Al Gore, Bungled

And you thought North American journalists screwed stuff up. The original Maktoob article (Maktoob is Jordan based) is gone, but Marc Sheppard's American Thinker post gives the gist of it:

“The North Pole ice cap is 40 percent gone already and could be completely and totally gone in the winter months in the next 5 to 10 years.”

Such thaw, cautioned Gore, “could increase sea levels by 67 metres” and that “each one metre of sea level rise (SLR) is associated with 100 million climate refugees in the world.” That’s up a full 47 meters from the already horrifying predictions he’s made previously.

The swiftly corrected version, however, reads:

Gore said if Greenland and West Antarctica, made up of massive ice sheets, were to melt it could increase sea levels by 6-7 metres, speaking in the heart of an oil-rich region not known for its regard for the environment.

In other words, 1) Gore is not talking about polar ice (which lies over water so would do very little to raise sea-levels were it to melt), and 2) is not talking about something that is due to happen in the next five to 10 years, though both the Greenland and Antarctic sheets have indeed begun to shed mass.

Maktoob claims to have "checked the tape" and Gore did apparently refer to arctic ice-cap disappearing in the "winter" months, so he might have reversed his seasons inadvertantly. Also, this statement seems a bit mysterious to me:

"Greenland and West Antarctica are such massive amounts of ice each one of would lead to a six to seven metre increase in sea level if it were to melt. And both West Antarctica and Greenland are beginning to melt," he said.

The six/seven metre is right enough for the Greenland sheet but, were the Antarctic ice cap to melt (not something anyone expects anytime soon), the average sea level would rise, you guessed it... 67 meters (230 feet).

So more confusion here, but more likely on the part of Maktoob than Mr. Gore.