The Globe and Mail's editorial board has called for an asterisk to be attached to Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize over a British judge's criticism of the documentary and his requirement that some explanatory notes be attached when it is shown in schools.

Here's the BBC story on the ruling: Gore climate film's 'nine errors'

Here's the judgment, and some comment on coverage of the judgment.

From the editorial: (pay-walled for non-subscribers)

Mr. Justice Michael Burton of the High Court of England and Wales took some of Mr. (Stewart) Dimmock's arguments with a large grain of salt, particularly his insistence that schools give equal time to the cases for and against global warming as a threat. A balanced approach does not require equal time, he wrote; otherwise a teacher might have to show Stalinist propaganda in history class.

But he did find nine areas in An Inconvenient Truth where Mr. Gore went far beyond the large scientific consensus represented by the recent report of the IPCC, the Nobel co-honoree. For instance, there's that bit where Mr. Gore warns about how many people will be under water when Greenland or West Antarctica breaks up and melts. (“The Netherlands, the Low Countries: absolute devastation. … This is what would happen to Manhattan.”) After quoting such warnings, Judge Burton writes: “This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr. Gore's ‘wake-up call.' It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea-level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.”

For context, Gore would have been working with the 2001 third annual assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for his film. I've said in other forums that given what that report had to say about the ice sheets, Gore should have made it clear that that such a collapse wouldn't likely happen in our lifetimes or even this century.

The fourth assessment was tabled earlier this year, and would have been based on the science up to about mid-2006.

Here's some new thinking since then on what might happen to the ice sheets. My source is a June 19 Independent article:

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

Another article that I thought I had referenced but am having trouble finding mentioned that ice sheet collapse can happen more suddenly than first thought because water melting at the surface and making its way to the sheet's base can work as the equivalent of a banana peel.

My point isn't that Gore's film is technically perfect on all aspects of climate change it raises, although it has been widely accepted by the climate change science community (here's a sample review). Let's not forget he's trying to popularize a very complex phenomenon. But on the big picture, he's right. Is the Globe editorial board saying that Gore's entire take on climate change is fundamentally wrong?

The Globe editorial board places itself in a strange position by seemingly accepting that climate change is a real phenomenon, yet still steadfastly rejecting the reality that emissions must start coming down now -- and now by cheap-shotting Mr. Gore.

As they wish.

Anyways, more here on Mr. Dimmock.

Here's an excerpt from an Oct. 11 Guardian article:

Despite his finding of significant errors, Mr Justice Barton said many of the claims made by the film were supported by the weight of scientific evidence and he identified four main hypotheses, each of which is very well supported "by research published in respected, peer-reviewed journals and accords with the latest conclusions of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]."

Odd that I didn't see such an acknowledgement in the Globe editorial. Or maybe not.

British author Mark Lynas makes this point in the Guardian:

... The case serves to illustrate how science and politics collide on climate change: so long as the political debate demands absolute scientific certainty as a prelude to serious action, a tiny seed of doubt on any issue - a single lake or mountain among 10,000 - can be used by the denial lobby to cast doubt on the entire global warming thesis, and so undermine public understanding.

Hence the need to move the debate from science and towards precaution. It is now very likely that global warming this century will present major challenges to the survival of human civilisation - and to our children's and grandchildren's lives. If we listen to the deniers, we are taking a very dangerous gamble - a bit like playing Russian roulette with five bullets and only one empty chamber. That's not a game I want to play with my kids.