Stolen e-mails embolden climate skeptics

At a critical time, the uproar over stolen e-mails suggesting scientists suppressed contrary views about climate change has emboldened skeptics — including congressional Republicans looking to scuttle President Barack Obama’s push for mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases.

The e-mail brouhaha dubbed “Climategate” by doubters comes as U.S. delegates to the international climate conference in Copenhagen are trying to convince the world the United States is determined to move aggressively to rein in heat-trapping pollution. To counter the delegates, a group of GOP lawmakers is going to Copenhagen to argue against mandatory greenhouse gas reductions.

The climate skeptics gained political momentum when former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said Obama should boycott the negotiations in Denmark and “not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices” — a clear reference to the purloined e-mails from computers belonging to scientists at a British climate research center.

Obama is going anyway.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most recognized U.S. voice on climate change, quickly rebutted Palin and accused the climate deniers in an interview with CNN of “taking things out of context and misrepresenting” what the e-mails actually said. On Thursday, more than 1,700 British scientists released a statement saying they continue to have “the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities.”

That hasn’t stopped Senate Republicans. More than two dozen sent a letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon Thursday demanding that he launch an independent inquiry into the e-mails. GOP lawmakers say they will loudly and often raise questions about what they consider a corruption of climate science at the Denmark conference, where delegates from 192 nations are trying to forge a political agreement.

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Al Gore rebuts Palin’s climate change claims

A former vice president and a former vice presidential nominee are engaged in a public battle over climate change, a tiff sparked by Sarah Palin’s op-ed in Wednesday’s Washington Post and furthered by Al Gore’s rebuttal on MSNBC.

In a piece titled “Copenhagen’s Political Science,” the former Alaska governor charged that “leading climate ‘experts’” have “destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.”

Gore bit back during an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell to air Wednesday afternoon. The former presidential candidate said “the deniers are persisting in an era of unreality. The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our eyes … what do they think is happening?”

Palin was referring to correspondence between some of the world’s leading climate scientists. The e-mails were recently stolen from Britain’s University of East Anglia and leaked on the Internet. Skeptics of man-made global warming say the e-mails prove that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about climate change.

Last week, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said the issue raised by the e-mails was serious and would be looked at in detail. Palin also took to Facebook to allege that concerns over global warming are “doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood.”

Gore said Wednesday that the scientific community has worked intensively on the issue for twenty years. “It’s a principle in physics,” he told Mitchell. “It’s like gravity, it exists.”

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Al Gore Addresses Green Building Community at Greenbuild

On November 11, former Vice President Al Gore delivered a keynote speech to builders, architects, contractors and other

Al Gore

professionals involved in the green building industry at Chase Field in Phoenix. The speech marked the kick off of the US Green Building Council’s (USBGC) three-day conference convening over 24,000 attendees. Gore praised leadership of the USGBC for bringing real change to the marketplace, and for being a leader in the change for a sustainable future.He also thanked high school and college students around the country who have changed their course of study to one that will help solve the climate crisis. At the same time, he issued a call to action directed toward each member of the audience to personally strive to get involved in changing the future of our environment.

 

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Al Gore in Newsweek: The Plan That Saved The Planet

Not too many years from now, a new generation will look back at us in this hour of choosing and ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, “What were you thinking? Didn’t you see the entire North Polar ice cap melting before your eyes? Did you not care?”

Or they will ask instead, “How did you find the moral courage to rise up and solve a crisis so many said was impossible to solve?”

We must choose which of these questions we want to answer, and we must give our answer now—not in words but in actions.

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