This whole global warming thing is one of my pet peeves, and I try to post on it when I can. See this post, which is probably my best on the subject thus far. If The Day After Tomorrow wasn't bad enough already, Al "I invented the Internet" Gore has a "documentary" coming out. It is titled An Inconvenient Truth, which I find a highly ironic title for a film which the people profiting off it are propogating a lie as fact (and no, that was not intended as a cheap shot at The Da Vinci Code, which I did see, and would asses the book as better).

Anyway, An Inconvenient Truth even has its own blog, which is kind of funny. But I would like to set the record straight with some truths about the film. First, Dr. Roy Spencer had a TCS Daily column up yesterday with some "Questions for Al Gore," after seeing the film. He poses eight questions, and here's number one:

"Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and ice calving off of glaciers and falling into the ocean, are only recent phenomena associated with global warming? You surely know that hurricane experts have been warning congress for many years that the natural cycle in hurricanes would return some day, and that our built-up coastlines were ripe for a disaster (like Katrina, which you highlighted in the movie). And as long as snow continues to fall on glaciers, they will continue to flow downhill toward the sea. Yet you made it look like these things wouldn't happen if it weren't for global warming. Also, since there are virtually no measures of severe weather showing a recent increase, I assume those graphs you showed actually represented damage increases, which are well known to be simply due to greater population and wealth. Is that right?"

You can read the other eight here. Also, on Thursday, Patrick Michaels, "senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown" (I have to dig out my copy) had a column in the Washington Times about the movie. He has a pretty damning quote from Gore himself:

So here's what Al told Grist Magazine about global warming: "I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."

Michaels also hits the nail on the head with why "global warming" has cropped up:

"Then issues compete for public attention (i.e. funding). Presenting them in as important a light as possible is required by such competition. And without funding, there's no research, which means, for most scientists, a new job.
That's "The Inconvenient Truth" about global warming. Prominent scientists feel it's perfectly fine to exaggerate, and so does the former vice president."

I did some poking around in the campus library and found this jewel:

It is from 1976, and is out of print, not surprisingly. Now the science of this book may be questionable, but the author, Lowell Ponte, says in his foreward (page xvi), "It is acold fact: the global cooling presents humandkind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenege we have had to deal with for ten thousand years" (emphasis his). Interesting.

I have done some reading on climate change, and am maintaing a Listmania! list at Amazon.com to keep track of it.

Posted by Ryan S. on Friday, May 26, 2006 at 1:38 PM | Permalink |