N.b. Gore, press reporting inconvenient facts.

Cartoon: Scott Standis.

In the wake of the ‘Climategate’ scandal it would seem that the realistic thing for GW alarmists to do would be to pull their heads in and stick to the facts. The very last thing that you need at a time when your credibility is in tatters is for someone, especially a great guru of the movement to make wild, unfounded and irrational claims. However this is what Gore has done and been caught out again, this time in a speech to delegates of the COP15 summit:

Gore made statements that the North Pole had a 75% chance of being ice-free by 2014. Already under scrutiny from climate skeptics due to his work with scientists embroiled in the Climategate leak, it was discovered that the scientific data that Gore was referencing does not support his claims.

"It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," said Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the climatologist that Gore referenced in his Monday afternoon speech.

In his presentation, Gore said that "some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years. There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water – many of them all of their drinking water – from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice." …

It’s a bit of a problem when your source refutes what you are quoting him on, but in the past Gore has been able to rely completely on an alarmist press that has tended to be completely in his corner. Generally in the past they could be relied on to put the ‘public interest’ above any facts that they didn’t consider coincided with what they assumed that interest to be and refrain from reporting them.

In the wake of increasing public scepticism as to the validity of the claims that have been made over the years, and the realisation that many of the proponents were not actually living what they preached, this has slowly been turning around. Last year it is doubtful that Climategate would have made the news, the fact it did should have been taken as a warning but it seems there is no limit to arrogance.

The response still seems to be to rail against the publicising of these inconvenient truths, (to the climate frantics, that is) on the basis that it gives credibility to sceptics. It appears that these people still seem to expect an unchallenged free ride.