Dear Science: The Goracle

Al Gore can’t get a break these days. The man has been called out by The New York Times for exaggerating the effects of climate change yet when you look closer at what he said it seems like another false charge on something he really never said. Confused? Hint: “I invented the Internet.”

Speaking on weather-related hazards in a presentation, Gore stated “it is the view of many scientists that the intensity of hurricanes is affected by the warming issues.” That doesn’t sound like an overstatement or inaccurate. If you read Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth you would get a very different impression.

Revkin reported Mr. Gore … showed a slide that illustrated a sharp spike in fires, floods and other calamities around the world and warned the audience that global warming “is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.” But Gore didn’t exactly say that. Still, as we posted on Monday , the criticism didn’t stop him from removing the “disaster trend” portion of his slideshow.

For more, read Grist’s extensive defense of Gore here , challenging Revkin’s integrity. Fight! Fight! Fight!