I will examine here the February 24 New York Times article by Andy Revkin to show that Al Gore is not “guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements,” as he was accused.

Part 1 detailed how Roger Pielke, Jr. started all this by repeatedly misstating what Gore had said in his AAAS talk (video here). These indefensible charges would have died on the gossip grapevine of the blogosphere, had they not been picked up by Revkin.

I have written multiple emails to Andy in an effort to get him to clear Gore’s name in print, and he refuses. If he won’t, I feel that someone must for the record and the search engines. If I could clear Gore’s name without criticizing Andy, I would. But I can’t.

My reason for writing this post is simple. Having your reputation stained in print in the New York Times is a very big deal for anyone because:

• That story is reprinted and excerpted around the planet. It lives on forever.
• The NYT is the “paper of record,” and thus considered highly credible (though it shouldn’t be).

Let’s look at exactly what Revkin wrote in “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall” (original links, emphasis added):

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Last night, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) office responded to forecasts of a dangerous storm with mockery. A winter storm sweeping up the East Coast with rain, snow, and ice has caused 350 car crashes in New Jersey, a 15-mile-long traffic jam in North Carolina, and four deaths from car accidents in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Long Island. Hundreds of thousands of households lost power from Georgia to Maine. Marc Morano, Sen. Inhofe’s environmental communications director, mocked the threat of the storm by pointing out it would take place at the same time as a protest of fossil-fueled global warming in Washington D.C.:

BREAKING: Not again! Big DC Snowstorm to Greet ‘Largest public protest of global warming ever in U.S.!’ – Unseasonably Cold March Temps! [Note: All I (Marc Morano) can say is: HA! HA! HA! - The ‘Gore Effect’ Strikes again – this time it impacts NASA’s James Hansen! See also: GORE HEARING ON WARMING MAY BE PUT ON ICE – Jan. 26, 2009 ]

Spurred by his email blast and pumped by Drudge, the conservative blogosphere went into a tizzy that the East Coast has a snowstorm in the beginning of March:

Drudge Report: “‘Largest public protest of global warming’ ever in USA faces DC March snowstorm!”

Stop the ACLU: “As usual, great timing by the Climahysterics.”

Gateway Pundit: “The global warming religionists have been planning this protest in Washington DC for months. They’ve billed it as the largest public protest of global warming in the United States ever. Today, Mother Nature greeted the junk science enthusiasts with a record storm and a foot of snow.”

Watts Up With That reprinted part of Morano’s email and writes: “It seems like the Climate Crew has had some trouble getting their messages across.”

In addition, The Politico‘s Glenn Thrush blogged:

John Bresnahan correctly points out that it seems that a disproportionate number of GW events coincide with winter storms (and no, we’re not going to provide other examples).

The Politico has run with this line of argument before — in print. The Wonk Room checked with Bresnahan, a veteran reporter, and he explained in an e-mail that it was “a joke” that “was never meant to be posted.” He continues:

As someone who wrote his first story on global warming and climate change while a reporter for the newsletter “Clean Air Report” back in 1993, I have no doubt that global climate change is occurring, it is anthropogenic in source, and the US gov’t, as well as other industrialized nations and India/China, need to take action to reduce/combat it asap.

Bresnahan followed up in a phone call with another joke (we hope!): “Glenn Thrush’s days are numbered.”

(HT: Hall of Record)

Marc Morano’s full email: Read more

This is an excerpt of a post that first appeared at Wonk Room. Livestream of Capitol Climate Action below.

Today, thousands of youth activists participating in Power Shift ’09 are descending on the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress take action to fight climate change. While students from South Dakota to North Carolina lobby their elected officials, others will be engaging in mass civil disobedience to protest the United States’ continued use of coal.

They will be in the halls of Congress and surrounding the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant despite a wicked snowstorm that is ensnarling the East Coast.

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I have previously blogged about how Australia has been suffering from Hell and High Water — record-breaking wildfire, drought, and heatwave in one part, flooding and inundation in another. Our guest blogger today Erica Newman, research associate at the College of Natural Resources and Center for Fire Research and Outreach at UC Berkeley, has an update on the hellish side (first published by Wonk Room here).

Even in Australia, where people have learned to live with large wildfires, February’s “Black Saturday” fires in Victoria blew away all expectations. Of the hundreds that died, those who stayed had no time to prepare, and many who fled were overtaken by the fast-spreading flames and died in their cars. Multiple days of above 100-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, extremely low relative humidity and 100 mile per hour winds resulted in an unstoppable spread of the flames, 100-200 foot flame lengths, and fire intensity unlike anything ever before recorded anywhere on the planet.

Wildfire expert Max Moritz, a professor at the College of Natural Resources and Center for Fire Research and Outreach at the University of California, Berkeley, explains these extreme conditions raise new questions:

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Today, thousands of youth activists participating in Power Shift ’09 are descending on the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress take action to fight climate change. While students from South Dakota to North Carolina lobby their elected officials, others will be engaging in mass civil disobedience to protest the United States’ continued use of coal.

They will be in the halls of Congress and surrounding the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant despite a wicked snowstorm that is ensnarling the East Coast — or, in many ways, because of it. In a basic sense, what these activists are trying to do is save our weather, growing out of control.

As predicted by models of climate change, the South and West is increasingly gripped by extreme storms and extreme drought: California is in its third consecutive year of drought conditions and now in a state of emergency. Drought conditions in Oklahoma are “terrible.” Despite the triple storms of Dolly, Gustav and Ike in 2008, nearly 97 percent of Texas is in drought — already this year, “about 3,400 wildfires have been reported across the state, scorching nearly 105,000 acres.”

The youth activists are trying to keep it snowing in the Northeast, raining in Texas, cold in the Rockies, and sunny in Florida. They’re trying to prevent California from burning up, Iowa from being flooded out, and Alaska from melting away. They’re trying to get our elected leaders to take action to put an end to the destabilization of our climate. Droughts are increasing. Hurricanes are stronger. Floods and storms are more intense. And it will only get worse.

[updat

In all the hubbub about George Will’s falsehood-filled columns and Andy Revkin’s equation of Al Gore with George Will in the New York Times, one simple fact has been a largely overlooked:

Contrary to Revkin’s assertions, Former Vice President Al Gore is not guilty of “exaggeration,” let alone “guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements.”

Having communicated at length with Gore’s staff and Revkin, I will show that not only did Gore do nothing worthy of the NYT‘s criticism, but in fact he acted honorably and in the highest traditions of science journalism. Contrary to the impression left by Revkin in his February 24, “News Analysis” piece, “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall,” Gore and his team work overtime to accurately represent the data and the science.

Gore is very careful in his use of language, more careful than the NYT — and far more careful than the man who initiated the indefensible charge, Roger Pielke, Jr. As Dylan Otto Krider wrote at Examiner.com:

It was Pielke who provided Revkin with his Gore infraction to “balance out” his article on Will to allow Revkin to say “both sides do it”….

As we will see in this two-parter, Revkin’s case is so weak, so nonexistent, that it rests almost entirely on his interpretation — on his indefensible overinterpretation — of one word by Gore, a word that Revkin didn’t even include in his article for reasons that will soon be obvious to all.

Part 1 focuses on how Pielke started all this by fabricating a bunch of baseless charges against Gore and smeared the good name of thousands of scientists.

To undestand what Gore was saying — as opposed to what Revkin and Pielke assert Gore was saying — we need some history.

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