Gore Rewrites ‘Inconvenient’ Claim about NYC Flooding in ‘Sequel’

By Julia A. Seymour

Critics gave former Vice President Al Gore grief for predicting in An Inconvenient Truth that major cities including lower Manhattan would be underwater if severe ice melt occurred.

Now Gore is rewriting history to claim his prediction came true in promotion footage of his upcoming film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which debuted at Sundance on Jan. 19.

In this case, context is the difference between honesty and self-interested revisionism.

In his 2006 film, Gore warned, “If Greenland broke up and melted or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida [animation shown with much of the state underwater].”

Immediately, after showing Florida, Gore showed animations of drowning cities and countries: San Francisco, The Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta and then Manhattan.

“But this is what would happen to Manhattan, they can measure this precisely,” Gore warned as he showed his audience much of the city underwater, including the area where the memorial would be built.

Now, he’s twisted his original words to make it appear his prediction about Manhattan came true.

“Ten years ago when the movie An Inconvenient Truth came out, the single most criticized scene was an animated scene showing that the combination of sea level rise and storm surge would put the ocean water into the 9/11 memorial site, which was then under construction. And people said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration,” Gore claimed in a newly released clip from An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. [Emphasis added]

In that clip, Gore then shows “Superstorm Sandy” footage of water flooding lower Manhattan, including the memorial site and a quote from Gov. Andrew Cuomo blaming climate change, to prove true Gore’s claim from 11 years ago.

But his original prediction was not about extenuating circumstances of a storm like Sandy slamming into New York or any “storm surge” at all. It was about the sea level rise that would be generated as (he predicted) ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica escalated dramatically.

The latest maps show that Greenland still has ice 11 years after Gore’s prediction of catastrophic melt due to global warming.

What’s worse than Gore’s rewrite of history is that online media not only aren’t exposing it, they’re perpetuating the distortion. EcoWatch reported on Jan. 23, “Al Gore’s Prediction Came True.” SlashFilm.com …

Al Gore still ‘training hundreds of mini-Gores’ – Uses bad weather events as proof of global warming

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/10/al-gore-optimist-000295

The big difference in the updated version of the slide show is that a decade ago, Gore mostly warned about what could happen. Now he shows what’s already happening.

Gore did discuss President Barack Obama, giving him high marks on climate issues for his first few months in office and for his entire second term, but accusing the president of abandoning the mission for the bulk of his first term, in part because of his “historic web of ties to the coal industry in Illinois.”

From now on, Gore says, every election needs to be a climate-change election. His goal is to put a political price on denial.

That’s why Gore came to Miami, to build his grass-roots slide-show army, to spread his message that climate change is here and now and scary as hell.

Gore’s avalanche of statistics and images is designed to overwhelm, to make the reality of climate change undeniable. The heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, he explains, is the equivalent of exploding 400,000 atomic bombs every day. “The denialists challenge everything I say, but they’ve never challenged that one—and believe me, they would if they could,” he added.

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Gore: ‘Fertility management’ is needed to reduce the number of Africans to help ‘control the proliferation of unusual weather’

Excerpt From CNBC article:

Former Vice President Al Gore during a World Economic Forum session in Davos on Jan. 24, 2014 – Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world. “Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available … is crucial to the future shape of human civilization,” said Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on global warming. Gore said Africa’s population is expected to surpass India’s and China’s by the mid-21st century and will be more than both combined by the end of the century.

End excerpt

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Related Links:  Flashback 2011: ‘Fertility Management’: Al Gore Calls on Women to Have Fewer Children…to Curb Pollution Reality Check on Overpopulation claims: Slate Mag on the new population problem — UNDERPOPULATION! ‘And in the long term—on the order of centuries—we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity’ – ‘That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home’

Paging Ehrlich! Slate Mag: ‘About That Overpopulation Problem. Research suggests we may actually face a — declining world population in the coming years’ – ‘The rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today. And then it will fall’ — ‘Population decline is a very familiar concept in the rest of the developed world, where fertility has long since fallen far below the 2.1 live births per woman required to maintain population equilibrium’

Climate Depot’s Factsheet on Overpopulation – ‘Is too few people the new ‘population problem?’

PAUL EHRLICH