As the late US Pres. John F. Kenney once said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, while defeat is a lonely orphan.” This is the first thing that came into my mind after reading Amando Doronilla’s article in PDI, “Right, Left Swamp Noy with Advice.” Indeed, too many people claiming to be responsible for the victory of President apparent Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, III have now been giving him an avalanche of advice hoping that their advice would become an Aquino doctrine. Admittedly we are amongst (we will never deny that we voted for GIBO) the lonely orphans, hence I dare not give Mr. Aquino any unsolicited advise. But when he is proclaimed and take his oath as the President of this country, we would afford him media’s traditional 100 days, supporting him, unless he does something drastically bad.
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Mr. Albert Arnold “Al” Gore, the 45th US Vice-President under Pres. Bill Clinton will be in Manila today as the guest speaker on a forum about the environment and Global Warming. I’m sure everyone must have seen his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that was taken from the book he wrote “An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergence of Global Warming and What we can do about it.” I’m doubly sure that most of us Filipinos have probably seen his documentary through many pirated DvD discs available in your nearest neighborhood video pirate whom I dare say is truly the inconvenient truth about film piracy in this country!
This environmental documentary got Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Last December, right before the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference a.k.a. the Copenhagen Summit, my good friend Chris Go, our homegrown Planetary Imager whom we congratulated in our column yesterday, sent me various links that showed that there were serious problems happening before the Copenhagen Summit, which revealed that the findings about Global Warming was incorrect or worse, doctored.
This was exposed in the now famous “Climategate” where the computers of the University of East Anglia were hacked and some of its information made public. Apparently, the United Nations IPCC uses certain top universities to do their research on climate change, like the University of East Anglia, which uses concentric tree rings to look at the weather patterns going back hundreds of years.
Part of the studies that Al Gore used in his “An Inconvenient Truth” came from a research paper done by Professor Michael E. Mann (an American Climatologist) dubbed the “Hockey Stick Graph or Theory” which the IPCC highlighted and Al Gore used in his book and film documentary which earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
However, on Oct.7, 2009, the Financial Post, National Post of Toronto, Canada featured an article entitled “The Hockey Stick Myth” written by Lorne Gunter that featured Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross Mckitrick who declared that out of the 112 data the Prof. Mann used, 105 of them were incomplete, flawed or incorrect declaring the Hockey Stick theory a statistical nonsense as the chart revealed collation errors, obsolete data and other serious defects.
So what is really the inconvenient truth about the Hockey Stick Graph that Al Gore used in his documentary? Has he issued a statement defending or admitting that the figure he used was already debunked? The problem with the Climate Change issue is, most of the researchers that the United Nations (UN) came from Western Universities or Research firms that were given grants by either the US Government or rich corporations that is looking at a new industry that would develop because of Global Warming?
While we’re in the midst of one of the hottest summers we’ve ever seen in Cebu and we must find ways to conserve our water resources, there were many issues that Al Gore raised in his film documentary. For instance, when the ice glacier melts, the seas would rise. Since the Philippines is composed of small islands, we would be gravely affected by this. But so far, the melting ice caps did not yet result in the rising of our sea levels. We have a beach house in Liloan and the last time I went there, the sea was still on the same level that it was years ago.
I just hope that Al Gore would have the humility to realize and accept the fact that his using the Hockey Stick theory was detrimental to his documentary. I’m sure that Al Gore means well, but he shouldn’t stick to a theory that was already debunked by other scientists. More importantly, we should be extra careful when referring to our environmental problems because there are just too many greedy and unscrupulous people waiting to pounce on us because most of us are just too gullible.
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Email: vsbobita@mozcom.com