They're Blinding Us With Science
Back in 2007 Al Gore (and others) received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US Vice President Al Gore for their efforts to obtain and disseminate information about the climate challenge. In Gore's case, certainly, the award was grounded in his tireless campaign to put the climate crisis on the political agenda.
This was certainly in part for his movie An Inconvenient Truth, which predicted that global warming — we still called it global warming back then and not climate change — was going to have a whole lot of events, all of them bad, each more catastrophic than any of the others. Actually, it was a film based of Al Gore's slideshow, received two Oscars, and is available online for the low, low price of $3.99.
Because globally important movies of slideshows don't come cheap.
In the movie, Gore predicted the Arctic would be ice-free in 50 to 70 years. But later, in his Nobel Prize lecture, he mentioned “another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years” — in other words, about 2014.
Related: Sunday Supplement: Small Bucks for Rockets and Claude Cheaper Than Grad Students
Along with that was The Day After Tomorrow, in which Roland Emmerich predicted the effects of global warming would reverse North Atlantic circulation, leading to an instant ice age and worldwide chaos.
Related: Climategate: The Big Picture
It turned out that the real inconvenient truth was that, well, none of that happened.
Heller's tweet is overstated, and the dates were chosen — one might even say "cherry-picked" — but we can examine the actual data, satellite measurements starting in 1978, and find that 2007 was very nearly the minimum since 1978.
Since 2007, Arctic sea ice has in fact increased.
Similarly, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies posted a tweet (we called them tweets then) showing poor, trapped polar bears and predicting the Greenland ice cap was going to melt, leaving swimming polar bears and putting New York City under 23 feet of water.
That may have been good PR — NASA Goddard is federally funded after all — but crappy physics. I explain it in the article I linked, but the long and short of it was that it might melt the whole Greenland ice cap — but it would take 7,000 years to do it.
In any case, another inconvenient truth: Greenland's ice cap has increased.
This is press-release science — the new age of science (rhymes with "sew age") in which the goal is to produce political pressure and increased funding. Roger Pielke, Jr., put his finger on it in 2011, before he was run out of academia for heresy.
Climate science -- or at least some parts of it -- seems to have devolved into an effort to generate media coverage and talking points for blogs, at the expense of actually adding to our scientific knowledge of the climate system.
Related: Gov't Climate Propaganda Agency Caught Raking in Billions to Push Gov't Climate Propaganda
