A seeker of truth; a denier of falsehoods; a skeptic of unproven assertions.
You are standing in scientific quicksand when your scientific evidence is an ad hominem attack.
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.”