Environmental Talk

“Oops, I did it again…”

On a recent appearance on Larry King Live, Al Gore was asked by a caller, ” …what issues caused by climate change globally are likely to affect the United States security in the next 10 years?”

As usual, the former next President, didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Gore responded:

You know, even a one-meter increase, even a three-foot increase in sea level would cause tens of millions of climate refugees.

If Greenland were to break up and slip into the sea or West Antarctica, or half of either and half of both, it would be a 20-feet increase, and that would lead to more than 450 million climate refugees.

The direct impacts on the U.S. have already begun. Today, 49 percent of America is in conditions of drought or near drought. And we have had droughts in the past, but the odds of serious droughts increase when the average temperatures go up, as they have been going up.

We have fires in California, in Florida, in other states, unprecedented fire season last year, directly correlated with higher temperatures, which dry out the soils, dry out the vegetation.

We have a very serious threat of losing enough soil moisture in a hotter world that agriculture here in the United States would be greatly affected. Now, the list is too long to give you here, but look, these issues are more important that Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton, and they are not being talked about.

We agree with Gore that the issue of climate change is more important than Paris Hilton. What size popcorn I’m going to get when I go to the movies is more important than Paris Hilton.

Author Patrick Michaels, however, points out that there are at least three other factual problems with Gore’s answer:

FACT 1. There is not one shred of evidence in the refereed scientific literature speaking of a three-foot increase in sea level in ten years. The best estimates from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range from 0.8 to 1.7 inches.

FACT 2. There is no trend towards increasing drought area in the United States that is related to planetary warming. We have good data on drought area back to 1895. The correlation between the area of the U.S. under drought and planetary temperature is statistically ZERO.

FACT 3. As the mean planetary temperature has warmed since 1975, U.S. crop yields have increased significantly, just as they did during the period of cooling from 1945 through 1975, or during the warming from 1910 to 1945.

I so badly want to suggest that this story should be filed under “once a politician, always a politician” … but I won’t.

global warming, climate change, Al Gore, Larry King, Patrick Michaels, drought, famine, pestilence, Paris Hilton