The Wall $treet Journal has an interesting
subscribers-only op-ed by Jyllands-Posten culture editor Fleming Rose and Bjorn Lomborg on Al Gore's unwillingness to debate or take tough interview questions on his movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth. As Rose and Lomborg tell it, Jyllands-Posten, the Denmark's largest newspaper, had an interview scheduled with Gore to conicide with his visit to the country. The paper also planned to include Lomborg as a counterpoint in the interview, but it was not to be.
The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore's agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and do entary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?
One can only speculate. But if we are to follow Mr. Gore's suggestions of radically changing our way of life, the costs are not trivial. If we slowly change our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, the U.N. actually estimates that we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world. However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30% poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change.
The article goes on to note that many of Gore specific claims are either based on extremely unlikely scenarios, or misrepresentations of the available evidence. For example, Gore shows seal-level rise scenarios far in excess of UN projections, makes claims about malaria that are contradicted by the historical record, and only discusses the health harms of higher temperatures without considering the benefits.
Al Gore is on a mission. If he has his way, we could end up choosing a future, based on dubious claims, that could cost us, according to a U.N. estimate, $553 trillion over this century. Getting answers to hard questions is not an unreasonable expectation before we take his project seriously. It is crucial that we make the right decisions posed by the challenge of global warming. These are best achieved through open debate, and we invite him to take the time to answer our questions: We are ready to interview you any time, Mr. Gore -- and anywhere.
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@ the AMS seal of approval. Yeah, that means pretty much . You don't even need a degree to get that thing. I'd never go into broadcast meteorology either way. 
