4.6. Deceptions, Manipulations and Frauds Intentional Deceptions Whenever you defend a just cause, there is no need to resort to distorted or exaggerated arguments to impress more people. In that respect, it is interesting to analyze how a High Court judge who ruled in the UK on whether climate change film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, could be shown in schools came to the conclusion that it contains nine scientific "errors". On October 10, 2007, Justice Michael Burton, ruled “that it was clear that the film was substantially founded upon scientific research and fact, albeit that the science had been used, in the hands of a "talented politician and communicator", to make a political statement and to support a political program”. The judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contained nine scientific errors 369 and thus must be accompanied by an explanation of those errors before being shown to school children. The judge said that showing the film without the explanations of error would be a violation of education laws. In fact, Monckton of Brenchley (2007) lists 35 errors that he attributes to the film, but just one intentional deception would be worse than many accidental mistakes. It is to be feared that one can find more than one such breach of confidence and among the various “errors” pointed to by Justice Michael Burton it may be useful to be back on some of them and it will be done later. Probably the most controversial part or the ruling by judge Justice Michael Burton is when he stated “that it was clear that the film was substantially founded upon scientific research and fact“ as the film is just a massive deception that does not stand any scientific examination. Let's first list nine scientific "errors" spotted by Justice Michael Burton and then we'll comment briefly on them: • • • • • • • • •
Sea level rise of up to 20 feet (7 meters) will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland; Low-lying islands in the Pacific Ocean are having to be evacuated because of the effects of global warming; The Gulf Stream would be shut down by global warming, causing sharp cooling in northwest Europe; There was an exact fit between graphs showing changes in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global temperatures over a period of 650,000 years; The disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania was due to global warming; The shrinkage of Lake Chad in Africa was caused by global warming => irrigation demands increased four-fold between 1983 and 1994, accounting for 50% of the additional decrease in the size of the lake; Hurricane Katrina was likewise caused by global warming; Polar bears were being found drowned after having to swim long distances to find the (melting) ice; Coral reefs were being bleached by the effects of global warming and other factors;
Let's review these one by one and see how they stand the slightest examination - for a more comprehensive critic of Al Gore's film and book see (Lewis, 2007): •
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The sea level rise is the classical scare monger game that has been played for decades, starting with Schneider (who had just converted from his impending ice-age) in the "The Palm Beach Post" edition of the 8th of January 1979, while working for the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder (Colorado) predicted that “man-caused global warming would thus melt polar ice and raise sea levels by many feet". Schneider predicted this as a possibility to happen before the end of this century (understand before 1999) and teamed up with Robert Chen of MIT to add «sea-level rise of 15 to 25-foot. The nation's coastline would change markedly”, and the same continued full steam after hurricane Harvey (2017) with Hansen (Wallace-Wells, 2017) and Mann contributing their own catastrophic forecasts and doubling down on scare tactics. So, it's been forty years that doom-sayers explain that we should already have been submerged by several meters of rising waters, the inconvenient truth is that so far, nothing significant happened as thoroughly explained in the corresponding section of this e-Book “Sea Level Changes”, p.160 ; The low lying islands will have to be evacuated in the Pacific! So far the only example available to pursue the active deception is the Carteret Islands (CI) which are Papua New Guinea territories located 86 km (53 mi) north-east of Bougainville in the South Pacific. The atoll appears as a coralline construction atop the rims of a hardly emerging old caldera (coral larvae attach to underwater rocks along the edge of a landmass) which does
369https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimmock_v_Secretary_of_State_for_Education_and_Skills
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