Debates on Al Gore over global warming claims have been raging among hissupporters and critics since the former vice president found his calling. But Gore has a way with words, which sometimes gets him in hot water. Skeptics have come forward to point out the mistakes in some of Gore’s more interesting assessments of the planet’s climate.
Gore once claimed that the recent intensity of storms, heat waves, and droughts has led to scientists adding a new category 6 to the current 1-to-5-hurricane scale. Gretchen Goldman of the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out that no such category was being considered by the National Hurricane Center.
The National Weather Service responded that there is no such thing as a category 6 hurricane and that a category 5 covers all sustained winds for hurricanes at 157 miles per hour and above.
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Roger Pielke Jr., a researcher with the University of Colorado, noted that there has not been an increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes in the U.S. “since at least 1900.” In fact, he added, the U.S. was going through its longest period without Category 3-plus hurricanes at the time of Gore’s remark.
Climate change skeptic
Anthony Watts said Gore used “reverse rotation airbrushed hurricanes” in his “Our Choice” book, the sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth,” to make weather patterns look worse for an Al Gore global warming effect.
In the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore claims that changes in carbon dioxide, or CO2, levels caused changes in temperature, but it was the opposite way around,
Friends of Science point out. The CO2 concentration actually lagged behind global warming by about 800 years. The oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere when temperatures increase.
The High Court in London found at least nine errors in Gore’s movie in 2007 after a court order was successfully sought to balance Gore’s views with dissenting information when the movie was sent to schools.
Among the findings was that the snow of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa was not melting as Gore had claimed, according to climate change skeptic
Lord Christopher Monckton. Some melting began 125 years ago, before Hemingway wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
Gore had also said that flooding in the low-lying areas of Pacific coral atolls had forced inhabitants to move to New Zealand. Monckton explained there has been no major flooding in the area except when some damage is caused by locals digging too deep for fresh water or dynamiting reefs.
Another Al Gore global warming claim states that Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 was caused by global warming. In fact, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been warning local officials for 30 years that the levees protecting the city from flooding could not withstand a Category 3 hurricane.
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