Don’t give the doubters any more ammo

Andrew Revkin’s Dotearth blog today had this story:

Gore Pulls Slide of Disaster Trends
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Former Vice President Al Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation. When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels.

The graph, which was added to his talk last year, came just after a sequence of images of people from Iowa to South Australia struggling with drought, wildfire, flooding and other weather-related calamities. Mr. Gore described the pattern as a manifestation of human-driven climate change. “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented,” he said.

Now Mr. Gore is dropping the graph, his office said today. Here’s why.

Two days after the talk, Mr. Gore was sharply criticized for using the data to make a point about global warming by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political scientist focused on disaster trends and climate policy at the University of Colorado. Mr. Pielke noted that the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters stressed in reports that a host of factors unrelated to climate caused the enormous rise in reported disasters (details below).

Dr. Pielke quoted the Belgian center: “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one — even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future.

This is just the kind of thing that Rush and his gang of blow-hards pick up on and play back every day for the next ten years to prove to their mindless flock of sheep that environmentalists are pulling the wool over their eyes (how would that work?) about global warming.

There is plenty of good science on our side. We should be telling people that this is a long, slow process that is also going to take a long time to fix. I know people like to think in terms of this year vs last year, but do you really want the global climate change campaign to live or die on how much snow they get in New York next winter? Or whether Miami happens to get hit by a hurricane? We have a harder job than the poo-pooers. Let’s not make their work any easier.