Summary of Gore’s errors, adapted from an article in the Guardian following a Judge’s assessment that Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth contained nine errors.
Gore: A study showed polar bears were being found that had drowned “swimming long distances to find the ice”.
Judge: “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm”.
Gore: Two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed “an exact fit”.
Judge: although scientists agreed there was a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”.
Gore: The drying up of Lake Chad was used as an example of global warming.
Judge: “It is apparently considered to be more likely to result from … population increase, over-grazing and regional climate variability”.
Gore: the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was expressly attributable to human-induced climate change.
Judge: “The consensus was that that could not be established”.
Gore: A sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”.
Judge: “This was ‘distinctly alarmist’ and it was common ground that if Greenland’s ice melted it would release this amount of water – ‘but only after, and over, millennia’”.
Gore: Low lying inhabited Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming”.
Judge: “There is no evidence of any evacuation occurring”.
Gore: Global warming is “shutting down the ocean conveyor” – the process by which the gulf stream is carried over the north Atlantic to western Europe.
Judge: “According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it was “very unlikely” that the conveyor would shut down in the future, though it might slow down”.
Gore: Ascribed Hurricane Katrina to global warming.
Judge: “There was ‘insufficient evidence to show that’”.
Evidence News 31 Oct 2007