Former American Vice-President, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and climate change leader Al Gore lashed out at critics in a New York Times op-ed. Gore has been under threat by critics, especially FOX News in the United States, after a series of massive storms gripped the Eastern Coast of the US in February, which had a number of observers questioning the truth to climate change. In the op-ed, Gore specifically looked at challenges to the accuracy of findings by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has come under threat from a number of critics to climate change. “I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion,” Gore wrote in the op-ed piece. “But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes” in reports by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was referring to skeptics, who have pointed to errors in the panel's landmark 2007 report. They say the report overestimates of how rapidly Himalayan glaciers would melt in a warming world and incorrect information on how much of the Netherlands is below sea level. They take this as signs that the report's basic conclusions are flawed. The panel's report said that climate change is “unequivocal” and that human activities have greatly contributed to the worsening state of the environment across the globe. Gore's backing of the panel's report came only two days after the UN announced that there would be an independent scientific board to review the panel's work in light of the errors. “Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution,” Gore wrote of the American Senate for lagging behind climate change efforts. Three senators – Democrat John Kerry, Republican Lindsey Graham and Independent Joe Lieberman – have proposed to restart the stalled process by establishing across-the-board cap-and-trade provisions in favor of sectoral approaches to cutting greenhouse gas provisions, news agencies reported on Monday. Here in Cairo, environmental experts and activists praised the former Vice-President for what one activist called “taking a stand against idiots.” Hussein Shirazi, an Iranian environmental consultant working in Dubai on new renewable technology, told Bikya Masr that “here in the Middle East we see what is happening. People need to understand that science is not exact. Figures get changed all the time and there are constantly new reports being issued that update previous findings.” He said that those criticizing the UN report need to first look at historical precedents before claiming climate change is not real. Shirazi argued that science must always “improve upon itself, but most of the time, as is the case here with climate change, the overall realities will remain the same.” Climate change for many, said Roberto Cabino, a Colombian environmental science professor, is a straightforward “what you see is what you get.” So, he believes, when Americans and the world saw the snow fall from the heavens in abundance in February, their first reaction was “look, climate change doesn't exist. If there is snow then it can't be true.” But, for Cabino and many other scientists working on climate change, the massive amount of snow itself proves that something is going on. “We never have this kind of snow storm for so many days and it is obvious that the weather we are all experiencing is changing from what it was five or 10 years ago,” he added. In reality, most people connect climate change and global warming as one, but it is a misnomer that doesn't actually mean that only hot weather will supplant colder temperatures. Scientists made this clear after the Chile earthquake, which saw tsunami warnings run the Pacific Ocean. Climate change and global warming, in many says, says Avi Schmidt, an Israeli scientist working in Switzerland on renewable energy power sources for the Swiss government, “is the eradict nature of the world due to the rising overall temperature. It doesn't mean that the world is only going to get warmer, it also means the temperature rises are causing the climate to be doing things that it normally wouldn't because the overall patterns are changing.” This is what Gore has been saying since he left office in 2001, but with critics using the term literally, he was again forced to defend the realities that are being reported and codified by scientists across the globe. **Gore is the brains behind the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth BM
