UPDATED: When the going gets desperate…

Clearly stressed by so much climate spin…

… the desperate get going. In this case, Al Gore, who is wheeled out like some old relic to peddle more meaningless alarmism based on hopeless computer models to the gullible twits at Copenhagen:

Gore cited new scientific work at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, whose Arctic ice research is important for planning polar voyages by Navy submarines. The computer modeling there stresses the “volumetric,” looking not just at the surface extent of ice but its thickness as well.

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said. His office later said he meant nearly ice-free, because ice would be expected to survive in island channels and other locations. [“Some” of the models? So I guess “others” didn’t – guess which ones Al chooses – Ed]

Asked for comment, one U.S. government scientist questioned what he called this “aggressive” projection.

“It’s possible but not likely,” said Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “We’re sticking with 2030.”

Even the US government is embarrassed by Gore’s wild predictions. And anyway, what’s the big deal about Arctic ice anyway? If the planet is warming, there’ll be less ice – it doesn’t prove human causation. Gore sounds like Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: “There’s a 50:50 chance of no ice in 5 years, but there’s only a 10% chance of that.”

Read it here.

Update: The Times picks up Gore’s error, and as Marc Morano says, Gore is no longer getting a “free ride” from the media:

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

[…]

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

[…]

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”