With Al Gore’s recent re-emergence from the dead with An Inconvenient Truth, Version 2.0, I find myself noting his website, The Climate Reality Project (formerly The Alliance for Climate Protection) countdown clock has a familiar look to it.
It has a simple 3 step plan, for those that have trouble with the more complex steps of choosing reality. I wonder though, if the folks at choose-reality.org are going to file a copyright lawsuit? But reality aside, compare Al’s new web page to these great moments in failure prediction :
The “Doomsday Clock”by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – hasn’t been right yet.
End of the world, May 21st, 2011, now scheduled for Oct 21st due to “technical difficulties”
Not the end of the world, but just as relevant as Al Gore’s countdown
Get the app, just in case you can’t keep track:
No wonder we are starting to see stories like this one:
Warmers Go Harold Camping On Us
I gotta wonder about his ability to carry a tune though, when Al puts up stuff like this in the “About Us” page of his new project.
If it isn’t our fault, but our problem, then who’s fault is it? Oh, and that “And with your help” is code for “donate”.
And when you visit the donate page you get an address:
Want to donate by mail?
Write a check to “The Climate Reality Project” and send it to:
The Climate Reality Project
901 E Street NW, Suite 610
Washington, DC 20004, USA
Guess who else shares this address:
http://www.pewenvironment.org/about-us/contact-us/
Al Gore 2.0 – just as credible as any other pollster donations solicitor doomsayer.
Wind Costs: Connecting Some Dots
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/07/connecting-dots-wind-costs/
What’s all this obsession with doom?
RoHa;
It’s the only game with real stakes.
Gore’s clock isn’t about doom; it’s counting down to a day of activism. The comparisons with doomsday predictions are completely irrelevant and dishonest.
Thanks for your comments Mooloo.
I re-read my post and I did not make it clear that I was talking about the UK.
Liam Donaldson our Chief Medical Officer stated there could be 60,000 deaths due to swine flu in the UK last winter. There were (sadly) 580, ie less than 1% of Donaldson’s estimate.
AIDS has killed 20,000 UK citizens, which is a tragedy but nothing on the scale that was predicted in the 1980’s with TV advertisements showing tombstones and predictions of the end of the human race.
There have been 168 deaths from vCJD not the thousands predicted and the rate at which these deaths is occurring is slowing down.
I agree with you with regard to public health messages ( I am a dentist), but I mock these messages when they mock my intelligence. I agree that smoking is bad, but to claim bartenders are dropping like flies due to second hand tobacco smoke, that 100,000 hospital admissions a year are alcohol related, defy common sense and observation. People just switch off and like the boy who cried wolf, ignore the serious messages. I agree that the 1918 Spanish Flu was a terrible mutation but as far as I am aware there has never been anything like it before or since.
Some of the health scares are actually counter productive, for instance; exposure to the sun.
Parents are sending their children out to play in the summer wiith full bodysuits and hats with a flap to cover the neck after giving them a covering of white suncream for good measure. The child does not want to go out to play because he/she is too hot, feels sweaty and greasy, and looks ridiculous. Less exercise and running about means more obesity, less exposure to sunshine means less vitamin D, leading to rickets (on the increase in UK) in children and osteomalacia in adults. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked with breast cancer and MS which are both on the increase. A health message intended to prevent malignant melanoma leads to increased risk from other health problems.
I disagree with you about about health researchers and climate researchers, they both have self interests and ignore research and results that would jeopardise those self interests. The anti-smoking reseachers could not find a statistical link between ill health in non-smokers and exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke so they manipulated the data by producing metadata, which showed that secondhand smoke was dangerous. The climate warmists do exactly the same thing, they only publicise the data they want us to see or that they have manipulated without being found out.
They also try to create panic and therefore justification of their own existence by exaggerating their claims (the Costa del Sol should now be a desert, the UK will have heatwaves and snow will be a thing of the past, tobacco smoke causes 100,000 deaths a year).
With scienctific research nothing has changed in the 500 years since epicycles (an orbit within an orbit) were postulated to occur in planetary movement because the circle was divine and the planets had to orbit in circular paths not ellipses. As observational technique became better, more epicycles had to be added to planetary movements to account for their movements. No-one dared to say that observed planetary motion could be explained by elliptical orbits, if they did they would be burned at the stake.
Move on 500 years; “global temperatures are increasing and it is a travesty we cannot measure it”. “It is heresy to say that Man Made Global Warming is not occurring”. I cannot see any difference between then and now, apart from the research grants got bigger, disbelievers get ridiculed instead of burned and the general public are treated like overtaxed and over-regulated fools.