Why were the sceptics so conveniently slow?

Question

A british court has found '9 errors' in "An inconvenient truth"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm

Why were all those hordes of sceptics with thier pulsating brains and gas spewing, moneyed cronies so slow to spot these inacuracies? Why did it fall to a school governor in England and his unknown backers to expose this conspiracy to decieve the public?
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I don't think you're getting my drift; How long has the film been out? All this time down the line before someone has the neccesary level of brainpower to take it to a court.

What did they come away with? Not very much, they caught a politician doing what politicians do, and AGW remaining unscathed.

Answer 1

1. Courts are not scientific entities. This means nothing.

2. The court found disagreement with Al Gore's specific statements and their phrasing, not the science behind global warming. Read the story, if you've the brainpower to do so. These are very trivial disputes.

3. Recent studies have proven Al Gore to be correct in some of the statements that the court took issue with... just the other day his statement about polar bears and walruses being affected by Arctic melting was proven by a study that was articled on Yahoo! news. The judge couldn't find it... that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

4. The story is being spun as a victory for the person trying to ban the film from being shown in schools... which is odd because he essentially lost the case.

Really, the argument against global warming is pretty weak. Where are all the skeptics, you ask? Probably trying to find more straws to grasp.


Edit: Clint - I have looked into this. I've been looking into this for well over 15 years. If there's an argument to be made in either direction, I've read it.

Courts aren't scientific institutions. They aren't trained scientifically. They don't make decisions regarding scientific topics.

It's pretty simple, really. Courts decide matters of law.

If science comes into it, both sides of a debate can bring experts into the courtroom to debate the issues.

After that, it's all up to human prejudice and bias.

As such, a court never has been and never will be a scientific institution. Claiming that a court has any standing with regard to scientific analysis is hair-brained. It's like going to your local bar to get advice on pharma drugs... they both deal with substances, right? At least by your logic.

Beyond that, it really doesn't matter what you or this judge or anyone else thinks.

The data is very very clear. And has been clear for a long time.

Take your head out of the sand. (I could have said worse, but I'm being polite.)

Answer 2

There's more to it than the article you cite. Any one judge can do anything. While the criticisms have some truth to them, they don't even affect the basic accuracy of Gore's film, although he overreached on a few issues to be very dramatic. And oversimplified some things to be understandable.

And, as you say, mainstream global science is unaffected by the decision, since the criticized areas are handled properly there. The IPCC report is not significantly affected.

Ron C, Tomcat - The surface temperature data has been extensively validated, and shown to be unaffected by the location of the stations. Here are just two papers of many (and they're not limited to the urban heat island effect):

T. C. Peterson (2003). "Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found". Journal of Climate 16: 2941–2959

David E. Parker (2006). "A demonstration that large-scale warming is not urban". Journal of Climate 19: 2882–2895

How can you claim with a straight face that thousands of climatologists don't understand how to check data, and are risking their professional reputations on bad data. It's completely ridiculous. Do you think they don't know about the deniers criticisms? Do you think this hasn't been extensively investigated? This is just denier nonsense.

Answer 3

What makes you think they were slow to spot the inaccuracies? People spotted the inaccuracies immediately, but getting a case through the courts takes a long time.

Also, what is "convenient" about being slow? Your thinking here is confused. The skeptics would have much preferred that Al Gore's movie was recognized as inaccurate and incoherent before it won an Oscar.

Also, a great deal of the science is hotly disputed (pun intended). You cannot call disputed facts "inaccuracies" but they certainly are not "facts" either. For example, the IPCC claims the Earth warmed .74C in the last decade. But recent research shows that number may exaggerate the real warming by double. Anthony Watts is leading an effort to photograph all weather stations so scientists can learn which ones meet the requirements to be a good station. So far, half of the stations photographed are poorly sited. 95% of poorly sited stations have a warm bias. So the amount the Earth has warmed may be about half what the IPCC claims. To see pictures of the poorly sited stations (some of them are on top of parking lots!), go to http://surfacestations.org

Answer 4

I agree with the people who took this to court. This is a one sided argument with lots of error in it. If they were willing to teach this a pure truth then the might as well say the evolution is rubbish and god created everyone. Debate is healthy and aids learning, all of the facts should be taught and without being biased to one side.

I challenge anyone to find a respected scientist who states that Global Warming is man made. The science doesn't make sense, I not talking about climate change but the amount of effect man is having on it. I was force fed this rubbish at school and it wasn't until I studied it at university that most of the facts quoted were missing most of the important information or were simply wrong.

fitzix1 - 1: courts take information from both sides and look at it non biasedly with scientific specilists. There results would be better than some scientist reports.
2: If you had looked into this yourself you would have found that the court found that the scientific content was also incorrect.
3: And recent studies have shown him to be completely incorrect. The biggest of this was his CO2 chart which used incorrect data and also excluded oceanic lag time.
4:Wrong it was that the schools were showing an biased and one sided view point which missed important points and was shown to have large flaws. These now have to be addressed.

Bob - you'd think NASA could check there data on this topic to but it took an someone to point out that they had miscalculated there data before if was change. By the way it put the hotest days back to the 1920's and 30's.
Don't mention the IPCC report. 2,500 people of which only 10% were scientist half of which have requested to have there names removed.

Answer 5

An important note on this decision:

"The judge said nine statements in the film were not supported by mainstream scientific consensus."

The judge based his decision on the scientific consensus. There were a few minor inaccuracies in the film (such as Kilimanjaro, as we've discussed here), but the basic science in the film remains accurate. Moreover, I appreciate that the decision is based on the scientific consensus, which is based on the scientific evidence regarding global warming.

Answer 6

Every single inaccuracy in Al Gores film was debunked long before the film was produced, do you think Hollywood cares about the truth?

Just so you know, 50% of all surface temperature stations surveyed so far have severe biases from urbanization effects, which more than likely could be as much as 50% of the warming observed over the last century. So don't act so suprised when you find out in the near future, that the warming observed can no longer be called unprecidented.

So, there will be many more things debunked in Al-Gores film, but theories are difficult to dissprove, so it takes time.
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Answer 7

The skeptics have already debunked those errors the court made as has been noted.

Oh, you think the people denying global warming are skeptics? No, that's wrong, the people denying global warming are not skeptics.

Answer 8

The skeptics are slow since:

The Rio convention in 1992 already stated that greenhouse gases emissions needed to be slowed down...

As long as no specific action leading to political measures (and economical impacts) they didn't care.

So they obviously showed that the points they worry about are some economical interests, not science !

Answer 9

The true 'believers' in global warming have a vested interest in muzzling those that review their work objectively. "Believers" rather people just accept what they say without question.

We can see this with Algore's film and the inaccuracies in it, Mann's "Hockey Stick" graph which was proved inaccurate by a mining engineer and Hansen's climate graphs where the flawed data showed a spike in temps in the year 2000.

Much of the climate data is flawed, this is well known. Climatologist make an attempt to hide the flaws by insisting that only "other qualified climatologist" are able to interpret the data or so-called peer review. If a non climatologist finds flaws, he is quickly swift boated by the believers.

Answer 10

This is insulting to school governors. They're as smart as the next person. You don't have to be known to be smart.