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Gore derangement syndrome

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Byron
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« on: October 15, 2007, 08:50:03 pm »

Gore derangement syndrome
By Paul Krugman Published: October 15, 2007

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Gore's name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance." You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change - therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President George W. Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job - to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for - the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For conservatives, it's deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said FDR. "We know now that it is bad economics." These words apply perfectly to climate change. It's in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. "cap and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet - and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.

Everything I've just said should be uncontroversial - but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with tax cuts or bombs - well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of - who else? - George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Gore: In his case the smear campaign has failed. He's taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/15/opinion/edkrugman.php
« Last Edit: October 15, 2007, 08:50:48 pm by Byron » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: October 16, 2007, 10:11:02 am »





                                         Lie, lie, lie about citizen Gore 





By joan reports
10/13/2007 12:13:23 AM EST

You're hearing the award hoopla, no doubt.  But have you ever heard of another event covered, filmed, or reported on a news show, to tell you the time Gore flew out to New Orleans to evacuate hospital patients in New Orleans the week the hurricane hit the city?

If you didn't -- and chances are you haven't -- I call it a sizable lie of omission by your news suppliers.

Former vice-Prez Al Gore chartered a plane in Sept. 2005 and flew aboard for 2 roundtrips to New Orleans to medEvac 100s of patients from Charity Hospital and bring them to Tennessee.  The VP declined interviews while he was shuttling the evacuees that Saturday September 3 and for a 2nd return flight he made the next day, but the doctors who flew with him talked about the experience.

Gore had to work around a sequential blockade by FEMA, which naturally denied his team permissions, repeatedly.





KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP)- Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son.

...  [Gore] refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew last Saturday and Sunday. . . .



More below and a pix


Note, this article is a reprise of one I've posted before.





AP reported the rescue flights on a Friday evening after that day's primetime news cycle.  No broadcaster ever reported a news segment on the rescue.


      "Gore responded immediately . . ."


On [Thurs] Sept. 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, [Greg] Simon learned that Dr. David Kline ... was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.




The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute - food and water running out, no power, 4 feet of water surrounding the hospital and ... corpses outside," Simon wrote.

Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights, although Larry Flax, founder of California Pizza Kitchens, later pledged to pay for one of them.

The skinny on Al Gore's coordination of the 2-day airlift:

At TPM Cafe, Greg Simon, the pres of FasterCures, recounted the determined (and agonizing) logistical coordination that resulted, finally, in the 2 airlifts of flood victims and patients from Louisiana to Tennessee. (If you have time, you should click over and read the fuller story yourself.) Here's my take on it.

Gore flew from Tenn. to Dallas (to pick up the chartered plane), to La. to Tenn. - and then did the whole thing again the next day.  The idea was hatched Thursday night, and the advocates for the mission, including Simon, Gore and staff butted heads with the bureacrats for the next 2 days through mid-day Saturday.

At every turn, FEMA and military officials tried to stop these 2 flights.

The 1st flight out on Saturday was mostly patients in need of supervised care, including dialysis and insulin, and the second one on Sunday had more evacuees and fewer patients.

After landing slots were denied numerous times during the planning, the one person in Washington who would grant the 2 landing slots ended up being the single Democratic member of Bush's cabinet, Norm Mineta.  That took a personal call from Gore to Mineta to override the instructions from below to withhold landing slots.

An amazing read at TPM Cafe (link above).

The first flight to Knoxville brought about 100 patients and 40 non-patients.  The second flight on Sunday transported 130 evacuees to Chatanooga.

More info is also found in local coverage from Tennessee or at alternate link with the photo, originally from the News-Sentinel of Knoxville, Tenn (orig link expired).

     Haven from fury Mercy Flight Brings Evacuees to ET (=East Tennessee)


     Gore accompanies about 140 arrivals from New Orleans but declines to take credit

   "Gore chose not to speak to the assembled media, but he was seen in a black T-shirt and jeans moving rapidly from one side of the plane to the other assisting with the off-loading operation.

"Participating in the operation were the Knoxville Fire Department, the Blount County Rescue Squad and the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. Cruisers from the Tennessee Highway Patrol escorted the buses to hospitals.

"Additional medical personnel within the regional emergency system also were on standby.

"Units at the airports included at least 10 ambulances, a phalanx of buses, fire trucks and other equipment."


More about the arrival of the first plane bringing evacuees on Saturday - from WATE Channel 6 News of Knoxville -

-read down to the 5th paragraph-


Doctors say most diabetes patients haven't had insulin or a shower in days.
"Their condition is, they are speaking and able to move," said Dr. Anderson Spicker, who was asked to fly on the plane by former Vice President Al Gore.

Dr. Spicker says the refugees were relieved to make it to Tennessee. "When we touched down, and I was in the middle of all the folks on the plane in the aisle, the guy next to me said, 'You know, I haven't felt safe in 10 days. I feel safe."


http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2007/10/12/17625/948
The media never quite picked up on this.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2007, 10:16:21 am by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2007, 10:24:13 am »








Al Gore leads Charity Hospital airlift

         
                                                THE FASTERCURES AIRLIFT FROM NEW ORLEANS





Greg Simon
President
FasterCures

On September 3<sup>rd</sup&gt and 4<sup>th</sup&gt, FasterCures worked with a small dedicated group of people to airlift approximately 270 medical patients and evacuees from the New Orleans airport to hospitals and shelters in Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee.  This is the story of how it happened.

On Thursday, September 1<sup>st</sup&gt, my friend Jill Chozen of San Francisco called to ask if I could put someone in touch with Al Gore.  Dr. David Kline, the father in law of Jill’s friend Denise Kline, was stranded in Charity hospital in New Orleans.  The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute – food and water running out, no power, four feet of water surrounding the hospital and alligators eating corpses outside.  David is a neurosurgeon and needed to take his patients out of the hospital as soon as possible.  David asked Denise to find Al Gore for help because David knew Gore from operating on Gore’s son after a life threatening auto accident nearly 16 years ago. 

I emailed Gore with Denise Kline’s number after speaking to Jill and got an answer immediately.  Gore had phoned David in the hospital several times and ascertained that he was now on the way to an Apache Helicopter landing site with his patients.  Things were looking up.

The next day, Friday September 2<sup>nd</sup&gt, I heard an NPR story that things were getting worse at Charity hospital – they were actually taking in more patients because the other nearby hospital –Tulane—was closed.  When I arrived at work, I knew what we had to do –we had to evacuate medical patients from Charity to safety.

My first idea was to find helicopters, trucks, planes and a hospital.  I called a friend at FedEx but their planes are not good for carrying people.  I called my friend Steve Davison who charters planes for a living – he felt he could help.  I called Skila Harris, former Chief of Staff to Tipper Gore and a director of TVA.  TVA had trucks going to New Orleans with water that might be good for evacuating the patients on their return trips.  I emailed Gore for ideas, he suggested St. Jude’s in Memphis as a hospital to receive the patients. 

Meanwhile, Catherine Berger at FasterCures had contacted Charity Hospital and was told that most of the patients had now been evacuated to the airport field hospital but were still in dire straits.  Skila reported that the Coast Guard had helicopters that could help but need coordinates for landing.  She also reported that the University of Tennessee hospital system might be willing to take the patients under the supervision of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. 

Steve called back.  He had found one, possibly two planes.  It would cost $50,000 per flight.  FasterCures would have to be prepared to sign contracts that day.  I called my home office and got permission to do that.  I emailed Gore and asked for his help in raising the money.  He committed to paying for the planes and urged us to move forward.  He also offered to bring two doctors, his cousin Col. Dar LaFon, USAF Ret’d, who served in Somalia and ran the military hospital in Baghdad after the invasion.   He was board certified in Altitude Physiology and Internal Medicine.  He also brought a Doctor from Vanderbilt, Dr. Anderson Spickard.

At this point Catherine Berger pulled up a story from the DOD saying they had two medical teams evacuating people from the hospitals and the airport and that the ship COMFORT was sailing to New Orleans from Baltimore.  That did not sound like it was going to help that many people for at least another day or two.  We carried on.  (As it happens, the COMFORT never reached New Orleans). 

Skila confirmed that TEMA would find hospitals for the patients.  And then things got complicated.  TEMA required a FEMA “Mission Assignment” that would follow the patients and allow the funding for those patients to follow them into whatever hospital they ended up in.  Skila contacted FEMA and people with the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) who told her we could not get a  mission assignment because it is a “closed loop “ system only for the military and private help was not allowed or wanted.  (The NDMS system is the same system DOD uses for distributing soldiers wounded in Iraq to U.S. hospitals.)
We were at an impasse.

I called Gore and explained the situation.  He called Gov. Bredesen of Tennessee who put us in touch with the Tennessee FEMA people.  After a brief interval, Jim Bassham and Eddie Boatwright of the Tennessee FEMA office reported back that all was clear and the TEMA people could carry out the relocation in Tennessee.

Meanwhile, back at my day job at FasterCures, Larry Flax, founder of California Pizza Kitchens, called me to discuss his involvement with us.  After I explained what we were doing that day, he pledged to pay for one plane with money CPK had raised for New Orleans.  Also, Martin Craig called from Chicago to report on his recent successful prostate cancer surgery.  He agreed to locate hospitals in Chicago who would take patients.

We were now desperate to find a contact on the ground at the New Orleans airport to help triage ambulatory medical patients into these planes.  FEMA in Washington was non responsive.  We spoke to the aide to one of the deputies at FEMA and was told they did not need or want our help since the hospital evacuation was going fine.  We looked at the reports from CNN about the conditions at the field hospital at the airport and discounted that opinion immediately. 

Around 5 pm, we called Howard Zucker, Deputy Assistant Secretary of HHS.  He put us in touch with the Public Health Emergency Preparedness office.  Lieutenant Commander (LCMDR) Dunaway reported she was discussing our offer of help with her superiors within the hour and would get back to us.  We did not hear again until nearly midnight, when she called to say she was going off shift and gave us a number to call at the HHS command center in Washington. 

Around 8 pm this was the situation:  We had planes for two flights at least.  We had hospitals in Tennessee and Chicago for 290 and 200 patients respectively.  We had two doctors for the plane.  We needed landing slots at the airport and patients for the planes.  We needed a contact on the ground.

Gore called Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta and obtained two landing slots for Saturday.  All we needed now was a medical contact at the airport.  I contacted Casey Decker at the HHS Command Center, a highly advanced, high tech center for tracking and dealing with public health crises of all kinds.  I asked Decker for help contacting TRANSCOM, which was running operations at the airport, as well as a medical coordinator on the ground.  Decker explained they had not been able to maintain communications with TRANSCOM on the ground or the medical staff. That was troubling. 

It was now after midnight early Saturday September 4<sup>th</sup&gt.  I was home with my laptop and phone and blackberry spread out around me on my bed.  My wife, wisely, chose to sleep in the guest bedroom to avoid the phone calls.  And then it began.

Starting right after midnight I began receiving calls from FEMA, HHS, TRANSCOM and other groups whose acronyms I still cannot explain.  LCDR Kennedy from FEMA called to understand what I was trying to do.  I told him.  Fifteen minutes later Mimi Riley, Deputy Director from NDMS called to beg me in a plaintive and exhausted voice not to carry out this mission.  She had many reasons – you need doctors on the plane, Chicago is too far from their home, how will we track the patients, this is a military operation and we were not military. 

I explained to her that we had two doctors on the plane one of whom was a retired Air Force Doctor who had run the military hospital in Baghdad after the invasion.  I thought we could trust him to run an airplane of people from New Orleans to Knoxville.  We were working with NDMS hospitals in Tennessee and Chicago so they would have a good tracking system.  (I guess Mimi never heard of the Great Migration of African Americans from New Orleans and the south to Chicago after the flood of 1927 and during the Depression.  Many people from New Orleans are more at home in Chicago than Houston. )

Mimi was unmovable.  We were not military and that was that.  She tried to sound grateful for our intentions but she was not going to have outsiders help.  I even offered to GIVE her the planes and the crews and the hospitals and let her run it through her NDMS system but she would have none of it.  She asked me at least to delay until noon the next day and I said I would try. 

I called Steve and told him to delay the planes.  I called Al.  It was 2 a.m. in Nashville.  He was planning to leave for Dallas at 4 a.m. to meet the plane.  I told Tipper what was going on.  She said, “Greg, you can’t delay it now.  It’s too late, the doctors are flying in here to fly with Al to Dallas.”  Al got on the phone and said we could not delay.  I tried to scare him.  What if something went wrong with a patient on the plane?  What if the military did not cooperate on the ground and no patients got on the plane?  He refused to budge.  Col. LaFon could handle the patients and Al would trust that when they landed they would break through the resistance and succeed.

I called Mimi back and said we could not delay but we would agree not to fly to Chicago.  I called Steve back to re-start the planes. 

Over the next three hours (from 2a.m. to 5 a.m.) I was called by an array of Majors and Lieutenant Commanders telling me to stop.  (“I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but you must not do this.  You must stop this now.”)  Major Webb from GPMRC (don’t ask), Grant Meade from ESF. Major Lindquist from TRANSCOM (at last!) all telling me they would not cooperate and they did not know how we had gotten permission to land.  I never mentioned Gore’s name because no one ever asked me who was paying for the flights or how we had come so far. 

Finally at 5 a.m. Major Lindquist said if we landed he would not put any patients on the plane and we should expect no cooperation and there was no place to store the plane so we would have to leave. 

Through the night there was one voice supporting me.  Julie Soutuyo from FEMA had called around midnight when she came on shift and asked what we were doing because she had seen some report from our earlier calls.  I explained the whole thing to her.  She tried to put us in touch with TRANSCOM in New Orleans and she checked on me all through the night to see how we were doing.  When I told her of the calls from the military to stop us, she mentioned that she had confronted the NDMS people on our behalf and made the case that they should accept our help under these circumstances but had been rebuffed.  (The next day she called me from home to see if we had succeeded.)

(Casey Decker at the HHS Command Center also tried to help but he was unable to reach most of the people we needed to speak to despite his best efforts.)

At 7 a.m. on Saturday September 3<sup>rd</sup&gt, the American Airlines plane with Gore and the doctors and Gore’s son Albert left Dallas for New Orleans.  They landed at 8:30, got off the plane and Col LaFon immediately established contact with the Colonels running the operation on the ground, most of whom he had served with.  He had trained many of the doctors on the scene.  He explained why they were there and the doctors began a triage process to fill the plane.  Two hours later the plane was loaded and headed to Knoxville. 

After speaking with Gore, I called ahead to Donna Tidwell of TEMA who was running the operations there and told her what to expect – about 20 patients needing dialysis, many more needing insulin, a burn victim and many people needing to be back on their medications – and one boy with his dog.  Forty of the people on the plane were evacuees mistakenly put on the plane by TSA but who might need medical attention nonetheless.  Knoxville was prepared to provide shelters for them.

The plane’s arrival in Knoxville was described by the local paper as the “Mercy Plane” and the mayor and many of the citizens turned out to help. 

By now, it was too late to return to New Orleans, load up and leave before dark and American Airlines refused to have its personnel stay in New Orleans after dark.  Gore and the team headed to Dallas for the night.  Around midnight Saturday night, the FAA called American airlines and pulled their landing slots for Sunday saying only FEMA planes could fly in.  Gore called Mineta again who promised to honor our initial agreement for two landing slots. 

On Sunday morning Gore and the team landed in New Orleans to a much improved scene.  Many more patients had been airlifted out after our flight and there were only ten ambulatory patients for our plane so we took 120 evacuees with us to Chattanooga.  The welcoming reception in Chattanooga was so large that Gore said it looked like there was an ambulance for everybody on the plane. 

We decided not to return to New Orleans because the medical patients we could take had been helped.  (We could not take bedridden patients on stretchers on this plane.)  Gore said that on the second trip to New Orleans, the doctors at the airport told him that the evacuation of the first 90 ambulatory patients had been the tipping point in their ability to adequately care for the other bedridden patients.  They also noted that the military evacuations did not really pick up steam until after we “motivated” them with our private effort. 



Of note:

Throughout the entire operation in Tennessee, EMS operations in Chicago had stayed prepared to handle patients or evacuees.  None ever arrived because the military did not want us to use Chicago.  The volunteers in Chicago were amazing in their desire to help.  Mayor Daly had been rebuffed earlier when he offered a complete mobile hospital unit for the airport and a tent city as well.  Sen. Barack Obama called Gore and asked how had Gore managed to land in New Orleans when the Senator had been refused landing rights to help. 

None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews – the first time Steve Davison had ever witnessed that in 15 years of chartering planes for political campaigns and other events.  One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them. 
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« Reply #3 on: October 16, 2007, 10:46:27 am »








"In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds. . . . In other words, it wasn't done to us, we did it to ourselves. Sorry, but that's true. Until a solid 55% of American voters are willing to add at least two decades to their collective maturity, we're going to have Bush after Bush after Bush. We'll continue to claim it's "their" fault, but it's really ours. Prairie Weather blog:

Yesterday began with the gratifying news that Al Gore, derided by George H.W. Bush as the “Ozone Man,” had won the Nobel Peace Prize. . . Bob Herbert, NYT



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« Reply #4 on: October 16, 2007, 02:52:41 pm »







                                           Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again




By Robert Parry
October 13, 2007
 

When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.


 
That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.

But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.

Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure British judge.

Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a news story quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.”

Burton ruled that British schools could show the film but only with a cautionary advisory for students.

Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN, quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.

Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three words together.

Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found “nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”

For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who “started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”

Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]

However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as the “Inconvenient Untruth.”



Who Is Judge Burton?


Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase “nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on Gore’s lectures about the topic.

Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice, he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”

Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said, “This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]

Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more like quibbles than anything “significant.”

At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”

Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.

But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth” claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.

The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]

Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe. [See report from Friends of the Earth International.]



Evacuation Begun


Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.

“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75 Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …

“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves. Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater, which expands when heated.

“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau, Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island, Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before they slip off the map for good.”

Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be finicky at best.

Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.

“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.

But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea level would occur quickly or even at all.

Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.

“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,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.

While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with what Gore actually said.



Gulf Stream


Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.” For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.

Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow down.

Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.

Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.

Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”

But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words “an exact fit”?

In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,” although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.

Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”

While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.

Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans.

But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.

Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.


Disappearing Snow

Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.

Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph reported.

While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point of view.

Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.

Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of climate change from other problems, such as pollution.

[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.), Oct. 11, 2007.]

In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease, even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.

That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can make little controversies big and big controversies little.

Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to fall into line.

The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces, calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”

It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.



Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, ****, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101307.html
« Last Edit: October 16, 2007, 02:54:50 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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