Energy

Michael Bastasch

3:19 PM 08/17/2017

Former Vice President Al Gore labeled a British reporter a “denier” after he pressed the former vice president about scientific claims made in his recently-released global warming film.

“Are you a denier?” Gore asked The Spectator’s Ross Clark after a private screening of “An Inconvenient Sequel.” When Clark tried to finish his question, Gore said: “You are a denier.”

Clark questioned one part of Gore’s film that “cuts from Gore on his melting glacier to a flooded street in Miami Beach, with a voiceover from Gore making a strong connection between the two,” he wrote in an article.

“The implication is that sea-level rise is happening frighteningly quickly — and it is all down to carbon emissions, if not nature’s revenge for all those hanging chads which denied him victory in Florida and therefore the 2000 presidential election,” Clark wrote for The Spectator.

Clark was curious about the claim, so he asked Florida International University sea level expert Shimon Wdowinski about global warming’s impact on sea level rise. Wdowinski said glacial melt did impact sea level rise, but the recent surge in sea levels in Miami had more to do with “short-term variability caused by changes in ocean currents.”

Wdowinski also noted that subsidence is another major factor for flooding in Miami, much of which is built on reclaimed swamps and barrier islands. Clark wrote that “[s]atellite measurements reveal that some streets now lie 16 to 24 cm lower than they did 80 years ago.”

A recent study supports Wdowinski’s point. Sea levels south of Cape Hatteras rose about six times faster than the global average from 2011 to 2015, according to University of Florida researchers.

The study found “two large atmospheric patterns most likely accounted for the hot spot off the Southeast coast: the El Niño cycle and the North Atlantic Oscillation,” The New York Times reported.

Gore wasn’t interested in hearing inconvenient science. “As soon as I mention Professor Wdowinski’s name, he counters: ‘Never heard of him — is he a denier?’” Clark wrote, adding Gore soon accused him of being a “denier.”

Clark was also confronted by “a frosty PR woman” who told him “this is a film junket, to promote the film,” not an event to ask hard questions.

Clark isn’t the first to confront Gore on his scientific claims. Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Gore about failed predictions made in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Wallace confronted Gore on his claim that “[u]nless we take drastic measures the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years,” there would be a “true planetary crisis” due to global warming.

“We are going to suffer some of these consequences, but we can limit and avoid the most catastrophic if we accelerate the pace of change that’s now beginning,” Gore told Wallace.

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