Al Gore, an Inconvenient Man

Al Gore and global warming are not two subjects you'd expect to add up to the buzziest film at Cannes. But there's Al being celebrated in Cannes for his docudrama “An Inconvenient Truth,” doing the celebrity thing at the LA opening, power-walking a green carpet in Washington. Ana Marie Cox reports from Washington that “the wonky audience generated about much heat as Jennifer Lopez's little finger (a unit of measurement known as the ‘Gigli’).”

The movie is, essentially, a two-hour PowerPoint presentation, enlivened by periodic shots of Al Gore frowning contemplatively at computer screens, and full of dire predictions and horrifying scenarios for the Earth's future: rising sea-levels, hordes of refugees, parching draughts. But the crowd at the National Geographic Society saw it as the world's longest campaign ad.

Still Gore’s gone from media darling to the summer's most unlikely movie star, funny, vulnerable, disarming, self-effacing as NBC's Katie Couric called him. Gore is now a pop culture icon and bona fide member of the scientific intelligentsia.

It’s ironic to hear Gore pitching scientific accuracy. He earned a D and a C+ in his natural sciences courses at Harvard. Though Al got an undergrad degree in government, he dropped out of two graduate programs (in law and divinity). Now Gore has become a teacher/preacher on the subject of climate change.

That didn't stop him from demeaning respected scientists during his Today appearance. There's really not a debate. The debate is over. The scientific community has reached as strong a consensus as you will ever find in science. There are a few oil companies and coal companies that spend millions of dollars a year to put these pseudo-scientists out there pretending there is a debate, complained Gore. Apparently, anyone who disagrees with Gore is a pseudo-scientist in the pocket of the energy companies.

The “Inconvenient Truth” is that this guy could have been President.

Let’s take a closer look at a few of the facts of Gore’s non-debatable consensus.

The average temperature of the earth since it began being measured consistently (from 1880 to 2004) has been 14.0 +/- 0.7 Centigrade. During that time the temperature increased only 0.6 C. Thus the entire increase over 124 years is within the +/- error bars of the average temperature measurement.

Of the 0.6 C increase, about 0.45 C occurred before the end of WWII. Thus the increase during the last 60 years (of the most significant carbon emission from fossil fuel in history) is 0.15 C, or 0.025 C per decade. Based on that measured trend, in the next century we might expect to see a temperature increase of 0.25 C.

What causes the tiny warming then? Well the sun is the major culprit but the greenhouse effect has its way too. The major greenhouse gas is not carbon dioxide, as much as the global warming fanatics would have you believe it is. No, water is the major warming gas, accounting for 90-95% of the greenhouse effect. The other greenhouse gasses include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and traces of a few others.

There is no monotonic relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide change and global mean temperature trend -- global mean temperature has both risen and fallen during the period atmospheric carbon dioxide has been continuously rising.

Of the carbon dioxide emission, humans produce only 3.4% of it by breathing, burning fossil fuels, etc, the remainder comes from natural sources such as volcanoes.

Furthermore the temperature effect of carbon dioxide is just logarithmic, not linear or super-linear. Thus, if we consider the heating since the Industrial Revolution due to carbon dioxide alone, the first half of the heating was due to an increase of only 20 parts per million (from 280 to 300) while the second half of the heating required an increase of another 260 parts per million. It is significantly diminishing returns.

And is this bad? We already saw that the temperature rise was tiny and it’s not obviously detrimental. In fact, a more measurable effect is the benefit of the increased atmospheric carbon on crop yields, accounting for a rise in food production of 15% since 1950. Then there is the benefit to forests and to the natural wildlife habitat and to the reduction of deserts.

Then where do the Inconvenient Truths come from if not from the data? Ah, this is where it gets rather contentious because the big warming numbers come not from measurements but from computer models that make an enormous range of assumptions. What’s more, the climate models include positive feedbacks (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response in the models. There is no evidence the planet includes any such feedback effects or behaves in a similar manner.

In fact, a new study released this week by the National Center for Policy Analysis, Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts looks at a wide variety of climate matters, from global warming and hurricanes to rain and drought, sea levels, arctic temperatures and solar radiation. It concludes that the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21st century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change.

The Climate Change study concluded that half the observed 20th century warming occurred before 1940 and cannot be attributed to human causes, and changes in solar radiation account for 71 percent of the variation in global surface air temperature from 1880 to 1993.

Yet there is a sense of hysteria permeating the media and intellectual circles driven by the former Vice-President and his movie. A Time Magazine cover story warns us to “be very worried.” A new television ad, sponsored by the group Environmental Defense, depicts global warming as a speeding train headed straight for a little girl standing on the tracks. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle states that scientists have long been warning that the world must cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 70 percent, as soon as possible, if we're to have a fighting chance of stabilizing the climate. The Gore movie and web site predict a great many evil things: sea levels may rise by 20 feet, the Arctic and Antarctic ice will likely melt, heat waves will be more frequent and more intense, and deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years--to 300,000 people a year. Polar bears will drown. There is a proposal to create a $300 billion clean-energy fund for developing countries through a tax on international currency transactions.

At a time when millions in Africa and Asia are dying from malnutrition, bad water, AIDS, malaria and genocide while millions more in China and India are being raised from the depths of poverty by industrialization, Gore and his environmentalist friends simply ignore the former and impede the latter. They'd rather worry about global warming and spend enormous amounts of money on a potential future that if it comes will be so gradual that the people of the world will have generations to adjust to it. Have they no shame?

The world should thank President Bush for breathing new life into the stagnant climate-change debate when he announced in 2001 that he wouldn’t pursue ratification of Kyoto and then formed a coalition of the willing to pursue technological solutions. But that’s for another post.