**Updated–See Below**

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning and Nobel peace prize contributing An Inconvenient Truth contains a number of important errors. But scientists didn’t call Gore on the carpet. That experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the honesty of many climate scientists. Yesterday Al Gore promoted a bold claim that seemed to be quite a stretching the truth again. He claimed that polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years:

“It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this,” said former U.S. Vice President Gore, who joined Scandinavian officials and scientists to brief journalists and delegates. It was Gore’s first appearance at the two-week conference.

This was obviously crazy talk. Here’s a graph that shows the sea ice extent of Arctic ice for 2002 through 2009:

The red line is 2009’s data. As you can see 2009 was a bit lower compared to 2002-2006, but there was more sea ice in 2008 than in 2007 and more ice in 2009 than in 2008. This is still lower than the 1979 to 2000 mean sea ice extent, but the data do not point to zero Arctic sea ice in 5 to 7 years.

Unlike with many of Gore’s claims, the press called him on the carpet with this distortion. The Times reports:

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.

Hopefully journalists will do a better job of fact checking Gore’s claims in the future. A week ago he tried to defuse the ClimateGate letters scandal by saying that the most recent emails were more than 10 years old. Al Gore is just not credible when it comes to matters of science.

**Update**

It appears that Al Gore had a basis for his claim.  The claim is still nuts, but at least in this case he wasn’t just making stuff up. The paper that Gore was likely relying on is here. The graph looks like this: