posted May 23, 2006 01:26 PM              

Dozens of the executives, sheikhs, and oil barons who marched to demand an end to their oppression
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/48458

posted May 23, 2006 01:31 PM            

Europe Winter Weather Highlights
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service

Seasonal Highlights

Autumn-planted crops are expected to have over-wintered well in Europe. While some questions remain about the effects from a colder than normal winter, initial analysis suggests that the vast majority of winter crops, especially hardy winter wheat, should have survived without damage from the cold and sometimes bitter cold that infiltrated eastern and central areas of the continent. The cold weather during February and early March, coupled with persistent late-season snowcover, delayed the resumption of vegetative growth and has made it difficult to ascertain any winter damage. However, with the possible exception of localized areas, weather analysis suggests only normal winter losses are expected. During the later half of winter, Western Europe, including drought ravaged Spain, received a much needed increase in precipitation. Meanwhile countries in eastern Europe continued to run a moisture surplus with heavy amounts of snow and rain saturating soils, creating damaging floods and ice on cropland in Hungary and the Balkans. Finally, looking towards spring, air temperatures have recently increased and the corresponding slow rise in ground temperatures has begun. However, as farmers wait for soils to warm up, the spring planting season has been delayed about two weeks in much of Europe.

Winter Weather Summary

A mild start to the 2005/06 winter season was short-lived. Winter was punctuated by a pair of Siberian air incursions that ushered in some of the lowest temperatures experienced in Europe in years. Once cold air swept in during mid-January, the cold weather pattern persisted until spring. Not surprisingly, January through March temperatures averaged below normal across the continent. For the most part however, damage from the low temperatures [ a.) January cold episode b.) February cold episode ] was prevented by heavy snowcover [ a.)January snowcover map b.)February snowcover map ] which protected the underlying crops. In general, the more vulnerable areas with little or no snowcover were the same areas where temperatures had risen high enough to be above the damage threshold of -15 - -20° C. However some areas will need to be watched further as temperatures in some locations such as the major bread basket region of western Romania, Hungary, northern Serbia had dropped low enough during an absence of snowcover that scattered damage may still have occurred. Another locality that had similarly threatening conditions was eastern Germany, an area with a high concentration of winter rapeseed. Further west in France, the Benelux, UK, and Spain, winter temperatures had moderated enough that field crops are not expected to have incurred freeze damage, but because of the long winter spring growth and spring planting is behind schedule.

During early winter, rainfall was absent in much of western Europe with dryness spreading into the countries of France, Belgium, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. February and early March finally brought increased amounts of precipitation and enhanced soil moisture. During this time, several storm fronts crossed into western Europe, spreading beneficial rain and snow across many western European countries that had seen falling moisture reserves and dwindling soil moisture. The increased precipitation in February and March also improved soil moisture conditions in the moisture-deficient areas of Spain that have experienced well below-average precipitation levels for over a year.

Country Summaries:
Poland
Air temperatures reached -30°C in January and fell to below -20°C in February, but Polish crops were insulated under deep snowcover during both the January and February episodes. Nonetheless, fall dryness likely led to poorer than normal establishment conditions, which in turn, may have increased plant vulnerability. This would have left Poland’s crops more susceptible to the extreme temperatures that occurred, but analysis indicates widespread damage is not likely to have occurred. In early March, Poland's Grain Chamber's first estimate agreed; reporting that winter has not caused significant damage and that the snowcover will help moisten the ground. Winter rapeseed typically comprises about 75-80 percent of the Polish oilseeds crop, so depending upon the effects of winter on the somewhat more tender crop, area to spring-sown oilseeds or other summer crops may increase.

Baltics
January temperatures dropped well below -20°C for five consecutive days in the relatively snow-free Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. At its coldest, the temperature dropped below -30°C. While much of the crop area in the Baltic's is planted with spring grain and rapeseed, indications are that frost damage likely occurred on some of the area planted with fall crops. If damage was indeed incurred, fields would likely be replanted with spring varieties of wheat, barley, and rapeseed.

Hungary
During the coldest episodes, Hungary had little to no snowcover protecting its cropland, but temperatures did not reach as low as those recorded in countries farther north. A report released on March 3 by the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service's (FAS) office in Budapest, states that the delayed 2005 summer harvest [due to heavy rains and high grain moisture] delayed winter grains planting. However the mild, late fall enabled farmers to plant 1.1 thousand hectares of wheat (similar to last year), and increase barley area by 10 percent to 188 thousand hectares. Another issue facing Hungary is the unknown effects of a mild and moist December. This led to flooding in early January and then to freezing with significant area under ice.

Germany
Similarly, areas of Germany - particularly eastern Germany - had only shallow snow cover for protection during the coldest periods. Temperatures in Germany however, were not as low as they were in Poland or in the Baltics. Because of the relatively higher temperatures, Germany likely escaped significant damage to winter crops, but localized damage may still have occurred. However, it will not be until crops green-up in April when more information is available on the vegetative health.

Spain
A severe drought has kept reservoir levels very low in central and southern Spain, but recent rainfall has them rising again, along with surface moisture levels. According to an early March release by Spain's Ministry of Environment, Spain's water reserves have risen to over half capacity, but they are still far below the 10-year average. With much of the corn crop irrigated, low reservoir levels and water restrictions are certain to play a major role in Spain's cropping mix.

United Kingdom
The United Kingdom (UK) has not received as much precipitation as continental western Europe and would benefit from increased rainfall. The grain-heavy south-east England area has had only 75 percent of normal precipitation since September 2005. According to a survey released in early March by Britain's farm ministry, UK 2006/07 wheat area has fallen 3.4 percent, rapeseed has fallen 4.5 percent, and barley is marginally up from 2005/06.

France
Temperatures in France and the Low Countries were below normal, but not excessively low for the January through March period. Late winter precipitation enhanced moisture levels in the drying soils. On March 8th, French cereals office ONIC reported 2006/07 soft wheat area up 2 percent, durum wheat area up 6.75 percent, and winter barley area up 2 percent. Meanwhile ONIC projected rye to be down 7 percent, and oats down 3 percent.

Romania
The agriculture-oriented eastern area of Romania (Dobrogea) experienced very cold temperatures during a coinciding snow-free period in January. This area of the country is known for its summer corn and sunflower crops but also produces significant amounts of winter wheat and barley that may have been affected by the cold. Planting in Romania and neighboring Balkan countries during autumn 2005 was was late because of heavy rains and a late summer harvest. Therefore, some plants likely have less than optimal establishment conditions, and some sowing may have gone incomplete.

Serbia and Montenegro
The intensive agricultural region in northern Serbia, Voijvodina, also experienced cold temperatures during a period of no snow cover. However, temperatures in Voijvodina and adjacent areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina generally stayed above -20°C, so any freeze damage that may have occurred is likely minimal.

Possible Winter Damage Areas
While winter damage is expected to be minor, the colder than normal winter likely has affected some areas more significantly than others. Any possible winter damage is also likely to be geographically limited and on a localized scale. It would be in areas where temperatures dropped especially low, and/or snowcover was nonexistent. Areas that had experienced conditions most conducive to freeze damage are the Baltics, Romania, Hungary, and eastern Germany, all areas that had cold temperatures and little or no insulating snow. Some of the coldest areas however - the countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia - were protected by heavy snowcover. Potential for damage also exists in areas that had suffered from poor establishment conditions during fall - Polish crops were sown into dry fields last autumn, while Balkans crops were planted later than normal because of a late summer harvest. Finally, any damage incurred would most likely have occurred to the more temperature sensitive crops - barley and rapeseed - and on fields planted with lower quality seeds.

Maps showing areas of greater concern. Locations that experienced the coldest weather and the least snowcover: 1) January Map 2) February Map

(View MODIS Satellite Imagery showing snowcover on January 24, 2006 and on February 5, 2006.)

posted May 23, 2006 01:50 PM              

**************

By Deborah Zabarenko
2005 was warmest year on record: NASA

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last year was the warmest recorded on Earth's surface, and it was unusually hot in the Arctic, U.S. space agency NASA said on Tuesday.

All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement.

"It's fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records," said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City.

"Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years."

************

Eight of the 10 warmest years since 1860 have occurred within the last decade.

posted May 23, 2006 04:24 PM            

When are you going to come to grips with the fact that surface temperatures can't be colder all over earth and still have the global warming baloney supported?

We've looked at the United States and we've looked at Europe...so, if it's not happening there and here, where is it happening?

Even if it were happening, what the hell would you expect during a 300 year peak output of solar radiation striking the earth?

BTW, water vapor is a far better heat insulator than CO2...by orders of magnitude.
Increased solar radiation striking oceans and lakes cause increased evaporation and increased water vapor in the atmosphere.

All this BS over a rise of 2*F over a hundred year period is hysterical...even if it happened. Who the hell would know? No one would know or feel the difference. Temperatures fluctuate far more that than from day to day in locations all over earth.

Yet these grubby little bullsh*t artists are attempting to create hysteria over global warming baloney. I know they're bullsh*t artists because they've already admitted to falsifying data and reports to create just as much hysteria as possible.

posted May 23, 2006 05:37 PM              

Climate Change 2001:
Working Group I: The Scientific Basis
Table of contents | Previous page | Next page Other reports in this collection
2.3.3 Was there a “Little Ice Age” and a “Medieval Warm
Period”?

The terms “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” have been used to describe two past climate epochs in Europe and neighbouring regions during roughly the 17th to 19th and 11th to 14th centuries, respectively. The timing, however, of these cold and warm periods has recently been demonstrated to vary geographically over the globe in a considerable way (Bradley and Jones, 1993; Hughes and Diaz, 1994; Crowley and Lowery, 2000). Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to the 20th century, including Alaska, New Zealand and Patagonia (Grove and Switsur, 1994). However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional climate changes, not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation (see Bradley, 1999). Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries. With the more widespread proxy data and multi-proxy reconstructions of temperature change now available, the spatial and temporal character of these putative climate epochs can be reassessed.

Mann et al. (1998) and Jones et al. (1998) support the idea that the 15th to 19th centuries were the coldest of the millennium over the Northern Hemisphere overall. However, viewed hemispherically, the “Little Ice Age” can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels (Bradley and Jones, 1993; Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998; 1999; Crowley and Lowery, 2000). Cold conditions appear, however, to have been considerably more pronounced in particular regions. Such regional variability can be understood in part as reflecting accompanying changes in atmospheric circulation. The “Little Ice Age” appears to have been most clearly expressed in the North Atlantic region as altered patterns of atmospheric circulation (O’Brien et al., 1995). Unusually cold, dry winters in central Europe (e.g., 1 to 2°C below normal during the late 17th century) were very likely to have been associated with more frequent flows of continental air from the north-east (Wanner et al., 1995; Pfister, 1999). Such conditions are consistent (Luterbacher et al., 1999) with the negative or enhanced easterly wind phase of the NAO (Sections 2.2.2.3 and 2.6.5), which implies both warm and cold anomalies over different regions in the North Atlantic sector. Such strong influences on European temperature demonstrate the difficulty in extrapolating the sparse early information about European climate change to the hemispheric, let alone global, scale. While past changes in the NAO have likely had an influence in eastern North America, changes in the El Niño phenomenon (see also Section 2.6), are likely to have had a particularly significant influence on regional temperature patterns over North America.

The hemispherically averaged coldness of the 17th century largely reflected cold conditions in Eurasia, while cold hemispheric conditions in the 19th century were more associated with cold conditions in North America (Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 2000b). So, while the coldest decades of the 19th century appear to have been approximately 0.6 to 0.7°C colder than the latter decades of the 20th century in the hemispheric mean (Mann et al., 1998), the coldest decades for the North American continent were closer to 1.5°C colder (Mann et al., 2000b). In addition, the timing of peak coldness was often specific to particular seasons. In Switzerland, for example, the first particularly cold winters appear to have been in the 1560s, with cold springs beginning around 1568, and with 1573 the first unusually cold summer (Pfister, 1995).

The evidence for temperature changes in past centuries in the Southern Hemisphere is quite sparse. What evidence is available at the hemispheric scale for summer (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean conditions (Mann et al., 2000b) suggests markedly different behaviour from the Northern Hemisphere. The only obvious similarity is the unprecedented warmth of the late 20th century. Speleothem evidence (isotopic evidence from calcite deposition in stalagmites and stalactites) from South Africa indicates anomalously cold conditions only prior to the 19th century, while speleothem (records derived from analysing stalagmites and stalagtites) and glacier evidence from the Southern Alps of New Zealand suggests cold conditions during the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries (Salinger, 1995). Dendroclimatic evidence from nearby Tasmania (Cook et al., 2000) shows no evidence of unusual coldness at these times. Differences in the seasons most represented by this proxy information prevent a more direct comparison.

As with the “Little Ice Age”, the posited “Medieval Warm Period” appears to have been less distinct, more moderate in amplitude, and somewhat different in timing at the hemispheric scale than is typically inferred for the conventionally-defined European epoch. The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of Jones et al. (1998), Mann et al. (1999), and Crowley and Lowery (2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2°C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures. The long-term hemispheric trend is best described as a modest and irregular cooling from AD 1000 to around 1850 to 1900, followed by an abrupt 20th century warming. Regional evidence is, however, quite variable. Crowley and Lowery (2000) show that western Greenland exhibited anomalous warmth locally only around AD 1000 (and to a lesser extent, around AD 1400), with quite cold conditions during the latter part of the 11th century, while Scandinavian summer temperatures appeared relatively warm only during the 11th and early 12th centuries. Crowley and Lowery (2000) find no evidence for warmth in the tropics. Regional evidence for medieval warmth elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere is so variable that eastern, yet not western, China appears to have been warm by 20th century standards from the 9th to 13th centuries. The 12th and 14th centuries appear to have been mainly cold in China (Wang et al., 1998a,b; Wang and Gong, 2000). The restricted evidence from the Southern Hemisphere, e.g., the Tasmanian tree-ring temperature reconstruction of Cook et al. (1999), shows no evidence for a distinct Medieval Warm Period.

Medieval warmth appears, in large part, to have been restricted to areas in and neighbouring the North Atlantic. This may implicate the role of ocean circulation-related climate variability. The Bermuda rise sediment record of Keigwin (1996) suggests warm medieval conditions and cold 17th to 19th century conditions in the Sargasso Sea of the tropical North Atlantic. A sediment record just south of Newfoundland (Keigwin and Pickart, 1999), in contrast, indicates cold medieval and warm 16th to 19th century upper ocean temperatures. Keigwin and Pickart (1999) suggest that these temperature contrasts were associated with changes in ocean currents in the North Atlantic. They argue that the “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” in the Atlantic region may in large measure reflect century-scale changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (see Section 2.6). Such regional changes in oceanic and atmospheric processes, which are also relevant to the natural variability of the climate on millennial and longer time-scales (see Section 2.4.2), are greatly diminished or absent in their influence on hemispheric or global mean temperatures.

posted May 23, 2006 06:41 PM            

quote:

---

I know they're bullsh*t artists because they've already admitted to falsifying data and reports to create just as much hysteria as possible.

---

posted May 23, 2006 08:05 PM              

quote:

---

Algore is the very last person to put out front on the global warming issue given his egregious past. He cleaned up the Love Canal, invented the Internet, he and Tipper were the inspiration for the writing of Love Story.--jwhop

---

posted May 23, 2006 08:06 PM              

By Robert Parry

To read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can't avoid the impression that many in the national press corps have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next president of the United States.

Across the board -- from The Washington Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from NBC's cable networks to the traveling campaign press corps -- journalists don't even bother to disguise their contempt for Gore anymore.

At one early Democratic debate, a gathering of about 300 reporters in a nearby press room hissed and hooted at Gore's answers. Meanwhile, every perceived Gore misstep, including his choice of clothing, is treated as a new excuse to put him on a psychiatrist's couch and find him wanting.

Journalists freely call him "delusional," "a liar" and "Zelig." Yet, to back up these sweeping denunciations, the media has relied on a series of distorted quotes and tendentious interpretations of his words, at times following scripts written by the national Republican leadership.

In December, for instance, the news media generated dozens of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. "I was the one that started it all," he was quoted as saying. This "gaffe" then was used to recycle other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as some writers put it, told "bold-faced lies."

But behind these examples of Gore's "lies" was some very sloppy journalism. The Love Canal flap started when The Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore on a key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give readers a false impression of what he meant.

The error was then exploited by national Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even after the Post and Times grudgingly filed corrections.

Almost as remarkable, though, is how the two newspapers finally agreed to run corrections. They were effectively shamed into doing so by high school students in New Hampshire and by an Internet site called The Daily Howler, edited by a stand-up comic named Bob Somerby.

Though the major media often portrays the Internet as a bastion for crazed conspiracy theories, the nation's prestige newspapers appeared to have sunk into their own pattern of reckless journalism.

The Love Canal quote controversy began on Nov. 30 when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes.

As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s.

"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee -- that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After the hearings, Gore said, "we passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

The context of Gore's comment was clear. What sparked his interest in the toxic-waste issue was the situation in Toone -- "that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After learning about the Toone situation, Gore looked for other examples and "found" a similar case at Love Canal. He was not claiming to have been the first one to discover Love Canal, which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies for the hearings.

The next day, The Washington Post stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative twist. "Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to publicize the dangers of toxic waste," the Post reported. "'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said, referring to the Niagara homes evacuated in August 1978 because of chemical contamination. 'I had the first hearing on this issue.' … Gore said his efforts made a lasting impact. 'I was the one that started it all,' he said." [WP, Dec. 1, 1999]

The New York Times ran a slightly less contentious story with the same false quote: "I was the one that started it all."

The Republican National Committee spotted Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. "Al Gore is simply unbelievable -- in the most literal sense of that term," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "It's a pattern of phoniness -- and it would be funny if it weren't also a little scary."

The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said, "I was the one that started it all." So, the Republican handout fixed Gore's grammar to say, "I was the one who started it all."

In just one day, the key quote had transformed from "that was the one that started it all" to "I was the one that started it all" to "I was the one who started it all."

Instead of taking the offensive against these misquotes, Gore tried to head off the controversy by clarifying his meaning and apologizing if anyone got the wrong impression. But the fun was just beginning.

The national pundit shows quickly picked up the story of Gore's new exaggeration.

"Let's talk about the 'love' factor here," chortled Chris Matthews of CNBC's Hardball. "Here's the guy who said he was the character Ryan O'Neal was based on in ‘Love Story.’ … It seems to me … he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous? … Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"

Matthews turned to his baffled guest, Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work on the issue.

"I actually think he's done a great job," Gibbs said. "I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation." [CNBC's Hardball, Dec. 1, 1999]

The next morning, Post political writer Ceci Connolly highlighted Gore's boast and placed it in his alleged pattern of falsehoods. "Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Gore," she wrote. "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie 'Love Story' and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site." [WP, Dec. 2, 1999]

That night, CNBC's Hardball returned to Gore's Love Canal quote by playing the actual clip but altering the context by starting Gore's comments with the words, "I found a little town…"

"It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron," laughed Chris Matthews. "I mean how did he get this idea? Now you've seen Al Gore in action. I know you didn't know that he was the prototype for Ryan O'Neal's character in ‘Love Story’ or that he invented the Internet. He now is the guy who discovered Love Canal."

Matthews compared the vice president to "Zelig," the Woody Allen character whose face appeared at an unlikely procession of historic events. "What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, 'I was the main character in ‘Love Story.’ I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal."

Former secretary of labor Robert Reich, who favors Gore's rival, former Sen. Bill Bradley, added, "I don't know why he feels that he has to exaggerate and make some of this stuff up."

The following day, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post elaborated on Gore's pathology of deception. "Again, Al Gore has told a whopper," the Post wrote. "Again, he's been caught red-handed and again, he has been left sputtering and apologizing. This time, he falsely took credit for breaking the Love Canal story. … Yep, another Al Gore bold-faced lie."

The editorial continued: "Al Gore appears to have as much difficulty telling the truth as his boss, Bill Clinton. But Gore's lies are not just false, they're outrageously, stupidly false. It's so easy to determine that he's lying, you have to wonder if he wants to be found out.

"Does he enjoy the embarrassment? Is he hell-bent on destroying his own campaign? … Of course, if Al Gore is determined to turn himself into a national laughingstock, who are we to stand in his way?"

On ABC's "This Week" pundit show, there was head-shaking amazement about Gore's supposed Love Canal lie.

"Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem," declared former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. "Says he was the model for 'Love Story,' created the Internet. And this time, he sort of discovered Love Canal."

A bemused Cokie Roberts chimed in, "Isn't he saying that he really discovered Love Canal when he had hearings on it after people had been evacuated?"

"Yeah," added Bill Kristol, editor of Murdoch's Weekly Standard. Kristol then read Gore's supposed quote: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I was the one that started it all." [ABC’s This Week, Dec. 5, 1999]

The Love Canal controversy soon moved beyond the Washington-New York power axis.

On Dec. 6, The Buffalo News ran an editorial entitled, "Al Gore in Fantasyland," that echoed the words of RNC chief Nicholson. It stated, "Never mind that he didn't invent the Internet, serve as the model for 'Love Story' or blow the whistle on Love Canal. All of this would be funny if it weren't so disturbing."

The next day, the right-wing Washington Times judged Gore crazy. "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings," the Times wrote. "Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusional' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is actually not present … a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'"

The editorial denounced Gore as "a politician who not only manufactures gross, obvious lies about himself and his achievements but appears to actually believe these confabulations."

But The Washington Times' own credibility was shaky. For its editorial attack on Gore, the newspaper not only printed the bogus quote, "I was the one that started it all," but attributed the quote to The Associated Press, which had actually quoted Gore correctly, ("That was the one...").

The Washington Times' challenge to Gore's sanity also was reminiscent of its 1988 publication of false rumors that Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment. [As for the Times' insinuations about Gore's "delusional" behavior, it might be noted that the newspaper's founder and financial backer, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon, considers himself the Messiah.]

Yet, while the national media was excoriating Gore, the Concord students were learning more than they had expected about how media and politics work in modern America.

For days, the students pressed for a correction from The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the prestige papers balked, insisting that the error was insignificant.

"The part that bugs me is the way they nit pick," said Tara Baker, a Concord High junior. "[But] they should at least get it right." [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

When the David Letterman show made Love Canal the jumping off point for a joke list: "Top 10 Achievements Claimed by Al Gore," the students responded with a press release entitled "Top 10 Reasons Why Many Concord High Students Feel Betrayed by Some of the Media Coverage of Al Gore's Visit to Their School." [Boston Globe, Dec. 26, 1999]

The Web site, The Daily Howler, also was hectoring what it termed a "grumbling editor" at the Post to correct the error.

Finally, on Dec. 7, a week after Gore's comment, the Post published a partial correction, tucked away as the last item in a corrections box. But the Post still misled readers about what Gore actually said.

The Post correction read: "In fact, Gore said, 'That was the one that started it all,' referring to the congressional hearings on the subject that he called."

The revision fit with the Post's insistence that the two quotes meant pretty much the same thing, but again, the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching "that" to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the "that" refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's hearings.

Three days later, The New York Times followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully explaining Gore's position. "They fixed how they misquoted him, but they didn't tell the whole story," commented Lindsey Roy, another Concord High junior.

While the students voiced disillusionment, the two reporters involved showed no remorse for their mistake. "I really do think that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion," said Katharine Seelye of the Times. "It was one word."

The Post's Ceci Connolly even defended her inaccurate rendition of Gore's quote as something of a journalistic duty. "We have an obligation to our readers to alert them [that] this [Gore's false boasting] continues to be something of a habit," she said. [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

The half-hearted corrections also did not stop newspapers around the country from continuing to use the bogus quote.

A Dec. 9 editorial in the Lancaster [Pa.] New Era even published the polished misquote that the Republican National Committee had stuck in a press release: "I was the one who started it all."

The New Era then went on to psychoanalyze Gore. "Maybe the lying is a symptom of a more deeply-rooted problem: Al Gore doesn't know who he is," the editorial stated. "The vice president is a serial prevaricator."

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writer Michael Ruby concluded that "the Gore of '99" was full of lies. He "suddenly discovers elastic properties in the truth," Ruby declared. "He invents the Internet, inspires the fictional hero of 'Love Story,' blows the whistle on Love Canal. Except he didn't really do any of those things." [Dec. 12, 1999]

The National Journal's Stuart Taylor Jr. cited the Love Canal case as proof that President Clinton was a kind of political toxic waste contaminant. The problem was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain. Gore -- self-described inspiration for the novel Love Story, discoverer of Love Canal, co-creator of the Internet," Taylor wrote. [National Journal, Dec. 18, 1999]

On Dec. 19, GOP chairman Nicholson was back on the offensive. Far from apologizing for the RNC's misquotes, Nicholson was reprising the allegations of Gore's falsehoods that had been repeated so often that they had taken on the color of truth: "Remember, too, that this is the same guy who says he invented the Internet, inspired Love Story and discovered Love Canal."

More than two weeks after the Post correction, the bogus quote was still spreading. The Providence Journal lashed out at Gore in an editorial that reminded readers that Gore had said about Love Canal, "I was the one that started it all." The editorial then turned to the bigger picture:

"This is the third time in the last few months that Mr. Gore has made a categorical assertion that is -- well, untrue. … There is an audacity about Mr. Gore's howlers that is stunning. … Perhaps it is time to wonder what it is that impels Vice President Gore to make such preposterous claims, time and again." [Providence Journal, Dec. 23, 1999]

On New Year's Eve, a column in The Washington Times returned again to the theme of Gore's pathological lies.

Entitled "Liar, Liar; Gore's Pants on Fire," the column by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder concluded that "when Al Gore lies, it's without any apparent reason. Mr. Gore had already established his credits on environmental issues, for better or worse, and had even been anointed 'Mr. Ozone.' So why did he have to tell students in Concord, New Hampshire, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on the issue. I was the one that started it all.'" [WT, Dec. 31, 1999]

The characterization of Gore as a clumsy liar continued into the new year. Again in The Washington Times, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. put Gore's falsehoods in the context of a sinister strategy:

"Deposit so many deceits and falsehoods on the public record that the public and the press simply lose interest in the truth. This, the Democrats thought, was the method behind Mr. Gore's many brilliantly conceived little lies. Except that Mr. Gore's lies are not brilliantly conceived. In fact, they are stupid. He gets caught every time … Just last month, Mr. Gore got caught claiming … to have been the whistle-blower for 'discovering Love Canal.'" [WT, Jan. 7, 2000]

It was unclear where Tyrrell got the quote, "discovering Love Canal," since not even the false quotes had put those words in Gore's mouth. But Tyrrell's description of what he perceived as Gore's strategy of flooding the public debate with "deceits and falsehoods" might fit better with what the news media and the Republicans had been doing to Gore.

Beyond Love Canal, the other prime examples of Gore's "lies" -- inspiring the male lead in Love Story and working to create the Internet -- also stemmed from a quarrelsome reading of his words, followed by exaggeration and ridicule rather than a fair assessment of how his comments and the truth matched up.

The earliest of these Gore "lies," dating back to 1997, was Gore's expressed belief that he and his wife Tipper had served as models for the lead characters in the sentimental bestseller and movie, Love Story.

When the author, Erich Segal, was asked about Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. But Segal said the female lead, Jenny, was not modeled after Tipper Gore. [NYT, Dec. 14, 1997]

Rather than treating this distinction as a minor point of legitimate confusion, the news media concluded that Gore had willfully lied. The media made the case an indictment against Gore’s honesty.

In doing so, however, the media repeatedly misstated the facts, insisting that Segal had denied that Gore was the model for the lead male character. In reality, Segal had confirmed that Gore was, at least partly, the inspiration for the character, Barrett, played by Ryan O'Neal.

Some journalists seemed to understand the nuance but still could not resist denigrating Gore's honesty.

For instance, in its attack on Gore over the Love Canal quote, the Boston Herald conceded that Gore "did provide material" for Segal's book, but the newspaper added that it was "for a minor character." [Boston Herald, Dec. 5, 1999] That, of course, was untrue, since the Barrett character was one of Love Story's two principal characters

The media's treatment of the Internet comment followed a similar course. Gore's statement may have been poorly phrased, but its intent was clear: he was trying to say that he worked in Congress to help develop the Internet. Gore wasn’t claiming to have "invented" the Internet or to have been the "father of the Internet," as many journalists have asserted.

Gore's actual comment, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that aired on March 9, 1999, was as follows: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Republicans quickly went to work on Gore's statement. In press releases, they noted that the precursor of the Internet, called ARPANET, existed in 1971, a half dozen years before Gore entered Congress. But ARPANET was a tiny networking of about 30 universities, a far cry from today's "information superhighway," ironically a phrase widely credited to Gore.

As the media clamor arose about Gore's supposed claim that he had invented the Internet, Gore's spokesman Chris Lehane tried to explain. He noted that Gore "was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." [AP, March 11, 1999]

There was no disputing Lehane's description of Gore's lead congressional role in developing today's Internet. But the media was off and running.

Routinely, the reporters lopped off the introductory clause "during my service in the United States Congress" or simply jumped to word substitutions, asserting that Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet which carried the notion of a hands-on computer engineer.

Whatever imprecision may have existed in Gore's original comment, it paled beside the distortions of what Gore clearly meant. While excoriating Gore's phrasing as an exaggeration, the media engaged in its own exaggeration.

Yet, faced with the national media putting a hostile cast on his Internet statement -- that he was willfully lying -- Gore chose again to express his regret at his choice of words.

Now, with the Love Canal controversy, this media pattern of distortion has returned with a vengeance. The national news media has put a false quote into Gore's mouth and then extrapolated from it to the point of questioning his sanity. Even after the quote was acknowledged to be wrong, the words continued to be repeated, again becoming part of Gore's record.

From the media’s hostile tone, one might conclude that reporters have reached a collective decision that Gore should be disqualified from the campaign.

At times, the media has jettisoned any pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate on television.

Several journalists later described the incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The Daily Howler observed, Time's Eric Pooley cited the reporters' reaction only to underscore how Gore was failing in his "frenzied attempt to connect."

"The ache was unmistakable -- and even touching -- but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it," Pooley wrote. "Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

Hotline's Howard Mortman described the same behavior as the reporters "groaned, laughed and howled" at Gore's comments.

Later, during an appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Salon's Jake Tapper cited the Hanover incident, too. "I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the only time I've ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event." [See The Daily Howler, http://www.dailyhowler.com/, Dec. 14, 1999]

Traditionally, journalists pride themselves in maintaining deadpan expressions in such public settings, at most chuckling at a comment or raising an eyebrow, but never demonstrating derision for a public figure.

Reasons for this widespread media contempt for Gore vary. Conservative outlets, such as Rev. Moon's Washington Times and Murdoch's media empire, clearly want to ensure the election of a Republican conservative to the White House. They are always eager to advance that cause.

In the mainstream press, many reporters may feel that savaging Gore protects them from the "liberal" label that can so damage a reporter's career. Others simply might be venting residual anger over President Clinton's survival of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They might believe that Gore's political destruction would be a fitting end to the Clinton administration.

Reporters apparently sense, too, that there is no career danger in showing open hostility toward Clinton's vice president.

Yet, the national media's prejudice against Gore -- now including fabrication of damaging quotes and misrepresentation of his meaning -- raises a troubling question about this year's election and the future health of American democracy:

How can voters have any hope of expressing an informed judgment when the media intervenes to transform one of the principal candidates -- an individual who, by all accounts, is a well-qualified public official and a decent family man -- into a national laughingstock?

What hope does American democracy have when the media can misrepresent a candidate’s words so thoroughly that they become an argument for his mental instability -- and all the candidate feels he can do about the misquotes is to apologize?

As The Daily Howler's Somerby observes, the concern about deception and its corrosive effect on democracy dates back to the ancient Greeks.

"Democracy won't work, the great Socrates cried, because sophists will create mass confusion," Somerby recalled at his Web site. "Here in our exciting, much-hyped new millennium, the Great Greek's vision remains crystal clear."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/020100a.html

posted May 23, 2006 08:11 PM              

**********

You know that "Love Canal" quote? The media botched it - read below:

The incorrect information being circulated: Gore implies that he began Love Canal during a visit to a New Hampshire high school on November 30, 1999
"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue," stated Gore. "That was the one that started it all. ... We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved."

Now, Gore did chair hearings on the matter by the House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, but that was two months after the Love Canal homes were evacuated and President Carter declared the area a national state of emergency. However, he was not the one who first drew attention to Love Canal, as he tries to claim.
(Sources: http://www.junkscience.com/dec99/lovegore.htm
Associated Press, Dec 1, 1999
The Providence Journal, Dec 21, 1999, page B-04)

posted May 23, 2006 08:16 PM              

No, Al didn't claim that he and Tipper were the inspiration for "Love Story"

The incorrect information being circulated: "Around midnight, after a three-city tour of Texas last month, the Vice President came wandering back to the press compartment of Air Force Two. Sliding in behind a table with the two reporters covering him that day, he picked slices of fruit from their plates and spent two hours swapping opinions about movies and telling stories about old chums like Erich Segal, who, Gore said, used Al and Tipper as models for the uptight preppy and his free-spirited girlfriend in Love Story; and Gore's Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones, who played the roommate of the Gore-like character in the movie version of Segal's book." (Time, 12/15/97)

"Vice President Al Gore acknowledged Sunday a 'miscommunication' on his part in leading reporters to believe he and his wife were the model for the 1970s romance novel 'Love Story'."

"The author, Erich Segal, told The New York Times he was 'befuddled' by the comments in the first place. He said he called Gore, and the vice president said it was a misunderstanding."
(Sources: The Des Moines Register, 12/15/97; Gore concedes 'miscommunication' about 'Love Story' role)

Hold it. The real information: An article the Tennessean quoted Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story" incorrectly. The Tennessean quoted Segal as saying that "Love Story" was based on both the Gores. Segal claims that he was misquoted in that article, and explained in the 12/14/97 issue of the New York Times, that the male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones.

posted May 24, 2006 01:08 AM              

Dr. Vinton Cerf and Dr. Robert Kahn
Medal of Freedom Recipients
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn designed the software code that is used to transmit data over the Internet. Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn have been at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment.

Dr. Vinton Cerf

Dr. Vinton G. Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. Widely known as a "Father of the Internet," Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet.

In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them "at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment."

*********

Dr. Robert E. Kahn
Chairman, CEO and President, Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)

Robert E. Kahn is Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a thirteen year term at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

While Director of IPTO he initiated the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government. Dr. Kahn conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. He is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible for originating DARPA's Internet Program.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cerf-kahn-bio.html

**********

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 17:43:58 -0400
From: vinton g. cerf <vcerf@MCI.NET>
To: Declan McCullaugh <declan@well.com>, farber@cis.upenn.edu
Cc: rkahn@cnri.reston.va.us
Subject: Al Gore and the Internet

Dave and Declan,

I am taking the liberty of sending to you both a brief
summary of Al Gore's Internet involvement, prepared by
Bob Kahn and me. As you know, there have been a seemingly
unending series of jokes chiding the vice president for
his assertion that he "took the initiative in creating
the Internet."

Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant
credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has
become the Internet.

I thought you might find this short summary of sufficient
interest to share it with Politech and the IP lists, respectively.

==============================================================

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the
Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the
Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among
people in government and the university community. But as the two people
who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the
Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a
Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to
our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his
role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the
initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have
argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover,
there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's
initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving
Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and
promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it
is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed
telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the
improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official
to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact
than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily
forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial
concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even
earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we
know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in
the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual
leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high
speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on
how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating
the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate
what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into
an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials
in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the
passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in
1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education
Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the
spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.

As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as
well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies
that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for
continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private
sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of
extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today,
approximately 95% of our nation's schools are on the Internet. Gore
provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the
Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven
operation.

There are many factors that have contributed to the Internet's rapid growth
since the later 1980s, not the least of which has been political support
for its privatization and continued support for research in advanced
networking technology. No one in public life has been more intellectually
engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the
Vice President. Gore has been a clear champion of this effort, both in the
councils of government and with the public at large.

The Vice President deserves credit for his early recognition of the value
of high speed computing and communication and for his long-term and
consistent articulation of the potential value of the Internet to American
citizens and industry and, indeed, to the rest of the world.
http://www.sethf.com/gore/

posted May 24, 2006 01:16 AM              

High Performance Computing Act of 1991

Summary

posted May 24, 2006 02:00 PM              

quote:

---

Too bad you overlooked something important when you were attempting to question the high temperature in Dallas for the day you questioned...among other things.

You posted the observed....not the official temperatures for Dallas on the day in question

Your "observed" temperatures came from "Hell" not Dallas. Though it's only a local call from Dallas to Hell, Hell is both hotter and at a "lower" elevation.

When are you going to come to grips with the fact that surface temperatures can't be colder all over earth and still have the global warming baloney supported?

We've looked at the United States and we've looked at Europe...so, if it's not happening there and here, where is it happening?--jwhop

---

i posted proof that there have been higher than normal temperatures in the u.s. this year, something you seemed to think was being disproved by your lying newsmax farticle and your 'average temperatures chart"......i posted local news weather reports, reports from the ncdc, and the actual observed temperatures from the same weather.com site you linked us to.....3 sources all consistently cross confirming the record temperatures.....your only defense seems to be "maybe the airport was shut down and they took those temperatures in hell..

i also posted the yearly average for last year, second hottest on record, and the breakdown by month of this years global averages, again all higher than average......

then you said this.....

quote:

---

Yes Petron, I'm well aware of using parameters for a mean temperature which enhance the kook global warming theory. A mean with 1880 as the starting date is one such tactic. The truth is, it was warmer in 1300 than it is now but if the paramenters of the mean included that period, it would blow the hell out of the global warming baloney.--jwhop

---

jwhop, the "medieval warming period" lasted roughly the same amount of time as the "little ice age", ......during the warming period, temperatures were about 1 degree celsius warmer (1/2 degree farenheit) than now.....and during the little ice age, temperatures were 1 degree celsius cooler..... can you calculate what that would do to the average over the last 1000 years ???

posted May 24, 2006 02:20 PM              

quote:

---

All this BS over a rise of 2*F over a hundred year period is hysterical...even if it happened. Who the hell would know? No one would know or feel the difference.--jwhop

---

first of all thats not true....2* would be 4 times the temperature rise from the medieval warming period!!..second, an imbalance like that will tip the scales into an out of control positive feedback loop ....which is already happening........

Warming hits 'tipping point'

Siberia feels the heat It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday August 11, 2005
The Guardian

A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.

Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

Article continues
The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.

The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today.

The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across.

Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.

Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.

"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

In its last major report in 2001, the intergovernmental panel on climate change predicted a rise in global temperatures of 1.4C-5.8C between 1990 and 2100, but the estimate only takes account of global warming driven by known greenhouse gas emissions.

"These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then. They had no idea how much they would add to global warming," said Dr Viner.

Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost, because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws.

Siberia's peat bogs have been producing methane since they formed at the end of the last ice age, but most of the gas had been trapped in the permafrost. According to Larry Smith, a hydrologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.

The permafrost is likely to take many decades at least to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst, said Stephen Sitch, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.

But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.

It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said the finding was a stark message to politicians to take concerted action on climate change. "We knew at some point we'd get these feedbacks happening that exacerbate global warming, but this could lead to a massive injection of greenhouse gases.

"If we don't take action very soon, we could unleash runaway global warming that will be beyond our control and it will lead to social, economic and environmental devastation worldwide," he said. "There's still time to take action, but not much.

"The assumption has been that we wouldn't see these kinds of changes until the world is a little warmer, but this suggests we're running out of time."

In May this year, another group of researchers reported signs that global warming was damaging the permafrost. Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, told a meeting of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that her team had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia. At the hotspots, methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over.

Last month, some of the world's worst air polluters, including the US and Australia, announced a partnership to cut greenhouse gas emissions through the use of new technologies.

The deal came after Tony Blair struggled at the G8 summit to get the US president, George Bush, to commit to any concerted action on climate change and has been heavily criticised for setting no targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1546824,00.html

posted May 24, 2006 03:20 PM            

Web inventor warns of 'dark' net
By Jonathan Fildes
BBC News science and technology reporter in Edinburgh

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in the UK for his invention

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in the UK for his invention
The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said.

Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh.

He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period".

Sir Tim was speaking at the start of a conference on the future of the web.

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said.

"Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

An equal net

The British scientist developed the web in 1989 as an academic tool to allow scientists to share data. Since then it has exploded into every area of life.

You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for

However, as it has grown, there have been increasingly diverse opinions on how it should evolve.

The World Wide Web Consortium, of which Sir Tim is the director, believes in an open model.

This is based on the concept of network neutrality, where everyone has the same level of access to the web and that all data moving around the web is treated equally.

This view is backed by companies like Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to be introduced to guarantee net neutrality.

The first steps towards this were taken last week when members of the US House of Representatives introduced a net neutrality bill.

Pay model

But telecoms companies in the US do not agree. They would like to implement a two-tier system, where data from companies or institutions that can pay are given priority over those that cannot.

This has particularly become an issue with the transmission of TV shows over the internet, with some broadband providers wanting to charge content providers to carry the data.

The internet community believes this threatens the open model of the internet as broadband providers will become gatekeepers to the web's content.

Providers that can pay will be able to get a commercial advantage over those that cannot.

There is a fear that institutions like universities and charities would also suffer.

The web community is also worried that any charges would be passed on to the consumer.

Optimism

Sir Tim said this was "not the internet model". The "right" model, as exists at the moment, was that any content provider could pay for a connection to the internet and could then put any content on to the web with no discrimination.

Speaking to reporters in Edinburgh at the WWW2006 conference, he argued this was where the great benefit of the internet lay.

"You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for," he said.

A two-tier system would mean that people would only have full access to those portions of the internet that they paid for and that some companies would be given priority over others.

But Sir Tim was optimistic that the internet would resist attempts to fragment.

"I think it is one and will remain as one," he said.

The WWW2006 conference will run until Friday at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5009250.stm

posted May 24, 2006 03:42 PM              

quote:

---

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the
Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among
people in government and the university community.

As you know, there have been a seemingly
unending series of jokes chiding the vice president for his assertion that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet."(note:no mention of "inventing" anything)

No other elected official,(than Al Gore) to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Robert Kahn (co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible for originating DARPA's Internet Program)

and Vinton "Father of the Internet" Cerf

---

What Al Gore Said
On March 11, 1999, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Al Gore for CNN. In the midst of a rambling reply giving reasons why voters should prefer Gore over his primary race oppenent Bill Bradley, Gore spoke the following few sentances:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Internet Mythology and History
To most people, Gore's claim seems instantly ridiculous. When we think of the creation of the Internet, we think of scraggly-haired computer geeks in university computer labs soldering components into circuit boards late into the night. We think of programmers chugging Coke in front of computer terminals as they piece together the software that will bring their vision to reality. We think of entrepreneurs in sunglasses investing in garage-based start-up companies that will one day be multi-billion dollar corporations. We visualize a grass roots, bottom-up technological revolution, driven by little people with grand obsessions that happened to turn out to be visionary. If the government had known what was happening, they probably would have outlawed it. Al Gore fits into that vision exactly nowhere.

Except that vision is a myth, a backward projection of our perceptions of the Internet today. Oh, all those people did exist, and the Internet would not exist without them, but bringing the Internet into being was anything but a grass roots process. The Internet spent it's first two and a half decades in a U. S. government incubator supported by many billions of dollars of the taxpayer's money, appropriated for that express purpose by Congress. And that's where Al Gore has a place in the history of the Internet.

The Internet's granddaddy was something called ARPANET. It was the first test of the basic technology that drives the Internet today. It was built with government funding from the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As many news reports have pointed out, Al Gore was in law school when the ARPANET project was started in 1967, and, as far fewer point out, he had just completed Army basic training when the first Internet connection was established in 1969. He obviously had nothing to do with the net at this point.

But ARPANET was not the Internet, any more than the Wright Flyer was an international air travel network. There was a huge amount of technological development and infrastructure construction still to be done. For one thing, it had to be grown substantially before it could take off. The Internet could not have captured the imagination of large numbers of people in the 1990's if did not connect to a lot of interesting places, and it could not have attracted business investment if there were not already a lot of people using it. Business entities like "Internet Service Providers" had to be invented, and the government regulations that would govern (or not govern) their existance had to be developed. The creation of the Internet had begun, but it was far from complete.

ARPANET grew slowly, connecting only a few universities and research labs. Universities started seeing real advantages in networking, but DARPA was not eager to be running a network for academics. Around 1984, a government agency better suited to the task, the National Science Foundation (NSF), launched a new network to support academic research. They called their network NSFNET and based it on the basic technology pioneered by ARPANET. Many other networks were being created by different organizations during this period, some interconnected, some not, but it was NSFNET that most directly evolved into the modern Internet.

Initially NSFNET was restricted to non-commerical use only. Since it was funded entirely by taxpayer money, it was thought inappropiate for anyone to use it to seek a profit. The driving purpose of NSFNET was to give researchers at universities all over the nation access to a number of supercomputer centers that the NSF had established, but very early the decision was made to make it available to all academic users, not just those accessing supercomputers.

I've seen no evidence that Gore had anything to do with the creation of NSFNET. My impression was that the initiative for NSFNET came mostly from within the staff of the NSF, a mixture of academics and bureaucrats.

The decade during which the NSF operated the net was a period of important development. There was substantial growth both in capacity and number of connections. The original NSFNET was based on 56kbps backbone connections - hardly faster than the connections most Americans have to their homes today. In July 1988, after it's first major upgrade, NSF net tied together 170 campus networks and was carrying 152 million packets per month. By 1992 6000 networks were connected. By the end of 1994, after two more major upgrades to the backbone, it was carrying 17.8 trillion packets per month, an almost 100,000 fold increase since 1988.

There was simultaneously a steady process of commercialization. Almost from the beginning, the National Science Foundation deliberately contracted backbone upgrades and other tasks out to commercial organizations, with the aim of developing network expertize in the private sector. The conditions of use were revised in 1991 to allow commercial traffic. In 1995 the NSF turned operation of the Internet over to commercial providers, finally ending 25 years of government incubation of the net.

So, in fact, the US government played a fundamentally important role in bringing the Internet into existance. Our government's deliberate and intelligent efforts to back the growth of the Internet were well ahead of other nations in the world, explaining in no small part why the Internet first flowered in the United States. The notion that the network was created entirely from the bottom up, without the knowledge or encouragement of the government is simply false.
What Al Gore Did
Gore served as a Representative from Tennessee in the House between 1976 and 1984. I've seen some hints that he had interest in net-related issues during this time (including one remark from Newt Gingrich), but it probably didn't amount to much.

Gore then moved up to the Senate, serving there from 1985 to 1992 when he left the Senate to become Vice President. As a senator, he became the earliest and most prominent advocate for networking in the upper levels of government. Gore's father had been the sponsor of the legislation that funded the interstate highway system, and he clearly saw the developing Internet as a similar opportunity, where timely government investment in infrastructure would pay off in substantial benefit to the nation. Though he did not invent the term "information superhighway," he obviously liked the analogy to his father's work. In speechs and in articles in popular magazines like Byte and Scientific American, he popularized the term and with it the concept that the government had a key role to play in fostering its development. He introduced his first Internet-related legislation on the anniversary of the date his father introduced the highway bill.

Ultimately Gore introduced a whole series of bills. They are listed below:
Bill Number Bill Title Introduced Fate
99th Congresss S.2594 Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 6/24/1986 Passed?
100th Congress S.2918 National High-Performance Computer Technology Act of 1988 10/19/1988 No action taken
101st Congress S.1067 High-Performance Computing Act of 1990 5/18/1989 Passed Senate, Failed in House
102nd Congress S.272 High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 1/24/1991 Passed
102nd Congress S.2937 [b]Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 7/1/1992 No action taken

Gore's 1986 bill called for a study of the possibility of creating fiber optic links to supercomputer centers, requiring the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to issue a report on the subject. Though references differ on whether Gore's 1986 bill was ever actually passed, the report it called for was issued in November of 1987. It expressed concern that the U.S. was falling behind Europe and Japan in the development of supercomputers and high speed networks, and recommended creation of a program to advance research in those areas.

Gore's 1988, 1989, and 1991 bills were attempts to create such a program. During this period the White House was reluctant to do so, but in early 1991, just before the Gore Bill finally passed, the White House proposed in its budget to fund a High Performance Computing and Communications Program. Gore's 1991 bill defined that program and authorized spending more than a billion dollars over the next five years on supercomputing and network projects. This funding was mostly under the control of the NSF, but also parts also went to DARPA and NIST.

These efforts contributed substantially to allowing NSFNET to grow into the modern Internet. Interesting discussions of their significance can be found in a 1992 paper advocating further expansion of the net, 1993 testimony from the head of OSTP, and Vinton Cerf's description of the evolution of the Internet. All give Gore primary credit for this legislation, and stress it's importance in the development of the Internet.

During the long debate leading up to the 1991 bill, Al Gore actually pushed to extend the the initiative beyond serving the academic and research communities, but did not succeed. (Some sources claim that his 1991 bill opened NSFNET to commerical use, but, although the NSF did open it in 1991, Gore's bill was not the reason.) Gore's 1992 bill was aimed at extending network connectivity to primary and secondary schools, libraries, hospitals, and industry. The bill was not acted upon before Congress adjorned, and Gore could not reintroduce it in the next session because he became Vice President in the next year. As Vice President, Gore did remain active in Internet related issues, but we will not describe those in detail here, since his claim refers specifically to the work he did as a congressman.

Gore pursued a vision of the Internet that is substantially different from what most people think of as the Internet today. The "information superhighway" he spoke about reached into homes, schools and businesses, but his vision sounds much more orderly and well regulated than the net we know today. It was more like watching PBS or visiting a library. There isn't much there about commerical use or person-to-person communications. There was a large emphasis on supercomputers, which seem very peripheral to the Internet as we know it today. Some modern critics have taken this different vision as evidence that "he doesn't get it," but that's hindsight talking. At the time, nobody got the "it" those authors are talking about. If you are going to dismiss Gore's efforts on that basis, then you'll soon be denying that anybody contributed anything to the development of the Internet before the mid 1990's.

An interesting coincidence can be pointed out that gives evidence that spending money on supercomputer centers was not entirely irrelevant to the growth of the Internet. One of the supercomputer centers that received funding from Gore's 1991 bill was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). In 1993, the first graphical web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was developed there. All modern web browsers are derivatives of NCSA Mosaic.

It's also important not to limit our assessment of the impact of Gore's work to the bills he sponsored. His advocacy, and the debate triggered by all his bills, passed or not, may have been at least as important in building a consensus within the government that the Internet was worth investing in. Many issues still currently relevant were raised in the bills and in the discussions of the bills, including security, protection of copyrights, ensuring universal access, and balancing private and government involvement. During this time, Congress was presumably approving annual NSF budgets that included money for the clearly important NSFNET, the direct ancestor of the modern Internet. Gore's "information superhighway" boosterism surely helped make getting funding for such programs easier.

The impact of such funding bills on research often goes beyond the research directly funded by it. From my own experience in academia, I can testify that when large amounts of funding are offered in a research area, researchers flock to that area like lemmings. I was a Computer Science professor during this era, and saw it with my own eyes. I remember talks by the department chairman outlining this new funding opportunity to the faculty, and I remember credit for the initative going to Al Gore on the second slide of the talk. I remember all sorts of academics trying to figure out what they had to offer to this research effort. Even I morphed briefly into a supercomputer expert to help my department win an NSF infrastructure grant in 1992. The ability of such funding to concentrate the attention of the academic community is dramatic, and at the time, the academic community was still most of the Internet.

In the end though, it is difficult to assess how big Gore's actual impact on the development of the Internet was. The funding he won for the development of the Internet actually arrived somewhat late in the Internet's incubation period, and the impact of his earlier advocacy is much harder to document. But it is not that hard to imagine an alternate history in which the government, instead of encouraging the growth of the open Internet, tried to convert it into a tightly controlled public utility. Gore got the government behind the Internet, and an important effect of that may have been to get it out of the way of the Internet.

There is no question that Gore was among the very first in the government to see the value of high-speed, wide-area computer networks, and that he did take initiative to give a major boost to the development of that the technology and to make it accessable by more people, a boost that undoubted brought us closer to the Internet as we know it today. As Newt Gingrich said during a CSPAN broadcast of an American Political Science Association colloquium on September 1, 2000

In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.

Gore's claim to have "taken the initiative in creating the Internet" was perhaps not as well phrased as it might be. He was speaking off the cuff, after all. His next sentence, in which he takes "the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives," could use a little word smithing too. But if we take "the Internet" to mean the independent creature that came into being in 1995 when the NSF passed management of the net to commerical providers, and not the incubator baby that the government nursed along up to that point, then, yes, Al Gore's initiatives were fundamental to it's creation.

If there was as much substance behind 90% of the claims politicians make, then, well, politicians would be much quieter people. We'd never again have to hear anyone talk about how much unemployment dropped during their first term in office, unless they were willing to demonstrate exactly how policies they enacted brought that about.
What the Media Said
In the CNN interview, Wolf Blitzer took no notice of Gore's claim and simply proceeded with the next question. One presumes he's heard a lot of politicians claim a lot of things. Within the day, however, an article by Declan McCullagh appeared in Wired News attacking Gore on his claim. Though strongly tilted against Gore, the article actually got most of the basic facts right. It quoted Gore correctly and in context, and recognized that he did have a longer than average record of activity on Internet issues, but it ridiculed everything from the significance of his legislation to his pronounciation of "router". It pointed out that Gore was still in law school, when work on the design of ARPANET began. For an "expert opinion" on Gore's role in the development of the net, McCullagh went to Steve Allen, the vice president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which he accurately identified as a conservative organization.

Allen was quoted as saying "Gore played no positive role in the decisions that led to the creation of the Internet as it now exists -- that is, in the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic". Well, that's true enough. Gore did a lot, but only a little in the direction of opening the Internet to commercial traffic. Commercialization was an important change, but hardly the beginning and ending of the creation of the Internet. This rather weak denial of Gore's claim was, however, enough to get the ball rolling.

The Wired News story got picked very quickly by Republican leaders and other media outlets. Either Wired News was more widely read than I would have guessed at the time, or there is truth in the story that Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson faxed copies off to Republican leaders and news outlets. The day after Gore's comment, House Majority Leader Dick Armey provided the full quote and then joked, "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system." Two days later, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott claimed to have invented the paperclip, and two days later, on March 16, Dan Quayle said "If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check". Never one to be left out, Bill Clinton joked to the Gridiron Club, "Al Gore invented the Internet. For the record, I, too, am an inventor. I invented George Stephanopoulos."

So within days after Gore's statement had been transmuted from "took the initiative in creating" to "created" to "invented". Unsurprisingly, a study that asked English-speaking people not familiar with Gore to evaluate the truthfulness of claims using those three phrasings showed that each new revision placed Gore in a worse light.

The story also appeared in newspapers all over the country, generally giving a greatly abbreviated version of McCullagh's already minimal arguments that Gore did no such thing, and rewording the quotation in the same ways with equal speed. The first media reference to Gore "inventing" the Internet appeared on March 15 in USA Today. This version was all over the papers and TV news within days, and even to this day is still repeated.

By March 21, newspapers were connecting this to other accounts of Gore lieing, including the the Love Story and hog farming stories (both equally inaccurate), saying these stories demonstrated a pattern of boastful exaggeration. The pattern existed, but it was almost entirely media generated.

On March 23, Wired News published a followup article from Declan McCullagh, who originally broke the story. Curiously, the very author who originated the story, who had quoted Gore accurately, and had done some independent, albeit biased analysis of the story, was now simply echoing the distorted echos of his own story. He says Gore "claimed to have invented the Internet". He refers back to the Love Story story and hog farming stories.

Nineteen months after the first article in Wired News, McCullagh published an article pointing out that news stories had deviated substantially from facts and had underappreciated Gore's actual contribution the the Internet. He did not mention that his original article had seriously understated Gore's contribution or that his second article had echoed the distorted version of Gore's claim.

Ultimately the impression that most Americans were left with was that Gore had claimed to invent the Internet as a completely random, grandeous boast. A claim to have invented sunshine would have been no more absurd. Spun the right way, the story of Gore's early efforts for the Internet could have played strongly in his favor. After all, the Internet was just about the best thing that had happened to the US economy in decades, and to have worked as hard as Gore did to promote it long before its value was obvious to others shows leadership and vision and an ability to make government work for the general good. What more could you want from a presidential candidate? Instead, Gore's involvement with the Internet became a political liability.
What the Internet Said
Now, if Al Gore really was a major contributor to the development of the Internet, you'd think that all the knowledgable people on the Internet would rise up in his defense.

And, in fact, many did. Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, the designers of the basic architecture and core protocols of the Internet, issued several statements commending Gore's contributions to the development of the Internet. They said the vice president was "the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development" and "no other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."

John Doerr, co-founder of Netscape, and Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote that "nobody in Washington understands those (technology) dynamics, and has done more to encourage them than Al Gore." Many others also spoke in Gore's favor, and not a single person with significant involvement in the development of the Internet could be found to speak against Gore.

But the Internet's celebration of Al Gore was very far from universal. Many self-appointed Internet pundits spoke against him. Declan McCullagh, the Wired journalist that wrote the original story criticising Bush's comments, is a visible example. Not all political ideologies manage to find a place in the Democratic or Republican Parties. Among those small homeless groups we find those I'll call the Internet Freedom Fighters. They believe that the Internet should be as free and unregulated as possible. Many Internet Freedom Fighters prefer to believe in the myth that the government had no significant role in the creation of the Internet, that it was primarily a product of ground-up creation by universities and businesses. They strongly oppose attempts by the government to censor the Internet, such as the Communications Decency Act of 1995 (CDA). They also oppose infringements on privacy on the net, seeking universal access to strong encryption, and opposing concepts like the Clipper Chip program which sought to allow only encryption methods that the government could read.

Both of these programs had had strong bi-partisan support so the Internet Freedom Fighters were pretty thoroughly disgusted with Democrats and Republicans alike. Gore, whatever his contribution to the Internet might have been, had been a visible proponent of the Clipper Chip and no opponent to the CDA. True blue Internet Freedom Fighters did not like him. For Al Gore to publically claim to have created the Internet was to wave a red flag in front of the Internet Freedom Fighters.

I think this, rather than any particular sympathy for the Republican party, was the motivation between McCullagh's original article. For such people, Vinton Cerf's defense of Gore was simply proof that Cerf had fallen from purity. McCullagh said in response to Cerf's defense, "Cerf is an executive at a large telecommunications company, and I suspect he acts more like a Washingtonian than a technologist nowadays." Obviously the testamony of such a tarnished creature needs to be discounted if it contradicts our favorite myths about the creation of the Internet, even if he was actually there at the time.

I believe that these kinds of feelings substantially dampened the defense of Al Gore on the Internet. Many people who came to the Internet more recently simply don't care to accept him as their forefather for reasons that have nothing to do with his actual role in the development of the Internet.
What the Al Gore Didn't Say
The Republicans definately ran with Gore's Internet statement. The Bush campaign inserted references to it into their television ads, and George Bush made reference to it during the debates. Oddly though, neither Al Gore nor his campaign seems to have put forth any defense of his claim. One would expect that some official defense of Gore's record on the Internet from the people who knew it best would have appeared, but there was nothing. Everything I've been able to find on Gore's record of work on the Internet is pieced together from independent government and media sources. There is nothing from Gore or the Democratic party. The most Gore did was joke mildly about it.

Presumably this was a deliberate choice by the Gore campaign. Perhaps they thought addressing the criticism would legitimize it. But the end effect was pretty much the same thing we saw again in 2004. The Democrats pretty much stood by while the Republicans defined their candidate.

But actually defending Gore isn't all that simple a process. In his September 30, 2000, Wired followup, McCullagh reviews the comments from Cerf, Kahn, Doerr and Joy, and then concludes by saying, "but, for some odd reason, they don't claim that Gore invented the Internet." This highlights the problem. The charge against Gore was a simple one. "Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, which, of course, he did not." A simple counter to the charge would be either (1) "he never said that" or (2) "he really did invent the Internet." These are the kinds of answers that McCullugh pretended were needed to counter the original story, but they would have been absurd. The actual honest answers were (1) "he didn't say exactly that" and (2) "he sort of did do what he said."

Al Gore was a senator, one of 100. No senator does much of anything single-handledly. He needs at least 50 other people voting with him to pass any legislation. To try to take sole credit for anything is not only absurd, but an insult to the contributions of your colleagues in the Senate. Though it is true that no other elected offical had as much to do with getting the government to do the right thing with respect to the Internet, lots of people helped. It is almost impossible to exactly measure what Gore's contribution was. It's a very complex question.

Presidents and governers routinely take credit for everything that happens during their time in office. We know, of course, that much of what is done during any administration is actually done by underlings, of which chief executives have vastly more than Senators do, but we are willing to give credit to the executives, if not for doing it all themselves, then for appointing good people and leading them in the right direction. I suspect that if the first President Bush had claimed that his administration had overseen the expansion and commercialization of the Internet, then few would have questioned it, although, in fact, his adminstation rather resisted getting involved, and the President personally showed little interest in it. He was captain when the ship sailed in that direction, and so we grant him some credit, earned or not. Gore's role, though much larger, is also much more complex and harder to document. He sponsored some bills and cast one vote in favor of each one, but that's the smallest part of what he did. The actual contribution that his advocacy of the cause made is almost impossible to demonstrate.

The basic problem is that it is very hard to drive out a simple distortion with a complex truth. The whole case against Gore can be fit into a one-sentance joke on late night TV. The case for him requires at least a couple paragraphs, and possibly a essay as long as this one, and isn't even likely to end up sounding conclusive. That being the case, it is obvious that the complex story is going to reach many fewer ears than the simple story. It's not that people are stupid, just that they have too much else to think about to have time to get so deep into an issue that is of so little importance to most of them.

So I suspect that the Gore campaign decided that since a defense of his record couldn't fit into a sound-bite, it was just better to drop the whole thing. Although the generation of good sound bites is certainly vital to a modern campaign, I don't believe that the campaign has to be so single-layered. Why couldn't the campaign have produced a detailed account of the history of Gore's advocacy of the Internet, together with statements endorsing the significance of his contribution from a variety of respected people, and put it up on the campaign's website? The candidate wouldn't try to fit the whole story into a sound bite. He would only have to give a short statement that he had, in fact, been a leader in getting the government to invest in growing the Internet to a viable level, making possible one of the nation's most important new industries. Anyone who wants to know the complexities can look them up on the Internet. This way you can embrace the complex truth and have your sound bite too.
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