Inconvenient inaccuracies
A British court has found some inaccuracies in Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth:
- The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
- The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
- The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.
- The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.
- The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
- The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
- The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
- The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
- The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
- The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
- The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.
Comments
Sigh.
Instead of going over this point by point, I'll just make a few.
First, it was a British court. This is the same country where libel laws place the burden of proving false on the libeled instead of the libeler. More importantly, it was the court instead of the peer process used in science.
Second, An Inconvenient Truth is a film not science. It's a good film by a well meaning politician but it has not suffered the rigors of the peer review process. If you read the scientific papers, other than a very tiny minority of kooks and those with questionable motives, the debate is over. It's here and we are contributing. The only debates left are how much are we contributing, how severe will be the effect on the biosphere and to what degree do we adjust to affect it.
Finally, I will address one point. Katrina. Post-Katrina, I told a friend, God help us if the global warming zealots latch on to this because there's a good chance next year there won't be one and that will only give ammo to the skeptics. And that's exactly what happened.
Gore was mistaken in his initial claim. He took very fresh evidence and extrapolated it to something much larger. A very dangerous move and a course no reasonable scientists would take. It should be noted that in the DVD version of the film there is an addition at the end which addresses this problem. He should be criticized for the initial error but he should also should given the benefit of doing what science does and dogma does not. Admitting the error and correcting it.
But back to Katrina. No, there is no conclusive evidence that global warming has an effect on the creation of hurricanes. Quite frankly, hurricanes are the most complex weather phenomena in existence and we still don't really know why sometimes they form and sometimes they do not. However, we do know with certainty that once they do form if they encounter heat, the will strengthen. We also know for certainty the Gulf of Mexico's average temperature has increased dramatically. For this reason, when storms hit certain regions of the Gulf, they explode.
Just like Katrina did.
The reason we didn't have another potential Katrina in 2006 is because other factors kept every storm out of the gulf.
Bottom line is weather is complicated. You can't boil it down to bromides and I have criticized Gore for that very tactic. Instead of finding the latest popular screed which supports a position, I encourage everyone to take the time to explore the science. It's difficult to understand and may take some time, but it is worth it.
Posted by: griftdrift | October 9, 2007 01:43 PM
Correction. I think I had the libel thing reversed. Anyway, my point is British courts are screwy. I think we can all agree on that.
Posted by: griftdrift | October 9, 2007 01:44 PM
And don't they still wear those silly looking wigs? I mean, come on... how can you ever state as fact anything coming from people in silly looking wigs?
Posted by: Trev | October 9, 2007 03:30 PM
Not only do they wear silly wigs, they talk funny. They couldn't be right on anything. Yeah, good idea, let's bash the British because they figured out that Al Gore is wrong.
Posted by: Joe | October 9, 2007 04:41 PM