[NYTr] Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Just as strange as Alex Cockburn's bile against Al Gore is Robert
Parry's apparent enthusiasm for him. Gore did a good deed with his film
"An Inconvenient Truth."  He was extremely limited in what he could do
as Slick Willy's Vice President, but let's face it: He didn't resign
when Clinton attacked Yugoslavia -- far from it.  And he handled the
Bush coup in Florida very badly indeed.  Why is this man qualified to
be President, exactly? -NY Transfer]

Consortium News - Oct 13, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101307.html


Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again

By Robert Parry

When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s
nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the
right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted
reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore
during Campaign 2000.

That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting
at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v.
the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] 
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/020100a.html
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/101500a.html
Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.

But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war
on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed
the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.

Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity
to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of
his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s
work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing
media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An
Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure British judge.

Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a
news story quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine
errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes
“arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his
political thesis.”

Burton ruled that British schools could show the film but only with a
cautionary advisory for students.

Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s
powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement
seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN,
quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s
Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.

Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between
the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three
words together.

Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial
about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found
“nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial
faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”

For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s
ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him
during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about
him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who
“started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the
misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”

Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side
of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified
that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by
the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR2007101102134.html

However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press
misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the
supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as
the “Inconvenient Untruth.”

Who Is Judge Burton?

Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase
“nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the
more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the
arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on
Gore’s lectures about the topic.

Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal
tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice,
he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National
Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race
Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”

Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said,
“This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate
against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white
racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]
http://www.bnp.org.uk/news_detail.php?newsId=458

Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more
like quibbles than anything “significant.”

At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific
island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the
citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New
Zealand.”

Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was
referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.

But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the
Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth”
claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of
anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any
evacuation having yet happened.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/10/11/scigore111.xml

While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or
confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.

The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and
Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon
their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission
to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the
Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update2.htm

Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation
of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe.
[See report from Friends of the Earth International.]
http://www.foei.org/en/campaigns/climate/impacts/pacific.html

Evacuation Begun

Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has
begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about
the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.

“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been
beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel
wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded
process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75
Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …

“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves.
Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for
the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater,
which expands when heated.

“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the
frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau,
Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island,
Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s
Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before
they slip off the map for good.”

Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be
finicky at best.

Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the
near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the
melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.

“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels
may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the
idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in
line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.

But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea
level would occur quickly or even at all.

Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to
go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could
result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.

“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of
west Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the
sea level in Florida,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise
in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.

While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments
as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with
what Gore actually said.

Gulf Stream

Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.”
For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of
global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the
Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.

Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency
which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very
unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow
down.

Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of
Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor
in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice
melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the
Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.

Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something
similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton
is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.

Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one
representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an
exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific
agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish
what Mr. Gore asserts.”

But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words
“an exact fit”?

In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,”
although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a
teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit
together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.

Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there
is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and
it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets
warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”

While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation
between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores
Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and
instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.

Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the
destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton
claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed
claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New
Orleans.

But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of
extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe
has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically
attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.

Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.

Disappearing Snow

Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps
on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming.
The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding
of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to
human-caused climate change.

Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far
more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase
and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph
reported.

While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern
that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to
faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point
of view.

Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to
task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face
swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the
confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he
acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related
deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.

Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being
bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing
with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and
fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of
climate change from other problems, such as pollution.

[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.),
Oct. 11, 2007.]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/10/11/scigore111.xml

In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to
quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s
ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news
outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease,
even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.

That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White
House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little
since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can
make little controversies big and big controversies little.

Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to
fall into line.

The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to
reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous
presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt.
Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces,
calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”

It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.


[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.]