NUMBERS MAN MISSES POINT

Tim Lambert, obviously more comfortable working with numbers than with words, gets stuck into an ad from The Competitive Enterprise Institute critical of Al Gore's wasteful air travel promoting his Enviro Epic:

This screen capture shows that Gore's CO2 meter is about 683,000,000, while the one for the average person is 177, so apparently Gore's flying around produces 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person does in their regular activities.

This would be a valid criticism if the ad purported to accurately show emissions figures but since it doesn't, it isn't. If you watch Gore's emissions counter at the start of the ad you'll see that his first cross-country flight registers around 90, way below the 1,600 estimated by Lambert. So, it should be obvious the ad isn't going for numerical accuracy. That Lambert fails to pick up on the obvious is no real surprise.

Lambert then attempts to justify Gore's frequent flying, apparently in a gigantic megaphone equipped 747:

So, if Gore doesn't fly around the country to warn people about global warming, no-one hears his message.

Hey, Gore invented the internet, maybe he's onto something with the megaphone-747 thing.