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Cool It! - Answer to Gore's Hysterical "Inconvenient Truth


jbg

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A new movie, named Cool It, based on the work of Bjorn Lomborg is coming out in September. Lomborg, though politically a left-winger, is properly skeptical of many of the unfounded and extreme contentions of the climate change alarmists. This movie should counteract some of the extreme arguments raised by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth and which he refused to debate (link). In fact, Lomborg was the person whom Gore agreed to debate while he was in Copenhagen. Gore cravenly backed out of the debate.1

Excerpts about the upcoming movie, from yesterday's New York Times (link) below:

January 23, 2010

Filmmaker Seeks to Temper the Message of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — At the Sundance Film Festival four years ago, the global-warming debate took center stage with the premiere of an alarming work, the director Davis Guggenheim’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This year Ondi Timoner, a judge in the festival’s United States documentaries competition — in which Mr. Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman,” about the failures of public education, is an entry — is taking a break from a directing project of her own. Titled “Cool It,” Ms. Timoner’s partly completed film, based on the work of the environmental writer Bjorn Lomborg, aims to quiet the global-warming alarm bells that Mr. Guggenheim and his narrator, Al Gore, set ringing.

****************

Ms. Timoner, about to leave Los Angeles for Park City, Utah, where the Sundance festival takes place, said she was a fan of Mr. Guggenheim’s work, and looked forward to his new film. “I hear it’s wonderful,” she said.

“Cool It,” Ms. Timoner said, was intended not so much to correct “An Inconvenient Truth,” which raises the specter of devastation caused by climate change, as to temper its message with an appeal for practical solutions. Mr. Guggenheim’s climate film left in its wake “a certain amount of hysteria that is not realistic,” Ms. Timoner said.

****************

After encountering Mr. Lomborg at a Los Angeles lecture in 2008, Mr. Botwick persuaded Mr. Winter to join him in producing a documentary that would advance that environmental writer’s message.

Mr. Lomborg has opposed demands for what he calls devastatingly expensive reductions in carbon emissions. He has also advocated an array of engineering feats and technological fixes to hedge against problems like rising sea levels in the short haul, and to make green energy an economically attractive alternative in the long run.

Interviewing children in the slums of Kenya, Mr. Lomborg said he found that an almost universal dream among them was to own an automobile.

“They’re not going to let go of that dream,” Mr. Lomborg said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “We have to allow them good lives.”

Ms. Timoner was not an obvious choice for a project that wades into the climate change debate. Her previous works are noted more for their intimacy than for their sweep. “We Live in Public,” for instance, chronicled an attempt by the Internet pioneer Josh Harris to live under 24-hour surveillance.

And by her own description, Ms. Timoner is a liberal Democrat who worked as a page for former Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and at 16 was happily photographed with Mr. Gore, then a Democratic senator from Tennessee.

Still, Ms. Timoner said, an initial four-hour conversation with Mr. Lomborg left her convinced that Mr. Gore’s bleak narrative in Mr. Guggenheim’s documentary had overstated the immediacy of the global-warming threat, without proposing practical solutions.

“If he were absolutely correct, we’d be frying on the sidewalk by now,” she said.

(snip)

1Note, I placed this thread under "Relgion" based upon an earlier climate change discussion (link).

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Mankind is out of the loop. Out of the natural loop never to return. Natural existance is dependant on a cyclical system..we can not seem to find the great circle that connects human waste of all kinds to human sustainance... we poison our own poop making it useless...was a time when taking a human crap was benefical - now even our crap, human and industrial is adulterated.

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I read his book The Skeptical Environmentalist years ago. Not much to say, other than I take everything from both sides with a grain of salt.
Perhaps you should look again. Many of the errors in the IPCC report that are now being publicized deal with the alleged effects of climate change. The revelation of these gross exagerrations make the Lomborg's 'its cheaper to deal with climate change later' argument much more compelling. Edited by Riverwind
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In nature the term waste does not mean something that is lost for ever. Waste is meant to re-generate more life. The problem we have is that waste is held in a cloud of dark loathing and is best forgotten about..we have to look the turd straight in the face and deal with it...The whole world is like a bunch of jerks with a flock of huge dogs...that they never clean up after...and when they do they take the waste out of natural circulation or they adulterate it with poisons making it unusable..waste is suppose to circulate not be stored indiscriminately for eternity..waste becomes food eventually..in time we will run out of food because we ran out of useable shit...so let them eat cake in the mean time...

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Perhaps you should look again. Many of the errors in the IPCC report that are now being publicized deal with the alleged effects of climate change. The revelation of these gross exagerrations make the Lomborg's 'its cheaper to deal with climate change later' argument much more compelling.

Such as "Glacier-gate" and the threats against skeptics?

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Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal broke the law

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

TOL

One wonders, if global warming research is so pure, and completely on the up and up, why did these so-called scientists do their best Richard Nixon impersonation? I think we all know the answer to that one.

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Not much to say, other than I take everything from both sides with a grain of salt.

Amen brother. There's a lot of crap being spread around, by both sides of the debate. It's sickening! The worst is, it makes it damn hard for the non-scientist to try and understand this problem. Even fervent research by the average joe on this issue is frustrating and confusing.

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One wonders, if global warming research is so pure, and completely on the up and up, why did these so-called scientists do their best Richard Nixon impersonation? I think we all know the answer to that one.
Speaking as an American, Richard Nixon is a great analogy. There is a lot of big money in this "climate change" crap fraud. Edited by jbg
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It is sometimes useful to review past events dealing with the environment when dealing with the credibility of the global warming deniers.

Event one - DDT indiscriminately kills wildlife and poisons the environment - Denied by the pesticide companies.

Event two - Automobile exhaust causes smog - Denied by the auto industry and the oil companies.

Event three – Burning coal caused the poisonous smogs in London – denied by the coal industry.

Event four – Burning coal cause acid rain – denied by the coal industry.

Event five – chlorofluorocarbons destroy the ozone layer – denied by the chemical and refrigeration industry.

Event six – over cutting of trees destroys the watershed and causes flooding – denied by the forestry industry.

Event seven – greenhouse gases cause global warming – is there a pattern here?

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Event seven – greenhouse gases cause global warming – is there a pattern here?
The pattern I see here is environmentalists misrepresenting science in order to lobby for policy changes they would like to see happen anyways. The science is the excuse - not the reason.

To illustrate: almost no one questions whether 'greenhouse gases cause global warming'. What people do question is whether global warming is actually a problem that needs solving and if it does need solving people ask whether it is technically possible to do so. By trying to characterize the debate as a one about whether 'greenhouse gases cause global warming' you create a strawman.

I don't have the time to go back a research all of your other examples but it is reasonable to assume you completely misrepresent the debate in each of them as well.

What environmentalist forget is these debates are a waste of time without a cost/benefit analysis. No government will act on environmental issues unless social costs of action are less the social costs of not acting. Perhaps the best example is over population. There is no doubt that over population is a huge problem and the science could be used to justify some pretty abhorent policies in order to control human population. However, governments will not do that because of the social costs of such policies - even if we will be all worse off in the long run.

The same thing is true of carbon control. The social costs of the controlling carbon far exceed any likely benefit.

Edited by Riverwind
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Are there other examples of environmentalists doing this - aside from the greenhouse has question?
DDT. Environmentalists have long insisted that the chemical be banned completely despite its usefulness as a disease control. People who opposed the outright ban usually did not have a problem with some restrictions on its usage since overuse would reduce its effectiveness for disease control yet that does not stop environmentalists from labelling them 'people out to poison the planet'. From wikipedia:
According to Amir Attaran and Roger Bate, many environmental groups fought against the public health exception of DDT in the 2001 Stockholm Convention, over the objections of third world governments and many malaria researchers. Attaran strongly objected to an outright ban, writing, "Environmentalists in rich, developed countries gain nothing from DDT, and thus small risks felt at home loom larger than health benefits for the poor tropics. More than 200 environmental groups, including Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the World Wildlife Fund, actively condemn DDT..."
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DDT. Environmentalists have long insisted that the chemical be banned completely despite its usefulness as a disease control. People who opposed the outright ban usually did not have a problem with some restrictions on its usage since overuse would reduce its effectiveness for disease control yet that does not stop environmentalists from labelling them 'people out to poison the planet'. From wikipedia:

Excellent find. I remember DDT as being perhaps the first environmental issue. It was even mentioned in Joni Mitchell's seminal song "Big Yellow Taxi".

Maybe this would make a good topic for another thread ?

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I don't have the time to go back a research all of your other examples but it is reasonable to assume you completely misrepresent the debate in each of them as well.

There was no misrepresentation of the debate in any of the previous events. In each of the events mentioned the immediate reaction of the industrial establishment and the politicians they controlled was to deny the event. I could have used more examples, such as the reaction of the tobacco industry and its quack scientists to refute the health hazards of smoking. It is quite obvious that so called experts are being hired by the oil industry and other polluters to minimalize the dangers of global warming so that they can continue with business as usual. After all, it is much cheaper to bad mouth your critics than to actually do anything about it.

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There was no misrepresentation of the debate in any of the previous events.
I just posted information about how you misrepresented the debate over DDT as well. I admit I am not that interested in digging around to see if every one of them misrepresents the debate, however, I think it safe to assume that you have not done much research of your own and it is unlikely that you understand the subtleties of the debate in each case.
I could have used more examples, such as the reaction of the tobacco industry and its quack scientists to refute the health hazards of smoking.
Here is another example of you misrepresenting the debate. When talking about the tobacco industry there are two different debates: one over direct harms to smokers and one over second hand smoke.

In first debate the tobacco industry was facing lawsuits and it was entitled to defend itself - even if that meant paying scientists to present a more favourable view of the science. You may dislike such tactics but they are perfectly legitimate in our adversarial court system. Even the likes of Paul Bernardo is entitled to present a defence - even if it is pure fabrication.

In the debate over second hand smoke there was little evidence that second hand smoke was at risk at the time it was being debated (there may be more now - I have not looked). The smoking bans could not be justified on the basis of science. A few brave souls tried to point that out and got pilloried for it by people that wanted the policy change and did not really care about the science.

BTW: I am favour of the smoking bans but see no need to abuse science in order to justify it.

It is quite obvious that so called experts are being hired by the oil industry and other polluters to minimize the dangers of global warming
There are many so called experts hired by Greenpeace, WWF, the insurance companies and wannabe carbon traders. These experts grossly exaggerate the potential harms of global warming in order to line their own pockets. In fact, one of these carpetbaggers masquerading as a climate expert was the source of the false melting Himalayan glaciers claim that made it in to the IPCC report. That false claim brought a lot of money into the organization that he worked for.

So my question becomes: why are you ranting about mythical oil company funded experts when there is a real evidence of harmful deceit coming from pro-AGW experts?

Edited by Riverwind
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