Gore Ducks Debating on Warming

Great article at TCS by Dr. Bonner Cohen -
An inconvenient truth for Al Gore is that he has been ducking numerous attempts by global warming heretics to engage them in a debate on how much humans contribute to actual increases in the planet's temperature. Gore refuses to respond to Czech President Vaclav Klaus's offer to debate, nor the earlier offers from Hudson Institute fellow Dennis Avery or Britain's Lord Mornton.

Klaus is pretty unequivocable on the subject, as he stated in a piece published in the Financial Times in June of this year.

""As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

Gore's also been offered a bet in June of this year by University of Pennsylvania's Professor Scott Armstrong for $10,000. Both men would predict the change in the global average temperature 10 years in the future, and the one closest to the actual increase at the time would donate the $20k plus the accumulated interest to the charity of his choice. Gore hasn't responded to Armstrong's offer either, despite his substantial earnings from his movies, books and lecture fees on this subject.

Interestingly enough, there has been a debate on the subject, as Cohen relates:

"Gore's reluctance to go toe-to-toe with global warming skeptics may have something to do with the - from the standpoint of climate change alarmists - unfortunate outcome of a global warming debate in New York last March. In the debate, a team of global warming skeptics composed of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London emeritus professor of biogeology Philip Stott, and physician-turned novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton handily defeated a team of climate alarmists headed by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt. Before the start of the nearly two-hour debate, the audience of several thousand polled 57.3 percent to 29.9 percent in favor of the proposition that global warming is a "crisis." At the end of the debate, the numbers had changed dramatically, with 46.2 percent favoring the skeptical point of view and 42.2 percent siding with the alarmists."

One has to wonder if the results of this effort have led Gore to be a bit reluctant to respond to his critics.