches to the sea level rise by the end of the century. Gore also takes no notice of research showing that Greenland's temperatures were higher in 1941 than they are today.

Gore also frets over a predicted rise in heat-related deaths, without mentioning that rising temperatures will reduce the number of cold spells, which are a much bigger killer than heat. The best study shows that by 2050, heat will claim 400,000 more lives, but 1.8 million fewer will die because of cold. Indeed, global warming will actually save lives.

The IPCC has magnanimously declared that it would have been happy if Gore had received the Nobel peace prize alone. I am glad that he did not.

Unfortunately, Gore's prize will only intensify our focus on climate change to the detriment of other planetary challenges.

Gore concentrates above all else on his call for world leaders to cut CO2 emissions, yet other policies would do much more for the planet. Over the coming century, developing nations will be increasingly dependent on food imports from developed countries, not primarily as a result of global warming, but because of more people and less arable land in the developing world.

The number of hungry people depends much less on climate than on demographics and income. Extremely expensive cuts in carbon emissions could mean more malnourished people. If our goal is to fight malnutrition, policies like getting nutrients to those who need them are 5,000 times more effective at saving lives than spending billions of dollars cutting carbon emissions.

Likewise,

global warming will probably slightly increase malaria, but CO2 reductions will be far less effective at fighting this disease than mosquito nets and medication, which can cheaply save 850,000 lives every year. By contrast, the expensive Kyoto protocol will prevent just 1,400 deaths from malaria each year.

While we worry about the far-off effects of climate change, we do nothing to deal with issues facing the planet today. This year, malnutrition will kill almost 4 million people. Three million lives will be lost to HIV/Aids. Two and a half million people will die because of indoor and outdoor air pollution. A lack of micronutrients and clean drinking water will claim two million lives each.

With attention and money in scarce supply, we should first tackle the problems with the best solutions, thereby doing the most good throughout the century. Focusing on solving today's problems will leave communities strengthened, economies more vibrant, and infrastructures more robust. This will enable us to deal much better with future problems - including global warming - whereas committing to massive cuts in carbon emissions will leave future generations poorer and less able to adapt to challenges.

To be fair, Gore deserves some form of recognition for his resolute passion. However, the contrast between this year's Nobel winners could not be sharper. The IPCC engages in meticulous research where facts rule over everything else. Gore has a very different approach.

In cooperation with Project Syndicate, 2007.

Reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_freedland/2007/10/gore_and_peace.html

Gore and peace

The former vice-president deserves his shared Nobel prize, and there will be a feverish hope in the US that he will now enter the 2008 election race.

Jonathan Freedland

Well, that certainly puts Judge Michael Burton in his place. Earlier this week, the high court judge ruled that Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, contained nine scientific errors which had arisen in the context of "alarmism and exaggeration", and that therefore the film should only be shown in British schools with some balancing guidance notes. Somehow I suspect the blow of that court ruling will be softened by today's news that

Al Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has won the Nobel peace prize for his advocacy on the issue of global warming

- at the heart of which is, of course, An Inconvenient Truth.

When I saw the film more than a year ago, I wrote that it was a "model of political communication", somehow taking facts that you might have already known in your head and using them to reach your gut - which is where lasting political convictions reside. Many who had known abstractly about climate change before seeing Gore's movie admit they only truly cared about it, and saw its urgency, afterwards. And that turnaround has been repeated in countless countries among millions of people. For that remarkable achievement alone, Gore richly deserves his shared Nobel.

....

Gore's unhappiness with the life of a political candidate is real. He's also come to believe that even a US president is powerless to act on climate change unless public opinion has moved, that acting as a teacher and advocate can have a greater political impact. And in a way the Nobel jury have just proved him right. In this area, at least, a failed presidential candidate has achieved much, much more than the man who took the White House from him.

Gore and UN share Nobel peace prize

Reposted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/12/climatechange.internationalnews

• Mark Tran and Fred Attewill
• Guardian Unlimited
• Friday October 12 2007

Link to this video

The former US vice-president Al Gore and the UN climate change panel will share the 2007 Nobel peace prize for raising awareness of the risks of climate change, the Nobel committee announced today.

Chosen from a field of 181 candidates, Mr Gore and the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) will split the $1.5m (£750,000) prize.

The Norwegian committee praised Mr Gore for his strong commitment to the struggle against climate change.

Mr Gore responded by telling a press conference that climate change was the "most dangerous challenge we've ever faced".

"I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honour and recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency," Mr Gore said.

"It truly is a planetary emergency: we have to respond quickly. I'm going back to work right now. This is just the beginning."

Mr Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George Bush, ignored questions on whether he planned to run again for president.

The Norwegian committee said Mr Gore was "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted".

However, Mr Gore's award-winning film on the issue, An Inconvenient Truth, was this week criticised in a British high court case for allegedly containing inaccuracies.

Mr Gore said he would donate his share of the prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a group seeking to change public opinion in the US and around the world about the urgency of dealing with climate change.

"I am deeply honoured to receive the Nobel peace prize," Mr Gore said in an earlier statement.

"This award is even more meaningful because I have the honour of sharing it with the IPCC - the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis - a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years."

The Nobel committee said the IPCC had created an ever broader, informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.

"Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming," the panel said. "Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support."

The Nobel committee said that by awarding the prize to the IPCC and Mr Gore, it wanted to bring a sharper focus on the processes and decisions needed to protect the world's future climate.

"Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control," the panel warned.

The joint award to Mr Gore, who was the favourite among the contenders, is expected to galvanise his supporters, who are pushing him to run again for the White House, despite his loss eight years ago.

Since then, Mr Gore has appeared more relaxed, shedding an uptight image that did him no favours in contrast to Mr Bush, who projected an easygoing charm.

Should Mr Gore take the plunge, he can count on strong grassroots support, though his detractors believe that, in the glare of presidential politics, he will revert to his old, wooden self.

The "draft Gore" movement has been gaining momentum, accumulating about 127,000 signatures this year, 10,000 of them in the last week of September alone.

Mr Gore has consistently said he is not interested in running again for the White House, insisting he can be more effective in the fight against climate change outside mainstream politics.

But his denials of interest have done little to dampen the enthusiasm of supporters, who feel that as president he would have the credibility required to push through tough measures to slow climate change.

The other presidential candidates - Hillary Clinton, in particular - have so far disappointed environmental activists by shying away from promising aggressive action to deal with America's contribution to climate change.

Al Gore's Climate film allowed in UK schools

Reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7025119.stm

Climate film allowed in schools

Al Gore's film was sent to schools in England, Wales and Scotland

Ex-US vice president Al Gore's climate change documentary can be shown in England's secondary schools, a High Court judge has said.

An Inconvenient Truth promotes "partisan political views" but it is not unlawful to show to students, Mr Justice Burton said.

He made the comments after a hearing in which Kent parent Stewart Dimmock asked for the film to be banned.

The judge said teachers must follow updated guidance when showing the film.

The guidance, updated this week by the government at the urging of Mr Justice Burton, is designed to prevent the film being wrongly "promoted" to children.

Mr Dimmock, from Dover, argued the film was unfit for schools because it was politically partisan and contains serious scientific inaccuracies, as well as "sentimental mush".

Although the judge is to give his judgement next week after a four-day case, he indicated what his ruling would be for the benefit of schools.

Guidance

Children's Minister Kevin Brennan said: "The judge's decision is clear that schools can continue to use An Inconvenient Truth as part of their teaching on climate change in accordance with the amended guidance which will be available online tomorrow [3 October].

"Climate change is the greatest environmental challenge facing the world today. Schools have a special role to play in helping pupils understand its causes and in exploring if and how we should respond."

He said the updated guidance made "it clearer for teachers as to the stated IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] position on a number of scientific points raised in the film".

He added that the key arguments in the documentary - "that climate change is mainly caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases and will have serious adverse consequences" - are supported by scientific opinion.

Al Gore debates climate change with sceptics

March 21, 2007

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06:23:43 pm, Categories: Global Warming and Climate Change, Politics and Science, 1374 words

Gore Returns to Senate to Butt Heads With Climate Change Skeptics, Propose Real Solutions

Update: The full video of Gore's testimony before the Senate Environment Committee is now up on the homepage of CSPAN. (Currently it's the second link under "Recent Programs")

As soon as the Democrats took both houses of Congress, one thing became inevitable: Gore was coming back to the Senate, if only to address his all-consuming passion, climate change.

Today at 2:30 EST, Gore got 30 minutes to speak before a packed house. Immediately after, noted climate change skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who famously declared that global warming "is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public," got a chance to lay in to the former vice president, at one point even attempting to ambush him by embarrassing him into signing a pledge that he reduce his emissions energy use to that of a typical American household.

Debate

The gloves were off: it was political theater at its finest. Unfortunately, that meant that, save Mr. Gore and, in his better moments, Sen. Inhofe, few of those present addressed the science of climate change in a way that made it sound like they'd done their homework. To wit:

• When Senator Kit Bond (R-Missour) declared that sun spots were just as likely a cause of global warming as human emissions of CO2, I just about fell out of my chair. So did Mr. Gore.

• Sen. Inhofe declared that the Antarctic is gaining ice, not losing it. This makes a nice sound-bite (gee, if the coldest place on earth is growing, not shrinking, doesn't that mean the earth is cooling and not warming, or something?) until you realize that the climate models actually predict increased snowfall over antarctica, mitigating to some extent the sea-level rise that will come about as a result of global warming. It's also worth noting that this data is patchy, at best, and only goes back a few decades.

• Inhofe also whipped out a poster with "over a thousand names" on it of scientists who don't agree with the consensus on global warming. This was a nice touch, but Gore responded appropriately: the IPCC just declared the evidence for anthropogenic climate change to be unequivocal.
  
• the IPCC say "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global
  average sea level" (page 5)
• Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. (page 10) (Summary for Policymakers pdf)
  
• The National Academies of Science of the 16 most developed countries all concurr. In other words, for every name on that poster, there are a dozen, maybe a hundred scientists, maybe more, who don't dispute the basics of anthropogenic climate change. (It was also nice to hear Gore cite the September 2006 single-topic special issue of Scientific American on the future of energy, even if it was only to note that in it the editor in chief declared that the debate on anthropogenic global warming is over.)

  To me, Inhofe's poster o' climate change skeptics is the equivalent of trotting out a bus full of young-earth creationists--sure, there are people on this Earth who think that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, but that doesn't make it so, nor does it mean that there is any real debate about whether or not our planet is 6,000 years old.

To his credit, Inhofe did bring up one point where Gore may have exaggerated in his film: the link between global warming and an increased number of hurricanes. Certainly scientists believe a warmer earth will cause more intense hurricanes. But more hurricanes overall? The jury's still out. Chris Mooney, who is about to come out with a book on just this subject, has more at his blog The Intersection.)

• IPCC say "it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of
  tropical SSTs. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones. (page 16) (Summary for Policymakers pdf)

Solutions

Some folks may still think this is a political issue, but the many Republican Senators on the Senate Environment committee who were more interested in talking about solutions than debating the science would disagree with those folks. It was gratifying to finally see this becoming a bipartisan issue.

Here is Gore's 9-point plan for dealing with climate change, starting today, directly from his speech:

1) I think we ought to have an immediate freeze on co2 reductions and start from there.

2) We should use the tax code. What I'm about to propose I know is is very much outside the range of what is now politically feasible.

I think we ought to cut taxes on employment and make up the difference with pollution taxes - principally CO2 taxes. Some countries are talking about it seriously.

In the developed world our big disadvantage is that these developed countries have access to tech and container shipping. We don't want to lower our wages - but we don't want to pile on top of those wages these taxes.

We ought to use some of the revenue [from carbon taxes] to help the poor with the adjustments that are coming forward.

3) I'm in favor of cap and trade and I supported Kyoto. but I understand the realities of the situation.

I think the new president should take office at a time when our country has a commitment to defacto compliance with Kyoto. And I think we should move the start of the new treaty period from 2012 to 2010. We need a tougher treaty that starts in 2010. And we need to find a creative way to get China and india involved sooner rather than later.

That's important not least of which because China's emissions will exceed ours in the next couple of years.

We need to ratify a cap and trade system so the market will work for us rather than against us.

4) We should have a moratorium on new coal plants that are not fixed with carbon capture and sequestration technology.

5) I think our congress should fix a date beyond which incandescent lightbulbs are banned. [aside: Australia is about to do this.]...

It's like wal-mart. It's not taking on the climate crisis simply out of the goodness of their heart. They care about it but they're making money at it.

6) The creative power of the information revolution was unlocked by the Internet.

We ought to have [an analogous] electro-net and we ought to encourage widely distributed power generation. We ought to take off the caps and let individuals sell back as much as they want on the grid.

7) I think we ought to raise the CAFE standards. Don't single out autos, but as part of it.

8) Pass a carbon-neutral mortgage association. Here's why: buyers of new homes and buyers and sellers all focus on purchase prices. But the expenditures that go into more insulation and window treatment and those that don't pay back immediately but pay back over 2-3 years, those don't get counted as savings. Put those in a separate instrument - then have a Connie May [like the government's Fannie Mae, which handles mortgages] which can create a separate instrument. So that people can save and reduce co2 at the same time.

9) Require corporate disclosure of carbon emissions. Investors have a right to know about material risks that could affect the value of their stocks in the future.

reposted from: sciam
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments