Fibbing About His Viewership, Al Gore’s Credibility Took Another Beating

[First posted at Forbes.]

Al Gore’s credibility took yet another beating last week, as meteorologist Anthony Watts documented evidence that Gore lied through his teeth about the number of people allegedly watching the latest version of his 24 Hours of Climate Reality Internet television show.

The question arises: If Al Gore so cavalierly lies about his viewership numbers because – in his eyes – the ends justify the means, then how can we take seriously his claims on other global warming-related topics?

On his “Watts Up With That?” webpage, Watts shows how Gore claimedthere were more than 16 million viewers for his Climate Reality show last week. Take a moment and contemplate that number.

Considering there are only about 500 million people in primarily English-speaking nations, that would mean fully 1 in 30 people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia watched the show. Heck, I would bet all my material possessions, and lay 10-to-1 odds on top of that, that 1 in 30 people in these nations did not even KNOW about Gore’s show.

USTREAM tabulates the viewer numbers for Internet broadcasts such as Gore’s. Watts observed that USTREAM would have set a single-day viewership record had Gore actually generated the viewing audience he claimed. As Watts explained, “if USTREAM had a new record day with 16 million views, more than doubling their previous record traffic day of March 11, 2011, don’t you think they would be saying something about it? So far, not a peep.”

Looking more closely at the numbers, Watts analyzed system-wide USTREAM data and demonstrated how viewer numbers anywhere near those claimed by Gore should have created a huge spike in USTREAM system-wide data. Nevertheless, no such spike occurred. In fact, USTREAM data showed unusually low viewer numbers during Gore’s Internet television show.

“I suppose it is a matter of whose ‘reality’ you believe, but it seems clear to me that the numbers outside of Mr. Gore’s reality don’t even remotely support his version of it. Readers may recall that Mr. Gore is no stranger to manufacturing his own version of science reality, and sadly it seems his viewership claims are as inflated as his ‘science’.”

Watts brings up an important point. Why should people assign scientific credibility to people who intentionally lie about science-related issues? If Al Gore actually had something like 300,000 viewers for his program but reported it as 16 million, are we really supposed to believe his pontifications about other global warming-related topics?

For that matter, we can extend this same argument to the alarmist propaganda machine as a whole. Watts illustrates this point regarding recent hurricane activity:

“During his ‘dirty weather’ broadcast, Mr. Gore and his team of activists repeatedly tried to convince viewers that energy use is directly tied to weather events such as hurricane Sandy. The logic used is that warmer temperatures produce more frequent and more intense hurricanes.

The reality is that the United States has been in a ‘hurricane drought.’ The last major hurricane (Category 3 or greater) to make a landfall on the USA was hurricane Wilma on October 24th, 2005. That’s over seven years since a major hurricane has hit the USA. Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it made landfall, as it had been downgraded to an extratropical cyclone by the National Hurricane Center.”

Despite these hurricane facts, the most prominent, media-active global warming alarmists are flooding the airwaves, newspapers, and Internet with false claims that global warming is causing more hurricane activity (see here, for example). This leaves us with either of two possibilities; they are completely ignorant of basic meteorological data or they are deliberately misrepresenting the truth because they believe the ends justify the means.

Either way, they are tying their credibility to Al Gore. That is a losing proposition.