PrintOctober 30, 2009
Gore Gone Wild: Predicts 220 Foot Sea Level Rise in 10 years (Important Update)
Important Update: [11/02/2009 14:30 EST]
As the original article on which we relied for Al Gore’s quotes proved to be incorrect, this post has been withdrawn.
Please see full correction at: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/correction_gore_did_not_predic.html
The scariest story told this Halloween week had nothing to do with ghosts, goblins, or zombies, though it was certainly dripping with huge gobs of Gore. In fact -- the most terrifying words screeched in the past seven days came from the master of environmental horror himself.
According to Arab Internet services company Maktoob.com, our favorite greenhouse gasbag spent Tuesday afternoon outlining the reasons why attendees of the Leaders in Dubai Business Forum must change their wicked gas-guzzling ways:
“The North Pole ice cap is 40 percent gone already and could be completely and totally gone in the winter months in the next 5 to 10 years.”
Such thaw, cautioned Gore, “could increase sea levels by 67 metres” and that “each one metre of sea level rise (SLR) is associated with 100 million climate refugees in the world.” That’s up a full 47 meters from the already horrifying predictions he’s made previously.
Incidentally, a climate refugee (or “environmentally induced migrant” as the UN would prefer we refer to them) is a person forced to move to a new country by global warming related environmental disasters. Where the whacky climate refugees per meter SLR figure came from is anybody’s guess.
Anyway, if my math is correct, the 2007 Nobel laureate effectively predicted that by 2020, the oceans could rise 220 feet and 6,700,000,000 people will be forced to wander the planet in search of a less soggy domicile.
And the journey won’t be easy, what with much of the planet underwater and its entire population -- which Gore’s 6.7 billion amounts to -- vying for whatever dry land remains available.
But before we pack our tents, inflatable rafts, and foreign-language dictionaries, let’s take a closer look at the green Stephen King’s figures.
Gore states that the North Pole ice cap is 40% gone. Is that Goracle-speak for the fact that according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2007 arctic sea ice extent was 40% below its 20-year mean? Perhaps. But if so, it seems he somehow forgot to check back recently, or he would have noticed that the ice began recovering in 2008 and is now at about 32% below that same average.
And had he been aware of these recent recoveries, would he have nonetheless forecasted that winter ice will be gone in 5-10 years – once again unveiling his utter buffoonery?
For starters, the controversy over arctic ice has been of whether or not it may vanish in summer months. Ice extent variance is a seasonally cyclical phenomenon, retreating in summer and recovering in winter.
Yes, there have been alarmist projections of ice-free summers occurring as early as 2020, but even those predictions were recently walked back in a report from UK’s Met office, which confirmed the ice to currently be in recovery and predicted that “the first ice-free summer [is] expected to occur between 2060 and 2080.”
More importantly, even should the highly alarmist Met’s highly unlikely 50 to 70 year predictions come true, melting sea ice has little or no effect on SLR as it displaces an approximately equal weight of sea water in either physical state.
Perchance the climate expert/horror master conflated the floating polar ice cap with the land-based Greenland ice sheet. Easy mistake -- the latter is way up north and the Met does predict it holds enough water to effect 7 meters of SLR should it disappear. Of course that’s only a fraction of Gore’s figure, but we’ll cut him some slack for rounding. Ah, but there’s another problem -- according to Met, even “if man-made emissions are not controlled,” Greenland melting “would take a few thousand years.”
Perhaps that explains why Gore stands alone even among climate-hysterics in his gargantuan sea level numbers.
His co-Nobel awardees at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) maintain a midrange prediction of 1.26 inches per decade. And even his fellow uber-alarmist James Hansen is only predicting 1.5 meters SLR by 2100!
Now, I must disclose that these quotes come from one source and one source only, as media coverage of Tuesday’s event appears to have been somewhat sparse. But Maktoob Business is a major player in the region, and the author, Shakir Husain, boasts rather impressive credentials. Add Gore’s world-renowned large on shock-value, short on facts style, and I’m inclined to believe his words to be as reported.
Language issues? Perhaps -- that’s why I’ve contacted Mr. Husain for further confirmation and will update this entry should I receive relevant advice.
Meanwhile, it appears that even faced with the reality that the public’s disbelief in his hilariously impossible doomsday scenarios has likely played a major role in cooling the fear of the threat of global warming, Al Gore nevertheless did what any waning master of horror would do – ratchet up the terror.
And that’s not likely to please more moderate anthropogenic global warming believers. Just today, Britain’s Timesonline reported that “senior scientists” are quite concerned that such exaggerations from clueless politicians and activists undermine the efforts of serious researchers to get the word out:
“Excessive statements about the decline of Arctic sea ice, severe weather events and the probability of extreme warming in the next century detract from the credibility of robust findings about climate change.”
So the incessant, insidious bloviating of the Gorebotic greenhouse gasbags might help impede drastic and disastrous action where no action at all is what’s desperately needed? Both in Washington and in Copenhagen?
Speak out, Al Gore. And Barbara Boxer. And John Kerry. And Henry Waxman. And Ban Ki-moon. The lot of you!
Speak out loudly. And speak out often.
One thing we can agree on – the future of the world as we know it may just depend on it.
