Posted on 05/28/2006 12:48:22 PM PDT by Chi-townChief
When there is a new outrage, I have to download some of my existing outrages, to make room. -- Al Gore
CANNES, France -- What he wants you to know is that he has not made a political film. Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" tries to move outside politics and focus on the facts of global warming. Gore says those facts are established, the returns are in, there is almost unanimous scientific agreement about them, and we may have about 10 years before the earth reaches a tipping point from which it cannot recover.
He has been traveling the world for six years making speeches in which this message has evolved. But all of those speeches put together have not had the impact of this new documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim, which is horrifying, enthralling and has the potential, I believe, to actually change public policy and begin a process which could save the earth.
It is not only an important film, but a good one. Guggenheim has found a way to make facts and statistics into drama and passion. He organizes Gore's arguments into visuals that overwhelm us. Gore begins with the famous photograph "Earthrise," which was the first photo taken of Earth from outer space. Then he shows later satellite photos. It is absolutely clear that the white areas are disappearing, that snow and ice is melting, that the shape of continents is changing. The polar areas and Greenland are shrinking, lakes have disappeared, the snows of Kilimanjaro have vanished, and the mountain reveals its naked summit to the sky for the first time in human history.
You owe it to yourself to see this film. If that sounds overdramatic, I understand. I could not have imagined writing that before seeing the film myself. "An Inconvenient Truth" is not Al Gore's "opinion," or anyone's "political position," but a report on a process that the world's environmental scientists -- almost literally every single one of them -- are in agreement about.
Al Gore sits in a hotel room at the Cannes Film Festival and talks about these things. His film received a standing ovation here, but lots of films do. What's extraordinary is what an impact it has had. People are talking about it in that particular tone of voice that indicates they were moved beyond all their expectations. It opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles, and this Friday in Chicago and many other major cities. It will then roll out across the country, building (Gore hopes) on word of mouth, on people telling each other they must see it.
Gore makes no mention in the film of President George W. Bush or any of his policies. He deliberately avoids naming any names or pointing any fingers. "This is not a political movie," he said firmly. "Paramount did a lot of focus groups, and people came out said it was not like 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' It played fair and supported what it said. It appealed equally to Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. You have to remember that the environment used to be a bipartisan issue in the United States. Religious leaders saw it as a matter of respecting God's creation."
In the film, Gore is shown as a man with a mission. Other retired politicians go into business or the media or teaching. Gore has devoted his life to the issue of global warming.
"The other day," he said, "I saw a TV ad, which is being run to try to neutralize this film. It's sponsored by an industry front group underwritten largely by Exxon Mobil. They have a line in the ad: 'CO2. They call it pollution. We call it life.'
"Honest," he said. "This is a real ad. I know it sounds like a spoof from 'Saturday Night Live.' It's funny, and we laugh, but the energy industry has paralyzed America for 20 years with disinformation like that. They're using exactly the same strategy the tobacco industry used. They're saying there is a 'controversy,' and they refer to a 'debate' when in fact the scientific consensus on global warming is definitive.
"We found an internal memo from an energy industry group from 1998, written by their disinformation specialists, saying their objective was: 'Reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.' That's the same language that tobacco used. The easiest defense is to simply deny reality, and claim the truth is not the truth. Otherwise, they have to admit there is a moral imperative for change, and that would offend their big supporters in the oil and energy industries."
Gore says this, and behind him through the hotel window the sun shines down on Cannes and people make deals and go to movies and the world looks much as it always has. Then you go to his movie and discover that they drilled into the polar ice to extract an ice core that's a 650,000-year record of global climatic trends, and the current situation is going off the charts. There is no precedent. You learn that hurricanes in the Gulf and typhoons in the Pacific have suddenly escalated in frequency and strength. That rainfall patterns are being disrupted. That Arctic melting is having an effect on the Gulf Stream. That the 10 hottest years in history have been in the last 14 years. That the number of days annually the Arctic tundra has been frozen enough to support trucks has gone down from 225 to 75.
"There is as strong a consensus on this issue as science has ever had," Gore said. "A survey of more than 928 scientific papers in respected journals shows 100 percent agreement. But a database search of newspapers and magazines shows 57 percent of the articles question global warming, and 43 percent accept it. That's disinformation at work.
"Even in the short run," he said, "we aren't heeding the warnings. Two or three days before Hurricane Katrina, the National Weather Service predicted a hurricane so severe it would create 'medieval conditions' in New Orleans. It issued clear warnings that the levees might be breached and the city flooded. Yet look what happened, and how slow the response was. Hurricane season starts again in a week."
I asked him: "How do you feel about Bush's position on global warming?" -- since his film never mentions the president's name and refers to him only indirectly, when Gore introduces himself: "I used to be the next president of the United States."
Gore shrugged. "There was a big new official study last month that said global warming is real and human activity is largely responsible. The White House, quite, 'accepted the study without endorsing its conclusions.' A White House spokesman said, 'This is only the first of 21 studies.' That sounds good until you realize it is also the latest of hundreds of studies.
"The danger," he said, "is that people will go from denial to despair without stopping in between to ask themselves what action they can take."
In the movie, Gore suggests some actions, like switching to higher-mileage and hybrid cars, developing and supporting clean energy sources, and even something as simple as turning off the lights.
"The leading scientists say we have about 10 years. After that, we reach the tipping point, the point of no return. That doesn't mean the world ends, but it means that civilization as we know it gradually becomes impossible, more quickly than we can imagine.
"Is it too late? Look at the hole in the ozone layer. Everybody got together on that after the Montreal Accord, and the hole has grown a lot smaller, and will have disappeared by the year 2050. So that worked. No, it's not too late. But it's too late to be sitting around."
This interview was last Sunday.
On Monday, an Associated Press story began:
Is President Bush likely to see Al Gore's documentary about global warming?
"Doubt it," Bush said coolly.
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I think you have replied to the wrong person. I haven't commented on the film. I've only commented on Al.
Would that be Art Robinson of Cave Junction, Oregon?
"Leading Man" is Hollywoodese for "Alpha Male."
If global warming is such a threat (and I do believe that we are changing the climate), can't they get someone less dorky to spread the word?
If global warming is such a threat (and I do believe that we are changing the climate), can't they get someone less dorky to spread the word?
In the world of climatologists Al Gore is Mick Jagger.
Barf is right!
The "global warmers" produced the Kyoto treaty of 1997. However, the facts completely disprove what these people are saying about climate change.
Most scientists use facts and logic to reach conclusions. It's no surprise that over 17,000 scientists and engineers have signed a petition calling for rejection of the Kyoto treaty. This overshadows any collection of scientists that have endorsed the treaty.
Well, I heard that carbon dioxide is bad -- it's pollution, isn't it?
There seem to be a few things that your informant forgot to tell you -- like carbon dioxide being an essential trace gas that underpins the bulk of the global food web. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to aerial fertilization with increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population. Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. Doesn't sound too bad to us.
http://tinyurl.com/hn4qg
www.junkscience.com
How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear
Last year, filmmaker Roland Emmerich portrayed a global climate collapse triggered by human activity in his film "The Day After Tomorrow".
The idealists' weapon is organized fear of abrupt climate change, and they interpret any out-of-the-ordinary weather event as evidence of global warming caused by humans. PR consultants deliver the following advice to environmental groups: "You have to structure your information in such a way that it can always be corroborated, no matter what kind of weather we have." The realists, who claim that there is little evidence that meteorological extremes are caused by human activity, are fighting a losing battle. Their dry scientific facts don't stand a chance in a PR battle with the horrific scenarios painted in Technicolor by the climate idealists.
http://tinyurl.com/4djfg
Last year, for example, a survey of climate researchers from all over the world revealed that a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes.
Science losing objectivity
This self-censorship in the minds of scientists ultimately leads to a sort of deafness toward new, surprising insights that compete with or even contradict the conventional explanatory models. Science is deteriorating into a repair shop for conventional, politically opportune scientific claims. Not only does science become impotent; it also loses its ability to objectively inform the public.
For all of Gore's later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT. As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A's to C's as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.
When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil's college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.
"Four eighty-eight! Terrible" Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president's 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.
"Hmmmm. Chemistry. Five-nineteen. He didn't do too well in chemistry."
-Washingon Post Mar 19, 2000
No snow on Kilimanjaro for the first time in human history? That's 6,000 years of the lifetime of a 10 million year old mountain! Well you've convinced ME, al-Gore! We'd better start evacuating all coastal cities NOW!!!!!/s
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8Cover the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").
There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.
About Us:
Friends of Science is a non-profit organization made up of active and retired engineers, earth scientists and other professionals, as well as many concerned Canadians, who believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable. Friends of Science has assembled a scientific advisory board of esteemed climate scientists from around the world to offer a critical mass of current science on global climate and climate change to policy makers, and any interested parties.
We offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of the Kyoto Protocol and present alternative causes for climate change.
http://tinyurl.com/gg8c2
Gore is a twit, but he's a Democrat, therefore he's a genius.
Bush is highly intelligent, but he's a Texas Republican, therefore he is an idiot.
Don't you just love liberal/MSM logic?;)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess the "risk of human-induced climate change". The Panel is open to all members of the WMO and UNEP.
IPCC reports are widely cited [1] [2] in almost any debate related to climate change [3] [4]. The reports have been influential in forming national and international responses to climate change. A small but vocal minority (less than 1.5%) of the scientists involved with the report have accused the IPCC of bias.
The current Chair of the IPCC is Rajendra K. Pachauri, elected in May 2002; previously Robert Watson headed the IPCC.
Rajendra Kumar Pachauri (born August 20, 1940, Nainital, India) was elected chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2002. In 2001 he supported a consumer boycott of ExxonMobil for its stance on global warming, saying it was "a good way to put economic pressure on the US."
British-born U.S. scientist who has worked on atmospheric pollution issues since the 1980s (including ozone depletion, global warming), palaeoclimatic change and was the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change between 1996 and 2002. Watson had previously served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Bill Clinton, been Director for Environment and Head of the Environment Sector Board at the World Bank, and worked at NASA. He is currently Chief Scientist at the World Bank's Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development Network.[1]
The New York Times has characterized Watson as an "outspoken advocate of the idea that human actions - mainly burning coal and oil - are contributing to global warming and must be changed to avert environmental upheavals."
According to one global-warming-skeptical organization, Sovereignty International, Watson said at a 1997 press briefing that "The science is settled [and] we're not going to reopen it here." [
List of scientists opposing global warming consensus
* Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences: "We are quite confident that [the] global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago ... [but] we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future." [1]
* Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University: "At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models." [2]
* William M. Gray, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential." [3]
* Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "... there's increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. ... In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed". [4]
* Sallie Baliunas, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air". [5]
* Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: "So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities." [6]
* Fred Singer, president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project: has changed his position from "The earth is not warming significantly" (paraphrase) [7] to "The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it" [8].
I'm sorry, but it's gotta be asked: Who funded Will Soon's paper?
The study - funded by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the American Petroleum Institute - will be published in the Energy and Environment journal. A shorter paper by Soon and Baliunas appeared in the January 31, 2003 issue of the Climate Research journal.
while there was warming over the last century, much of it occurred before 1940—before industrialization led to increased uses of fossil fuels. Moreover, more recent satellite data on global climate suggest that since 1979 there has been a slight cooling trend in stratosphere temperatures. Indeed, much of the “scientific consensus” purported to global warming theory, especially of the world disaster flavor, comes from distinctly non-scientific sources. Beyond agreement over basic facts such as a slight warming over the last century and increased carbon dioxide levels as well, there continues to be a great deal of uncertainty about global warming and little scientific support for drastic policy measures, according to atmospheric scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen.
That the Kyoto Protocol will be costly, on the other hand, is well known; private and government estimates of the required greenhouse gas reductions place the cost to the U.S. economy alone at $130 billion to $400 billion annually. However, the benefits of a Kyoto-style policy should definitely be questioned. The protocol does not include developing nations such as China and India, which will clearly increase their levels of carbon dioxide emissions as they develop. Energy restrictions that raise costs in the developed world will only accelerate the shift of emissions (and jobs) to the developing world.
If the Kyoto Protocol is simply an exercise in international wealth redistribution, it is wise that the EPA’s recent report focused on real pollutants rather than carbon dioxide. The uncertainty surrounding carbon dioxide’s effect on climate must be resolved before imposing costly and poorly designed policies. As research scientist Dr. Sallie Baliunas, concludes, “Scientific facts gathered in the last 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming as a basis for drastic carbon dioxide emission cuts.”
http://tinyurl.com/mlayx
FreedomWorks : Making Good Policy Good Politics
That particular paper has an interesting history.
I'm not trying to cause trouble. It's just that the interests involved in this thing fascinate me. Personally, from what I've read, I've come to believe it's pretty much "game over" no matter what we do.
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