Al Gore speaking at Copenhagen, bold added:

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: "These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."

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. ... 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.

What was Gore thinking when he initially spoke? If he was recalling a conversation several years ago, as he insists (love to hear Maslowski's response) then he knew the "figures" weren't "fresh" at all, and said otherwise while knowing that. Of course, it doesn't sound like that came from a (nicely deniable) conversation either, given that Maslowski disclaimed that he would "never try to estimate likelihood... as exact as this."

And never mind the reliability of citing "some of the models" [computer simulations] as your source. If "some" simulations show a certain outcome, it most also mean that others — undoubtedly the majority (given "some") — don't show such an outcome. (For whatever that's worth.)

(This from a man who denounced Bush, loudly, because "he played on your fears." If "playing on fears" to promote action is one of the worst things Al Gore can imagine, then he is certainly, by his own suggested standards, as bad, if not considerably worse, than George Bush (which seems pretty bad, apparently!) — since it seems clear that Al Gore knows full well he is intentionally playing on other people's fears.)

About the title: I was going to apologize here for possibly overstating a bit: I couldn't resist the turn of phrase again, given the title of the previous post. But I reconsidered, after some reflection. Yes, lies seem like a pretty tame form of evil. Lies are not murder, or violent assault. All of us lie, and most of those lies ("I'm late because of traffic") arguably don't do much harm.

But these are not those sort of lies. The most harmful movements in history were all enabled by much tamer-seeming deceptions. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion seemed plausible, and didn't kill anyone, but the Nazis certainly did. The belief that Cambodians who were Western-educated were disloyal may have seemed plausible, and harmless — at first. Marxist analysis which says that the poor are poor because the rich have taken away wealth which belong to them sounds harmless too, until one considers the regimes who derived legitimacy from such a belief. Lies are the crucial mechanism for turning good intentions ("I want to help or protect my family/country/planet") into harmful actions.

Something this important, with this large an impact, cannot be promoted by the same sort of fudging one uses as an excuse for being late — not when people's lives are stake either way.

By the way, while the Arctic ice caps have been shrinking, a bit, in the last several years, it's also true that global sea ice, overall, has remained approximately constant for the last four decades.