In yesterday’s Telegraph (UK) Al Gore has a lengthy article on climate change science and policy. In the piece Mr. Gore includes an egregious and unquestionable misrepresentation of the science of disasters and climate change. This is unfortunate, because it detracts from a compelling argument for action in the same piece.


Mr. Gore starts out, ironically enough, asserting the importance of peer-reviewed science. I call this ironic because the misrepresentation that follows (a) hasn’t been peer reviewed, and (b) the peer-reviewed literature contradicts the misrepresentation. Here is what Mr. Gore says about the peer reviewed literature:

[T]here is a reason why new scientific research is peer-reviewed and then published in journals such as Science, Nature, and the Geophysical Research Letters, rather than the broadsheets. The process is designed to ensure that trained scientists review the framing of the questions that are asked, the research and methodologies used to pursue the answers offered and even, in some cases, to monitor the funding of the laboratories — all in order to ensure that errors and biases are detected and corrected before reaching the public.

Shouldn’t this also apply to the claims that Mr. Gore makes, and not just his opponents? Here is the misrepresentation:

And with regards to some of the financial implications suggested by the Stern report, one need only look to the insurance industry for validation of the potential costs of global warming. On Wednesday, the reinsurance giant Munich Re reported, “driven by climate change, weather related disasters could cost as much as a trillion dollars in a single year by 2040″.

We discussed this particular misrepresentation in depth in a post last week and discussed the Stern report’s misrepresentation the week before in this post. As I have said on many occasions, I am neither surprised nor too concerned that a politician would stretch the facts to advance his political agenda. What concerns me is that many scientists have been complicit in advancing such mischaracterizations and remain selectively mute when they are made. In this manner, a large portion of the mainstream climate science community has taken on the unfortunate characteristics of politicians like Mr. Gore, deciding to uphold scientific standards only when politically convenient. This is one way how science becomes pathologically politicized.

Mr. Gore’s misrepresentation is unfortunate because he makes a compelling argument for why action on climate change makes sense based on short-term benefits, a point a made in congressional testimony (PDF) last summer. Here is Mr. Gore’s argument for the short-term benefits for action on climate change:

Some of the policies detailed in the [Stern] report include: increasing global public energy research and development funding, dramatically reducing waste through energy efficiency measures, expanding and linking emissions trading systems and carbon markets, multiplying programmes to reduce deforestation of natural areas such as Amazonia, and continuing to set aggressive domestic and global targets to reduce the pollution that causes global warming. None of these policy measures should cause alarm.

In fact, not only are they rational, but also they have substantial co-benefits, which include increased air quality, improved access to energy among the rural poor in developed countries, further independence from foreign sources of energy in volatile and unstable regions of the world, and, of course, the obvious opportunities in the new markets developing for low carbon technologies.

We need more good arguments like this and less misrepresentation.