PrintMarch 6, 2009
Gore's Gruesome New Prize (Updated)
To celebrate the 100th birthday of the late Dr. Roger Revelle, the oceanography institute he once directed is today presenting an award in his name to his most famous disciple – Al Gore. And, while this charlatan should never seriously be considered for any scientific tribute, the specific intent of this one makes Gore a particularly unworthy maiden recipient, and he knows it.
You see, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography website: [my emphasis]
“The Roger Revelle Prize at Scripps recognizes leaders in the public or private sectors whose outstanding contributions advance or promote research in ocean, climate, and earth sciences. These international leaders, like Roger Revelle, ask the big questions, recognize the interrelationships of global systems, and think on a planetary scale. Their pioneering work and their courage in pursuing scientific questions of critical importance to our world evoke Revelle's leadership and vision.”
And it then goes on to qualify the first man to be so honored for evoking Revelle's leadership and vision:
“Former Vice President Al Gore will accept the inaugural Roger Revelle Prize for his outstanding contribution in bringing the science and issues raised by environmental and climate change research to a worldwide audience.”
But, as we pointed out years ago in Gore's Grave New World, while Revelle’s “vision” of “scientific questions of critical importance to our world” once included a world endangered by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, that vision changed shortly before Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance was published. You see, before he died in 1991, Dr. Revelle co-authored a Cosmos article entitled What to Do About Greenhouse Warming: Look Before you Leap, which concluded that “the scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” And Gore has gone to great lengths to convince the world that his aging mentor was somehow coerced into being associated with a piece whose message was that our planet is, in fact, not in the balance.
As described by one of Revelle’s coauthors, Dr. S. Fred Singer, in his personal account, The Revelle-Gore Story [PDF]:
“The contradiction between what Senator Gore wrote about what he learned from Dr. Revelle and what Dr. Revelle had written in the Cosmos article embarrassed Senator Gore, who had become the leading candidate for the vice presidential slot of the Democratic Party.”
Dr. Singer recalls a July 20, 1992 phone call from Dr. Justin Lancaster, one of Dr. Revelle's former associates, demanding that Revelle’s name be removed from a forthcoming inclusion of their article in a global warming anthology to be edited by Dr. Richard Geyer:
“When I refused his request, Dr. Lancaster stepped up the pressure on me. First at a memorial symposium for Dr. Revelle at Harvard in the fall of 1992 and in a lengthy footnote to his written remarks at that event, he suggested that Dr. Revelle had not really been a coauthor and made the ludicrous claim that I had put his name on the paper as a coauthor ‘over his objections.’ “
Lancaster also suggested that Singer’s sole purpose in listing Revelle as a co-author was "to undermine the pro-Revelle stance of [then] Sen. Gore."
During the discovery phase of the libel suit that followed, it was revealed that Gore had enlisted Lancaster shortly after reading a reprint of the original article in the New Republic. But Gore didn’t stop there. As Jonathan Adler wrote in the Washington Times on July 27, 1994:
“Concurrent with Mr. Lancaster's attack on Mr. Singer, Mr. Gore himself led a similar effort to discredit the respected scientist. Mr. Gore reportedly contacted 60 Minutes and Nightline to do stories on Mr. Singer and other opponents of Mr. Gore's environmental policies. The stories were designed to undermine the opposition by suggesting that only raving ideologues and corporate mouthpieces could challenge Mr. Gore's green gospel. The strategy backfired. When Nightline did the story, it exposed the vice president's machinations and compared his activities to Lysenkoism: The Stalinist politicization of science in the former Soviet Union.”
Ted Koppel summed it up well during the February 24, 1994 Nightline edition Adler’s piece had referred to when he accused Gore of “resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis.”
Where are these sound media voices now?
Anyway, the libel suit was dropped a few months after the Nightline airing, and Lancaster "fully and unequivocally" retracted his claims against Dr. Singer. Happily, and notwithstanding Gore’s extraordinarily sleazy efforts, the Geyer volume did, indeed, contain the Revelle, Singer, and Starr piece – with all attributions happily present and accounted for.
So to award this man in the name of one he selfishly sought so hard to undermine after death is nothing short of gruesome.
Hat Tip: Noel Sheppard
Update:
Weather Channel founder John Coleman has an eye-opening video report on Roger Revelle and Al Gore.
