The Case Against Al Gore

The Propaganda Professor

If you try Googling something like "Gore's 2013 prediction", you'll come up with an ocean full of blogs sneeringly touting Gore's pronouncements that the Arctic would be ice free by 2013. What an idiot!  What a lunatic! What a shill! What a propagandist! What an opportunistic manipulator!

But what you'll have a much harder time finding is his actual words. So let's take a look at them. Chances are you saw them here first:

Last September 21 (2007), as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

In case you're having struggles with the Mother Tongue, let's point out that there's a difference between "could" and "will"; between "one study estimated" and "without a doubt"; and between "in as little as 7 years" and "in at most 6 years".  In their ever-mounting desperation for a Gore flub, the anti-sciencers also turned to a speech he made in 2009, in which he supposedly said that the arctic ice could be gone in 5 years. Even if that had been what he said, that would mean this year (2014) and as of this writing it's only January. But what he actually said was this:

Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.