# A Challenge to Al Gore?



## always_outdoors (Dec 17, 2002)

I just caught a second of it and didn't hear the whole thing, but I believe some guy is challenging Al Gore as to his thoughts on global warming. Something like $10,000.

Anybody else heard anything like this?

I would love to see someone put it to Al Gore. All he is doing with this is selling "carbon" and putting money in his pocketbook. Maybe its for his house that eats up all the eletricity and heating/cooling in that mansion he lives in.


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## hunter9494 (Jan 21, 2007)

look, you can spin this anyway you want, lots of contradicting facts everywhere, bottom line is the climate is getting warmer, period.


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## Skip OK (Jul 16, 2006)

Hunter,

The only real "action" proposed to "address" global warming presopposes several conditions to be true:

1. The "globe" is getting warmer (ie, local increases in temperature are clearly part of a world wide increase).

2. The reason for (1) above is due to man's activity.

3. The net balance between good and bad effects from (1) and (2) above are in the net harmful.

4. We are able to adjust our activity such that we can ameliorte the negative effects shown in (3) above.

5. The "costs" of doing (4) above are so limited that the reduction in harmful effects more than makes up for the "costs".

So far, we are still arguing whether (1) may or may not be true.

The number I hear most when talking about a reduction in CO2 emmissions (please don't say "greenhouse gas emmissions unless you are willing to include ALL greenhouse gasses--that leaves the TOTAL CO2 emmssions, both natural and man-made, at much less than 1% of the total), is about 25%.

Here are some more statistics for you. In terms of the national total of CO2 emmissions, transportation produces 22%.

So, if you want to reduce emmssions via transportation, well, even if you stop moving entirely, you aren't going to make your goal.

The majority of CO2 is emmitted when making electricity. Just over 50% of man made CO2 comes out of electrical plants.

OK, lets get our 25% reduction there. Which 12 hour period each day are YOU willing to give up AC; or refrigeration; or traffic lights; or vbentilators in hospitals? THIS option gets people killed; just as sure as little green apples.

The above is pretty much why I am unwilling to accept the "the sky is falling!" pronouncements from the greens. Let them come up with a detailed plan to reduce whatever gasses are needed, one the takes into account the losses, both economic and human, that their plan entails, and THEN present that plan, warts and all to the public.


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## Gohon (Feb 14, 2005)

> 1. The "globe" is getting warmer (ie, local increases in temperature are clearly part of a world wide increase).


How many times in the earths past has temperatures risen only to fall again?



> 2. The reason for (1) above is due to man's activity.


And the proof for that is??


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## Whistler31 (Feb 1, 2007)

We have only been keeping records for about 100 years. How do we know it is not part of a cycle? I remember in the 70's and 80's we were going into an ice age. Get real! Gore is the biggest phony to walk the face of the earth in a long time. To him it is about controlling other people. Otherwise that phony wouldn't give a rat's a_ _!


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## Gohon (Feb 14, 2005)

Of course Gore is a phony. Who is disputing that. We have scientific data going back thousands of years, not just the last hundred years. The earth has heated and cooled many times in the past. Everything today that is claiming this drastic global change in the future is based on computer models. Models that are fed data by man which can't be proven. Funny thing is when the run these models in reverse with data provided they can't match the known data of the past.

This was taken from a essay by Spencer Weart. Interesting read. You can read the entire essay here. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm



> Yet amid all the uncertainties about how carbon cycles operated, how much could we trust the computer models? Scientists are more likely to believe something if they can confirm it with an entirely independent line of evidence, preferably from somewhere nobody had looked before. Just such new evidence came up in the 1990s, thanks to an unexpected alliance of paleontology and plant physiology. Studies of plant species that had changed little since the rise of the dinosaurs (magnolia for one) showed that if you exposed them to a higher level of CO2, the structure of their leaves changed. Ancient fossil leaves showed just such changes. Several kinds of chemical studies confirmed that the level of the gas had swung widely over geological ages, and the temperature too.


So you see, the climates temperatures have been going up and down like a yoyo since creation.


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## always_outdoors (Dec 17, 2002)

> look, you can spin this anyway you want


I wasn't trying to spin anything. I was merely wondering about this challenge and figured some guys on here might know what the challenge was and some of the background on how this came to be. I am also wondering who is challenging Gore.


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## Gohon (Feb 14, 2005)

"Potentially realizing that Gore has turned down such challenges in the past, a Wharton professor is willing to put his money where his mouth is that Gore's cataclysmic planetary predictions are wrong.

Armstrong has challenged the former vice president to a 10-year bet, in which $10,000 from the two would be set aside in escrow as Gore pits his forecast of how much global temperature will increase during that time against a so-called "naive model," in which temperature would be expected to stay the same.

The winner would get to donate the $20,000 and accumulated interest to the charity of his choice.

Armstrong explained that the idea of a bet arose out of research a colleague and he - both specialists in forecasting - had done on global-warming forecasts put out by Gore and organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored entity formed to help achieve scientific consensus on climate change.

Armstrong said that he discovered that most climate-change forecasts use bad methodology.

"We've been unable to find any scientific forecast, and what we have are forecasts by scientists," he said.

Armstrong and his colleague, Keston Green of Monash University in Australia, are presenting their findings in a paper to the International Symposium on Forecasting on Wednesday, but Armstrong said the bet is meant to serve as encouragement to his peers in the field "to start making forecasts for important problems" and not to question whether climate change is occurring, per se."


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## always_outdoors (Dec 17, 2002)

Thanks Gohon for posting the information. I guess it wasn't like I thought it was.


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