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by Joseph Bast
A friend invited me to a screening of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s film about global warming, when it arrived in Chicago recently. It was sponsored by an environmental group and the theater was filled with Gore fans. They seemed to love it. I found it frightening.
In the style of a previous generation of propaganda films, Gore substitutes vivid images of the alleged effects of global warming for an accurate account of the scientific debate. We see glaciers calving into the sea, giant storms sweeping through resort areas, burning deserts, even a cartoon polar bear swimming aimlessly, searching for a place to rest.
But all of the events in this movie have been occurring since before human activities could possibly have caused them. Glaciers have broken off into seas for millions of years; storms obviously predate modern civilization and its emissions; and real-life polar bears know better than to head into open water during the Arctic summer. At any given time in earth’s history, some glaciers have been expanding while others were shrinking.
Early in the movie, Gore shows us images of Mount Kilimanjaro’s disappearing snow cap and blames the loss on global warming. But scientists say the disappearing snow is due to changes in land use at the bottom of the mountain, causing drier air to rise up the mountainside.
Later, we see ice melting in the Arctic, Greenland and the Antarctic. More evidence of global warming? Not necessarily. Scientists say temperatures in the Arctic were higher during the 1930s and the current melting is probably part of a natural cycle caused by ocean currents, not greenhouse gases. And only small parts of Greenland and the Antarctic are melting: Snow and ice are accumulating as rapidly in other parts, for a net loss of around zero.
Gore ignores these inconvenient facts because, he says, the only people who disagree with him are oil-company stooges. At one point, he compares scientists who disagree with him to apologists for the tobacco industry.
So what are we to make of Tim Ball at the University of Winnipeg, Robert Balling at Arizona State, Sallie Baliunas at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Bob Carter at James Cook University in Australia, Randall Cerveny at Arizona State, John Christy at the University of Alabama, Robert Davis at the University of Virginia, Christopher Essex at the University of Western Ontario, Oliver Frauenfeld at the University of Colorado, Wibjörn Karlèn at Stockholm University and Christopher Landsea at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?
And David Legates at the University of Delaware, Henry Linden at IIT, Richard Lindzen at MIT, Ross McKitrick at the University of Guelph, Patrick Michaels at the University of Virginia, Dick Morgan at the University of Exeter, Tim Peterson at Carleton University, Roger Pielke Jr. at the University of Colorado, Eric Posmentier at Dartmouth, Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama and Boris Winterhalter at the University of Helsinki?
All are respected authorities on climatology, working at respected universities, who appear regularly in peer-reviewed science journals. Some, like Lindzen, are undisputed leading thinkers in their fields. Yet all dispute Gore’s alarmist claims.
So whom are you going to believe, Al Gore or real scientists?
There are plenty of other errors and exaggerations in the movie, which people more expert than I are documenting and exposing. Suffice it to say, “An Inconvenient Truth” contains very little truth, and a big helping of propaganda.
What frightens me is the probability that Al Gore himself believes the hype he’s trying to sell. Those who’ve watched him give his PowerPoint presentation and have discussed it with him say he does.
Everyone has the right to run for president, even several times, and apparently Gore plans to seek his party’s nomination in 2008.
But do we want to put the incredible powers of the presidency in the hands of what Eric Hoffer called a “true believer,” someone who ignores evidence and opinions that contradict his faith?
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