I still have to watch the Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”. But, it seems that others are now questioning some of the statements made by the former Vice President.
Today, the Wall Street Journal writes about some of the exaggerations in the movie.
Now, his home state newspaper, The Tennessean, is writing critically about Mr. Gore. First about his zinc mining royalties, (Link Here); and also about his outrageously high home electric bills (Link Here).
Even the New York Times, has asked Al Gore to “Cool the Hype” (Link Here).
Even Congress is about to begin some tough questioning concerning Mr. Gore’s global warming arguments. (Link Here).
Lord Monckton has challenged Al Gore to a debate on the question of whether “Our [Man’s] effect on global climate is dangerous”. (Link Here) .
Monckton, a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher during her years as
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said:
“A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and
errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide.”
The economic consequenses of “fixing” global warming, thru the implementation of Carbon caps and carbon credit trading, are profound. Let’s be sure the problem is real before we try to fix it.
It is worth noting, however, that, while Al Gore is being criticized for exaggerating, the underlying science and basic message is, even in these articles, still noted by the criticizing scientists as worthwhile. As with anybody, especially politicians, one must look through the rhetoric to find the truth, but that doesn’t mean truth isn’t there.
The NY Times article is the one I was referring to in the Town Hall Meeting.
There is, btw, the potential for economic growth through any policy that forces change of norms, because they spur entrepreneurship and innovation. I only mention it because you point to potential consequences.
Tom: Thanks for your continued deliberations on this topic.
It’s also possible that Gore has done the explaining, but that in light of the Oscar for his movie, there’s a backlash being launched in the media, scrutinizing him, looking for straw men to knock down. The cost of his energy bills, and whether or not he owns certain kinds of stock, is really not the same issue as whether the bulk of his assertions in the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” represent an accurate and truthful grasp of a real problem that has not, until recently, been on most American’s radar.
Gore has commented already, for example, on his home energy bills and his air miles: He buys “green” energy and other stock to “offset” the extra carbon his lifestyle and speaking creates.
But some in the media are not giving his explanation the attention that they are giving to the backlash, and in politics, as you know, sometimes what is repeated most often wins. If the questions about his air miles or energy bills are repeated more than his answers, what folks will remember most will be the doubts created in their minds by the questions, and not whether Gore’s answers were sufficient. Is that civil or fair? No, but as you know, that’s politics and PR.
And regarding the size of his house and energy bills, I might expect a former vice president to own a larger house and have larger energy bills than the average American. How do his energy bills compare to other past heads of state? Should we compare his energy bill to that of Dan Quayle, or would that be unfair to Gore, since Quayle was never the Republican candidate for president in a general election? And in spite of Gore’s energy bills, does the good Gore does in raising awareness on the issue outweigh some of the damage of his “carbon footprint”? Perhaps.
But discussion along these lines would not get attention in conservative press or blogs.
In your fourth post on this topic, you cited a study that said global warming is not a high priority issue for most Americans–-but you didn’t notice and/or mention that it was a 2003 study. A lot can change in four years.
And this is one of those times where you may have to consider whether it could be a life-or-death issue, and not a minor issue to be left up to the (old?) polls. You claim your method has been to take a strong stand on the important issues, but on others, to let the will of the people decide. Some questions:
- Does good leadership on this issue mean listening to the polls, even if the majority may be unaware of a grave danger to their future and future generations?
- Does it require more research?
- Or is the overwhelming consensus of most US and world scientists sufficient?
- How do you know if you can trust the skeptical public figures and scientists, like Lord Monckton and (the somewhat discredited?) Dr. Art Robinson and his (similarly discredited?) Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine?
- If you’re going to be this skeptical of Gore, would it not be fair to be as skeptical of Robinson and Monckton?
While the costs of carbon credit trading may be high according to some estimates, a push for cleaner, renewable energy technologies and conservation would also stimilate the economy in new ways. But I’m glad that you’re still open to the possibility that Gore may be right, or right enough to warrant action.
As I said at the start, thanks again for your continued deliberations on this.
Senator Neuville,
As a researcher into aspects of the climate system, I would like to help you in your search for a better understanding of the debate on climate change. The articles you discuss in your online post (Post 5 of March 19) view the topic from a mainly critical viewpoint. Since that view is in contrast to that of the majority of climate scientists that I know and whose research I have followed for 15 years, I hope I can point you toward a few sources of information that should be helpful.
First, I would like to point out that the “debates” and “controversy” in science that are so often reported in the popular media as uncertainty is actually a reflection the process by which science operates. In science a collection of observations (data) leads to a theory that describes the natural process that would produce those data. Subsequent research attempts to poke holes in the theory by creating new observations from different vantage points or under different conditions. If the existing theory cannot explain the new data then it is modified or replaced with a new one. Long-standing theories such as plate tectonics, evolution or climate change persist primarily because they still do the best job at explaining the continuing stream of new experiments and observations that scientists continue to make. Discrepancies in the details are inevitable and even expected in science but unless the theory can explain the overwhelming majority of observations it will be rejected. If the theory continues to succeed at explaining the observations it becomes more accepted by the research community as the best available means by which we understand that part of our world.
Second is the website of the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/) and their recently released Summary for Policymakers (http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf) that summarizes a consensus view of many of the world’s best climate scientists about how climate has behaved over the past few hundred years. Whatever your political feelings toward the U.N., this program has been a driving force in focusing the efforts of international climate researchers so that each assessment is of as high quality as possible. If anything, the general feeling within the research community has been that the IPCC assessments tend to err on the conservative side of what some research has predicted for the future. Probably the most important work of the IPCC has been to record the history of climate change theory since the first report in 1991. The reports have shown the increasing confidence that scientists have gained as experiment after experiment and observation after observation show that human activities have and continue to contribute to the changes in the climate system. Predictions for the future still disagree, but the range of disagreement also continues to narrow.
Third is a website called RealClimate.org. This is a group of climate scientists who are actively conducting research in their respective fields of study (i.e. conducting research on climate and publishing peer-reviewed research articles) who write posts to respond to climate-related issues that appear in the popular media. They have reviewed (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/) Mr. Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” as well as the recent N.Y. Times article that you mentioned in your post (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/broad-irony/#more-419).
As a glaciologist I study how glaciers and ice sheet have flowed in the past and present. Atmospheric chemistry is not my specialty, but since part of my research involves the response of ice to changes in climate, I am familiar with much of the current research. My concern with the presentation of climate change in the popular media and on your website is that the issue is often viewed through politically polarized glasses. One of the results is that the media give equal representation to a few vocal critics who speak out against the consensus view of a large majority of the scientific community (as represented by the IPCC assessment reports). As one of your constituents I hope that you are able to take the time to learn more about the view of the majority of climate researchers and perhaps to learn more about the science itself. Please let me know if I can be of any help. I would be happy to try to answer questions or refer you to researchers who are more qualified than I am.
Kind regards,
Brian Welch
1000 Saint Olaf Ave.
Northfield, MN 55057
Assistant Professor
Physics Department
Saint Olaf College
Northfield, MN 55057
Brian, thanks for the comment. In the book, “Unstoppable Global Warming, every 1500 years” Fred Singer and Dennis Avery discuss glacier core samples taken by several groups of researchers since 2000. There have also been cores samples taken from ocean sediment too. All show, according to the authors, that global warming is cyclical, most likely caused by the sun, and that there have been many periods when earth’s temperature was much warmer than today.
Three questions: have you read Singer’s book? What is your view on the validity of the core sample studies. What studies exist to contradict the results of the core studies referenced in the book? ( I am aware of none )
In response to the question “What studies exist to contradict the results of core studies referenced in the book (by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery)?”:
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers, p. 8
(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
http://www.ipcc.ch/
They base their work on peer-reviewd scientific research, but they are not scientists. From their web site:
“The IPCC does not carry out research nor does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature.”
The other issue regarding Singer and Avery is that very little hard data exists in the form of reliable and consistent records regarding solar activity (I have some students researching global warming, so I’m reading papers that juggle these things lately). Singer and Avery can offer solar activity as a hypothesis or guess, but until there’s more hard evidence proving that cyclical solar activity was actually present during warm periods, it’s just a guess, not a theory that accounts best for the data. The data does show very highly elevated CO2 levels in the atmopsphere now as compared to previous ages, not solar activity, as far as I understand it.
Besides solar activity and volcanoes, there’s also speculation regarding cyclical changes in the earth’s orbit as having an effect on climate change (the earth does not move in a circle around the sun but in an elipses, etc.).
But scientists think that the rise in CO2 is so dramatic, and so much of it related to industry, automobiles and energy generation, that the consensus seems to be that the CO2 is the cause of the warming.
I said page 8, but it’s actually page 10:
“The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the
conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past fifty years can be explained
without external forcing, and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone. {4.8, 5.2, 9.4, 9.5,…}”
Senator Neuville,
I am familiar with Fred Singer’s work, but not that particular book. I have read others of Singer’s publications and numerous quotes in the press. As many climate researchers have found, it is difficult to debate Dr. Singer because he utilizes numerous arguments even though they repeatedly have been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers. I will try to describe a few of the issues you raised and refer you to some of the sources that I have used myself.
The idea that long-term climate change is affected by orbital cycles of the Earth has been long recognized (as far back as Milankovitch’s papers in the early 1900’s). These orbital patterns (the degree of “ellipticity” of the orbit, the tilt of the rotational axis, and the orientation of the axis with respect to the sun) interact to control global climate changes on time-scales of 100000, 41000, and 23000 years respectively. From 3-2 million years ago there were global ice advances roughly every 41,000 years. For the last million years the 100,000 year pattern has been dominant, apparently due to the larger size of the recent ice sheets. One research article (Zachos et al., 2001, Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present, Science, v. 292, p. 686) that discusses the long-term record (back to 65 million years ago) based on ocean sediment records can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/292/5517/686. You can purchase the article online or obtain it from the St. Olaf or Carleton libraries.
In this regard Singer and Avery are correct: there have been many times in the past when the climate system has changed dramatically, even more than is currently predicted for the next century. However, when we look at the paleo-climate record in ice cores, tree rings, ocean and lake sediments, corals and so on, we see that the past 10,000 years have been quite stable compared to the past 100,000 years. Indeed, these years that coincide with the development of human civilization are actually the anomaly out of the past several hundred thousand years.
See this graph of temperature records for the past 400,000 years, 50,000 years, and 1,000 years to get an idea of what the long-term and recent climate records look like (http://www.pages.unibe.ch/cgi-bin/WebObjects/products.woa/wa/product?id=25). The graphs are derived from published papers referenced on the website. The top two plots are graphs of Deuterium and Oxygen isotope ratios that are used as “proxy” records for temperature - there is extensive scientific literature supporting this relationship. The bottom graph shows the northern temperature changed over the past 1,000 years. What is interesting here is the relative warmth and stability of global temperature during the past 10,000 years and how large the climate changes have been in the past, prior to human civilization.
My understanding of the scientific understanding of human impacts on the climate system and what may lie in the future rests upon our understanding of how various processes in the environment (and solar system) can “force” changes in climate. Paleo-climate records show us what climate has done in the past. We are able to test our theories on what drives those changes (the “forcings”) by using numerical computer models to try to replicate the paleo-climate record. The more closely the model results match the paleo-climate observations, the more reliable is our understanding of the forcings.
From the many studies that have established the various forcings that have influenced the climate of Earth’s past, we know that orbital patterns, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and ocean circulation are all very important forcings. When it comes to modern climate change the question we’re trying to answer is whether the changes we’re making to greenhouse gas concentrations will constitute a significant forcing that could result in changes similar to those seen in the past. What I think would be the worst-case scenario (and not one that is predicted by any climate researchers at this time) is that we see a global change of a magnitude similar to the changes seen over the past 500,000 years. Such a change would be outside the experience of human civilization. The real question is how large (and how rapid) a change can we absorb without endangering our economic, social, and ethical interests.
Two books that do an excellent job explaining the long-term and short-term climate history and the causes of abrupt climate changes in the past are “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises” from the National Academy of Sciences (http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10136) and “The Two-Mile Time Machine” by Richard Alley (http://www.amazon.com/Two-Mile-Time-Machine-Abrupt-Climate/dp/0691102961/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-9326711-9789422?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174444154&sr=8-1). The second is basically a version of the first book but written for the general public.