The World According to Gorep

I linked to this blog because I was absolutely aghast at their smug assurance that they are right and everyone who doubts them is an idiot. I'm nearly speechless about the whole thing, and I encourage you to have a look for yourselves.

"Nearly" is not "completely" of course, and I do have a few things to say. My even looking at this paean to all things Al Gore was triggered by this opinion piece in today's Ottawa Citizen. This bit in particular started me twitching:

Finally, a surprising 52 per cent of respondents think that there is still a legitimate scientific debate over whether human activity is making the planet warmer. [emphasis mine] When you consider that every major science academy in the world has stood in agreement on this question - and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has assigned it a certainty level of more than 90 per cent, this public misunderstanding again suggests that important information is not getting through. The IPCC also says flatly that ignoring this problem invites catastrophic consequences. And the former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, affirmed in a 2006 report that we could take action economically.

Heaven forbid that half the population (according to this questionable poll) still have minds of their own to see that in fact nothing has been definitively settled by anyone. There are some references to polar sea ice, and all of my (quick and nasty in this case) research suggests that while ice is declining in the Arctic, it's INCREASING in the Antarctic seas.

There was this last month: http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm
and this from last week:
http://www.dailytech.com/UN+Global+Temperatures+Will+Decline+in+2008/article11389.htm

In this case I have posted the whole addresses as a link, as they tell the story. When even the UN starts to back off, you know that things are in fact far from settled. A key bit from the latter article agrees with my personal experience of unusually cold winters in normally hot places:

Regardless of the cause, many are hoping the cooling ends soon. The past year saw dozens of nations struggle through record low temperatures and massive amounts of snowfall. If the trend doesn't reverse quickly, next year will be even more bitterly cold.

So, even a cursory look around the web will find plenty of (credible) sources to dispute the joint gospel of Al Gore and his "disciple" (not my word) David Suzuki. I guess I'd be in that 52% as well...