From an interview with Al Gore regarding global warming:
Q: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?
Gore: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.
So Gore admits that he has overhyped the danger from global warming, thus "playing on our fears" in the same way he and other Bush critics claim he did.
4 Comments:
That's not what he is saying at all. He's saying you have to make the appropriate presentation for the audience, and many people in the US won't pay attention to a crisis in the future, only a crisis in the now. Then they run around screaming, "Why didn't someone tell me?" So the future crisis must be presented in a way that clearly demonstrates that making changes now is the only way to avert it. Didn't you learn about "present value" in business school?
You could give the exact same defense for just about any prediction you make on any subject. We have to go to war in Iraq, if we don't and Saddam does bad stuff, people will run around screaming, "Why didn't someone stop him, they knew he was bad?" I fail to see how it justifies "an over-representation" of the facts.
"Even The New York Times bridles at this. After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change*, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists—not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls—charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.
"When you read the fine print of even the scientific reports that Gore likes to cite, you find the same thing. Gore foresees a 20-foot rise in sea level—240 inches. The IPCC panel report foresees a maximum of 23 inches. Gore says that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this.” Geologist Don Easterbrook says there have been shifts up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”
I haven't exactly verified the above, but, if true, there's no legit excuse for Gore saying the seas would rise 20' when scientists are all saying 2'. That's not present value, Courtney, that's Gore lying by PREYING ON OUR FEARS.
And none of it explains why the icecaps on Mars are melting. I doubt it's man made global warming.
Sorry, turns out Gore is talking 20' in two centuries if the current rate of global warming continues. And the next part Gore is referring to our civilization, a much shorter time span the entirety of our planet's history against which it is much more appropriate to judge climate change.
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