Al Gore

The Inconvenient Truth About Al Gore And The Climate 'Experts'

http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-inconvenient-truth-about-al-gore-and-the-climate-experts/

Excerpt: "Sooner or later," Gore tweeted, "climate deniers in the GOP will have to confront their willful blindness to the climate crisis." But skeptics of climate alarmism have their eyes wide open and don't like what they see. Donald Trump won the popular vote among people 45 years and older. Many in these ranks have followed grass roots environmentalism since it began, following publication of Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring," in 1962. Over time they've learned that celebrated environmental experts make false and wildly exaggerated predictions. A prime example is Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, a longtime environmental icon and author of the 1968 book "The Population Bomb." "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," Ehrlich confidently predicted in a 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years." He assured readers of The Progressive in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off." In a 1969 essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe!" Ehrlich said "most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born." Undeterred, the celebrity doomsayer and his cohorts now offer a new theory, claiming in a July 2017 issue of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" that human civilization stands in peril from an ongoing mass extinction on Earth: "Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages (of vertebrates) amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This 'biological annihilation' underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction event." And so on. (In real Science, only hard facts, solid data, are used objectively to investigate the complexities of reality. In psuedoscience, people start off with concepts and conclusions, usually based on feelings and perceptions, and then try to use everything from actual data to carefully "sorted" data to myths, exagerration, invalid extrapolation, and just false information, to support the conclusion they started with. Sometimes this can be done so it sounds really convincing. Most people doing this are not actual, rigorous scientists, but some do have degrees in Science, and qualifications too in the subject at hand. Yet even advanced degrees in Science do not make individuals immune to their own biases and emotional drives. The messages in the "Climategate" e-mails provided shocking evidence of how totally biased and willing to manipulate data some degreed climatologists could be. Real science is the most powerful thing humanity has ever come up with to help make progress in understanding the universe, and to give us tools to work in that reality to give ourselves much better lives. But it's difficult at times for nonscientists to listen to various presentations that are supposed to be about science and figure out which are valid and which are not. The experience of seeing how often some kind of thinking has been proven wrong is the best tool people have to figure things out. --Del)