Friday, September 28, 2007

TCS Daily - Gore Dodges Repeated Calls to Debate Global Warming

TCS Daily - Gore Dodges Repeated Calls to Debate Global Warming:

Klaus reserved his unkindest cut of all for the movement that has joined forces with Gore is spreading fear about global warming:

"As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

Gore's refusal to take on the likes of Klaus, Avery and Lord Monckton is no isolated incident of the former vice president's lacking the courage of his convictions. In June, Professor Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania urged Gore to put his global warming money where his mouth is. Armstrong, one of the world's leading experts on forecasting, has studied the forecasts made by Gore and such organizations as the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) and found their methodology wanting.

Convinced that Gore and the IPCC are overstating how much temperatures will rise in the years to come, Armstrong has challenged Gore to the following wager: Each man bets $10,000 on how much temperatures will go up in the next ten years. The money will stay in escrow until 2017. The one whose forecast come closer to the actual change in temperature will be declared the winner and be allowed to donate the $20,000 plus accumulated interest to the charity of his choice. But despite being flush with cash from his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," and from lucrative speaking engagements around the world, Gore has not taken Armstrong up on the bet.