There are sins of commission and sins of omission. The former is when you do something that is wrong. The latter is when you neglect to do something that is right. In the case of Jim Sutherland's opinion piece above, he neglected to fully research the subject that he was writing about. The result is a diatribe that is easily the worst example of journalism that I have ever seen in a newspaper. If it wasn't about such an important subject, I might have simply thrown it in the trash. However, it needs to be dissected line by line in order to expose the fraud.
 
1. Actually, Gore held the first congressional hearings on climate change back in the 1970's and 1980's. He was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of the issue. That's a bit more serious than "one or two undergraduate classes".
 
2.This is a very effective tactic. Use hyperbole to falsely portray someone's actions, and then condemn them for being hyperbolic. Sutherland, of course, gives no numbers to bolster his case. Being a wise-ass is sufficient to disguise the fact that he knows nothing about the topic at hand.
 
3.Sutherland neglects to mention that "records" weren't kept during "geological history". Thermometers came into existence only a few hundred years ago. Writing came into existence a few thousand years ago. Gore is, of course, refering to recorded history, not geological history.
 
4.This is true, but it simply shows Sutherland's ignorance of science again. Thousands of years ago, Red Deer was under ice, due to the ice ages. Millions of years ago, Red Deer had a tropical climate because of continental drift (ie, Red Deer was at that time much closer to the equator).
 
5.I thought that's exactly what Gore's graph did. It showed that temperatures and carbon dioxide levels shot up during the last 100 years. Isn't that a nano-second compared to the 400,000 years of data we have from the ice cores?
 
6.Sutherland drags in various facts about CO² concentrations and other greenhouse gases. All of his facts are true. However, they are meaningless because they weren't linked together in any kind of rigorous analysis. They were just spit out because they looked a bit strident on the page. For example, Jim states that CO² represents only 0.03% of the atmosphere. Well, duh! What's your point, Jim!? Is it that 0.03% is VERY, VERY TINY NUMBER? Anyone with 30 seconds and half a brain can go on Wikipedia and find that number. However, it takes someone with a bit of honesty to read on and find out how all the pieces of the atmospheric puzzle fit together.
 
7.Dragging in 30 year old science to discredit modern science makes no sense at all. In the late 1800's, respected astronomers thought that the "canals" on mars indicated the possibility of intelligent life there. Using Sutherland's tactics, we might use those now discredited views to say that NASA scientists are a bunch of idiots because their predecessors didn't know what they were talking about.
 
8.Solar activity does indeed have an effect on weather from month to month and year to year. This is something that all climatologists know about. But unlike Sutherland, they are honest enough and smart enough to separate its effects from those of unprecedentedly high levels of CO².
 
9.Kyoto is an easy straw man to bash, since Liberal inaction made it all but impossible for the Conservatives to attain it. What we are talking about in 2007 are serious efforts to lower carbon emissions--something Sutherland obviously couldn't give a damn about anyways. He would have us continue on our merry way because he is either too lazy or too ignorant or too corrupt to do any serious research on the subject.