The following is from a press release issued last week by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project (backup link here):
During the 24 Hours of Reality event, people all around the globe living with the impacts of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate. [bold added]I guess all the well-intentioned people associated with that brand new campaign missed the blog post by environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. in February that declared:
What seems obvious is sometime just wrong. This of course is why we actually do research…Connecting the dots is fun, but it is not science. [bold added]Pielke thinks climate change is a concern. He thinks we should strive to decarbonize our energy supply. But he is a person of integrity. And since there’s currently no evidence to support the simple-minded linking of natural disasters to CO2 emissions he says so.
In 2006 Pielke helped organize an international workshop on climate change and disasters such as floods and storms. Twenty-four papers were presented at the workshop, spanning a range of analyses and opinions. In the end, after two days of discussion and debate, the participants jointly agreed to a series of consensus statements.
According to these experts, there is currently no evidence that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions are making storms – or floods – worse. Moreover, they think it’s unlikely such evidence will become available in “the near future.”
So why, in the name of heaven, is Al Gore now spending time and money on a campaign that claims the exact opposite?
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