On the eve of the announcement of this year’s winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, a British judge handed the global warming deniers a little more ammunition to continue their diehard shoot-out over what more and more people believe will be the greatest environmental crisis the human species has faced since it walked out of the African desert and began its inexorable spread across the planet.
The right-wing New York Sun provides a good example:
Judge Chides Gore on Eve of Nobel Word
While conceding that much of the film was "broadly accurate," High Court judge Michael Burton derided Mr. Gore's movie as "one-sided" and "distinctly alarmist." He sided with the parent who brought the case, who said the film contained "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda, and sentimental mush."
Justice Burton ruled that if the film is to be shown in British schools it should be accompanied by a warning that Mr. Gore's argument may be flawed and that teachers should always offer a contradictory point of view.
Not quite. Burton did not say the film should be accompanied by such a warning. Rather, while ruling that the previous "warning," – "Guidance Note" in school parlance – was inadequate, he said that the amended Guidance Note now available to teachers resolves the issue being litigated. You can read the whole ruling here.
I am satisfied that, with the Guidance Note, as amended, the Defendant is setting the film into a context in which it can be shown by teachers, and not so that the Defendant itself or the schools are promoting partisan views contained in the film, and is putting it into a context in which a balanced presentation of opposing views can and will be offered.
But this misinterpretation is hardly the major problem. Tim Lambert at Deltoid does his usual bang-up job of showing us what is:
Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific errors. Let me name some of the journalists who got it wrong: Sally Peck in the Daily Telegraph, Nico Hines in the Times, Mike Nizza in the New York Times, James McIntyre in the Independent, PA in Melbourne's Herald Sun, David Adam in the Guardian, Daniel Cressey in Nature, the BBC, Mary Jordan in the Washington Post, Marcus Baram for ABC News, and (of course) Matthew Warren in the Australian.
Let's look at what Burton really wrote (my emphasis):
Mr Downes produced a long schedule of such alleged errors or exaggerations and waxed lyrical in that regard. It was obviously helpful for me to look at the film with his critique in hand.
In the event I was persuaded that only some of them were sufficiently persuasive to be relevant for the purposes of his argument, and it was those matters - 9 in all - upon which I invited Mr Chamberlain to concentrate. It was essential to appreciate that the hearing before me did not relate to an analysis of the scientific questions, but to an assessment of whether the 'errors' in question, set out in the context of a political film, informed the argument on ss406 and 407. All these 9 'errors' that I now address are not put in the context of the evidence of Professor Carter and the Claimant's case, but by reference to the IPCC report and the evidence of Dr Stott.
If you noticed the quotation marks around 'error' then you are more observant than all of the journalists I listed above. Burton is not saying that there are errors, he is just referring to the things that Downes alleged were errors.
Lambert goes on to look at the justice’s take on each of these. And I urge readers to follow the link to Deltoid and read the entire piece. Here’s one example of where Lambert says the justice erred:
Now let's look at the nine points and see if Burton classified them correctly.
In scene 21 (the film is carved up for teaching purposes into 32 scenes), in one of the most graphic parts of the film Mr Gore says as follows:
"If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the Low Countries: absolutely devastation. The area around Beijing is home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta, and to the east Bangladesh, the area covered includes 50 million people. Think of the impact of a couple of hundred thousand refugees when they are displaced by an environmental event and then imagine the impact of a 100 million or more. Here is Manhattan. This is the World Trade Center memorial site. After the horrible events of 9/11 we said never again. This is what would happen to Manhattan. They can measure this precisely, just as scientists could predict precisely how much water would breach the levee in New Orleans."
This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr Gore's 'wake-up call'. It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of 7 metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.
The IPCC report does say that the ice sheets will melt if warming is sustained over millennia, but does not rule out it happening sooner:
Recent satellite and in situ observations of ice streams behind disintegrating ice shelves highlight some rapid reactions of ice sheet systems. This raises new concern about the overall stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the collapse of which would trigger another five to six metres of sea level rise. While these streams appear buttressed by the shelves in front of them, it is currently unknown whether a reduction or failure of this buttressing of relatively limited areas of the ice sheet could actually trigger a widespread discharge of many ice streams and hence a destabilisation of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Ice sheet models are only beginning to capture such small-scale dynamical processes that involve complicated interactions with the glacier bed and the ocean at the perimeter of the ice sheet. Therefore, no quantitative information is available from the current generation of ice sheet models as to the likelihood or timing of such an event.
Some of the traditional media, several right-wing blogs and presumably the Foxagandists have already failed to accurately reflect Justice Burton’s decision, and I suspect we’ll see a great deal more of this as the trashing of Al Gore (and the Norwegian Nobel Committee) gets really revved up. Infuriating, but completely in keeping with their long-standing efforts to keep their audiences as ill-informed as possible.