Al Gore recently received a Nobel Award for his efforts to inform the world about a positive correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and apparent increases in global temperature. I myself watched his movie called An Inconvenient Truth and was impressed by how good an argument he made. There truly are solid measurements that atmospheric CO2 levels have been increasing during humankinds’ use of fossil fuels. There is also some solid data indicating that global average temperatures have increased, and photographic records showing glacier and ice pack volume reductions. It seems easy to conclude the presence of increased carbon dioxide, mostly contributed by humankind’s burning of fossil fuels, has CAUSED global warming and the trend will increase in the future.
Ah, but not so fast! There are some facts that have been ignored, and the people promoting that dramatic behavior change must be made, appear to have an economic or political agenda to promote, rather than actually investigate the facts. In addition, there appears to be a classic logic error being made: Correlation does not PROVE causation.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Increases in CO2 probably do reflect infrared back to the earth’s surface. However, AT MOST it contributes only 2% to the reflected heat! That amount would result only if there were no other mechanisms of heat transfer involved in cooling the earth. There is plenty of evidence supporting the opinion of many educated climatologists, that the average temperature of the earth is the result of very complex interactions and CO22 to the atmosphere, there is certainly NOT justification for the drastic measures being promoted by these special interest groups. atmospheric concentration is an extremely small part of the mechanism. While it probably would be wise to better understand the contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming, and it probably would be wise to reduce current production of CO There are political reasons why these groups want economic and cultural change, but not scientific reasons. Their basis for change is very simple minded…. besides, the “simple” conclusion supports what they are promoting….
The problem is that the error logic: “If B follows A, then B was caused by A” has not been recognized by the politically motivated, but simple minded, proponents of this cause. In their zeal to impose simple minded change on people and nations, they suppress evidence that does not support their position. That is political activity, not science. (In fact, there is scientific evidence that naturally occurring CO2 increases may be CAUSED by pre-existing global warming trends. Certainly, humankinds’ contribution of CO2 is measurable and has increased since 1940. However, on a global scale, the human contribution remains only a small fraction of the total planetary CO2 content.)
Mr. Gore himself has both suppressed and twisted testimony in Senate hearings on global warming so that his agenda is promoted. Mr. Richard S. Lindzen, an MIT climatological expert’s testimony before the Senate committee was spun so that contrary evidence would not be supported. Feel free to read his comments in this link:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
Consequently, it is a travesty that in the Nobel committee’s judgment, Mr. Gore was recognized for his contribution to scientific truth. It is obvious to this blog writer that Mr. Gore is a much better politician that he is a scientist. In addition, he either is so simple minded that he can’t see his logic error, or he is so intent on promoting his agenda, that facts and logic don’t matter… Unfortunately, the media, celebrities, and most politicians appear to be equally simple minded…. any contrary discussion is greeted with disdain and labeled as evil capitalism.
I have included a small sampling of the contrarian viewpoint, along with links for you to perform your own research, below.
I am in favor of reducing/controlling our CO2 production. I think there is a balance to economic, energy, and environmental needs. I believe our social and governmental policies should be based on sound, scientific, truth-based decisions, NOT on politically motivated, popular consensus proposals.
Please research before you decide:
All of the information on the following pages was copied from sources on the following website:
http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/OSGWD.htm
The Gospel according to Gore
by Mary Ellen Tiffany Gilder
You may have missed it, but April 22nd was National Day of Hope, Prayer and Reflection about Global Warming - presumably not by the edict of the current administration. In the political world Bush is becoming more and more isolated in his stance on this subject. Other public figures are acquiescing one by one. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once seemed likely to be an unmovable bastion of big-business conservatism, has been converted and is on the cover of Newsweek, twirling a fragile and endangered world on his finger and announcing draconian measures to limit carbon emissions in California. He's a believer.
Global warming has galvanized the developed world. Liberals sound the warning, Conservatives respond with gradually mounting enthusiasm. Clergy fall to their knees in prayer and repentance. Atheists find new purpose and a moral lodestone. Americans slap concerned bumper stickers on their SUVs and flock to "An Inconvenient Truth".
Or do they?
Gore assures us of it, stating that there is no controversy. He refers to the multitudes of the world's top scientists voicing unmitigated concern through the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. He cites a study of a random sample of 928 articles on global warming, none of which were found to express doubt. There is a consensus.
However, Michael Crichton (best known for his novels but also a graduate of
| "Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. "Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. "Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus." |
Think of Semmelweiss and puerperal fever. Think of Goldberger and pellagra. Even Gore's favorite example of continental drift highlights the folly of the scientific consensus that mocked Alfred Wegener's theory of Pangaea for half a century.
Al Gore Goes to
In his film Gore urges an auditorium full of students to "separate the truth from the fiction and the accurate connections from the misunderstandings". In keeping with that exhortation I watched the An Inconvenient Truth with careful attention to the research on which its arguments were founded. At the time of my second viewing, I began to take notes and read the scientific literature.
Within the first half hour of the film it is clear that Gore does not see global warming merely as a future threat. He states, "Now we're beginning to see the impact in the real world." The example of this impact that made the biggest impression on me was that of Lake Chad in
The first site that came up was Wikipedia, where I learned that, indeed,
The shrinking of the snows of Kilimanjaro is another dramatic example. Scientists have noted this phenomenon for over a hundred years. A search of the scholarly literature immediately produced Georg Kaser's 2004 article in The International Journal of Climatology on the subject. He states that all three of the major East African glaciers have seen significant retreat since the late 1800s. Kaser writes, "The dominant reasons for this strong recession in modern times are reduced precipitation and increased availability of shortwave radiation due to decreases in cloudiness". This dryness began relatively abruptly around 1880. "In contrast to this 'switch' in moisture conditions, there is no evidence of an abrupt change in air temperature.... Temperature increases in the tropics on the surface and in the troposphere have been little in recent decades compared with the global trend." The very shape of the glacier speaks out against Gore's theory: melting from temperature rise "would round-off and destroy the observed features within a very short time, ranging from hours to days". Indeed, a year and a half record from 2000-2002 showed that air temperatures never exceeded -1.6 degrees C (in fact, Gore's friend Lonnie Thompson reports that the temperatures never rose above -2 degrees C during his research there), and permafrost extends far below the edge of the glacier. (Kaser et al, Int. J. Climatol. 24: 329-339 (2004)) In other words, not only is the recession of Mt. Kilimanjaro's snowy peak probably not due to CO2 -induced temperature rise, it isn't even driven by temperature rise at all.
At this point I would like to make a note about methodology. To find the papers cited throughout this article I searched Google Scholar and occasionally individual publications, such as Science. (For example, when I wanted to find articles about Lake Chad, I typed in "
Perhaps you are wondering where Gore got his article proving the undisputed "consensus" on global warming. The original review of the scientific literature was published in a non-peer reviewed essay section of Science, written by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at UCSD. Her search included articles with "climate change" as a keyword. The study was cited and expanded in a paper in the political journal, Globalizations, which added the analysis of popular media. A statement by Dr. Oreskes that was not included in the Globalizations article read, "The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility…." In light of that, I encourage you to look at the evidence for yourself, but I recommend you start with peer-reviewed articles before resorting to the essay section of Science, let alone the science section of Globalizatons or Newsweek.
There is one piece of evidence that is particularly accessible to medical students for critical analysis: Gore pointed out the potential for increases in infectious diseases due to expansion of areas suitable for insect vectors. To illustrate this he listed fifteen new or recently resurgent diseases: Ebola, Arena virus, Hanta virus, SARS, multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR TB), E. coli 0157:H7, Lyme disease, legionnaire's disease, Vibrio Cholerae 0139, Nipah virus, malaria, dengue fever, leptospirosis, West Nile virus, and Avian flu.
This litany of killers is impressive until you realize that out of the fifteen, only Lyme, malaria, dengue and
On the other hand, two of the diseases - SARS and MDR TB - are transmitted person-to-person by aerosolized droplets and are therefore more likely to be spread during cold weather when people are in closer quarters. This is evidenced not only by the pattern of their epidemiology (apartment buildings for SARS, prisons for TB) but also by the seasonal (winter) pattern that we see in the
Arena virus, Hanta virus and leptospirosis are spread by aerosolized rodent feces or direct contact with rats. Human contact with rodent population is complex and poorly studied, but epidemiologic data show that it is largely related to precipitation and flooding, with no correlation to warming. (Climate Variability and Change in the
To return to Gore's original point, however, there is no evidence that any of these diseases emerged or resurged due to global climate change. Talking about these diseases in an article about Global warming is like listing Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin as examples of the depravity of American politicians. Like the tragedies in
But these kinds of "examples" go on and on: another is the storm argument. Are we having more storms, as the film states? Not according to an article last year in the journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. "Any changes associated with warming of the surface compared to a smaller temperature rise in the lower-troposphere (and resultant changes in atmospheric stability) have not produced detectable impacts on intensification rates of tropical cyclones in the
Even if every example of the current impact of CO2 driven temperature rise could be disproved, one stunning visual from the movie remains to haunt the viewer with doubts. Gore shows us two lines - one plotting temperature over the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, the other plotting atmospheric carbon dioxide. They appear to rise and fall with a synchronicity that would be the envy of many an aquatic acrobat. If temperature and carbon dioxide really have shown such a strong correlation over the centuries, isn't it still probable that CO2 drives temperature? This is possible, of course, provided that the CO2 rises coincide with or slightly predate the rises in temperature. Correlation is sensitive, but not specific - it can pick up a whole range of possible causes, but cannot prove causation. On the other hand, as we have all learned by now, if a sensitive test is negative, it can rule out a potential cause. Lack of correlation rules out proximate causation. Is CO2 inducing this global fever?
Probably not.
That is, not if you trust the ice core records that Gore speaks so highly of in his Oscar-winning Powerpoint presentation. The Antarctic melting during the third glacial termination (210-225 thousand years ago) show that the CO2 rise lagged behind the temperature increase by about 800 years. An article by Fischer in Science reported a lag of 400-1000 years during all three glacial interglacial transitions on record. A later analysis using argon - which has been shown to correlate with temperature as well as the standard oxygen isotopes and would be less prone to inaccuracies in timing - confirmed the previously reported findings. That kind of a lag is easy to miss in charts covering hundreds of millennia, but it is hard to dismiss as insignificant on a practical level. The Fischer article states that the generally observed correlation between CO2 and temperature rise and fall is "connected to a climate-driven net transfer of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere". In other words, the ocean acts as an enormous organism that exhales carbon dioxide during warming periods of earth's history, and absorbs it during periods of cooling. Caillon et al report that "this confirms that CO2 is not the forcing [that is, the causative factor] that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation". (Caillon, N. et al, Science 14 March 2003: Vol. 299. no. 5613, pp. 1728 - 1731; Fischer, H et al, Science 12 March 1999: Vol. 283. no. 5408, pp. 1712 - 1714).
The temperature records have more to tell: even with a cursory investigation of Gore's charts you will notice that the temperature rises during the early part of the 20th century. This rise begins decades before cars or planes were in use, at a time when the global economy was struggling under war and economic depression. Industry, and with it, CO2 emissions, didn't really take off until the post-war period, at which point temperatures went down. I'm not making this up.
"But these details are missing the point," I hear you cry. "The critical issue is that we're seeing extreme, rapid climate changes." Not really. If you look back at Gore's chart of the past couple hundred thousand years (though not his chart of the past 2000 years which does not resemble any other temperature record I've come across), even he shows our current temperature as still within the high end of the normal limits. His graph also reveals something else, noted by a team of Chinese scientists in The Geophysical Research Letters in 2003. In their paper Ming Tan and his colleagues record data taken from temperature proxies found in a 2560-year-old stalagmite. They report that, over this period warming and cooling trends have followed a distinct pattern……….
Unlikely CO2 **, possible meteorites, probable sunshine
Carbon dioxide has never driven temperature. In fact, the evidence shows that historically, temperature has driven CO2 . We cannot rule out the possibility that CO2 could drive climate, just as it would be hard to rule out the possibility of a devastating meteor striking earth. But we are not enacting expensive legislation to erect retractable meteorite shields around major
So, if it isn't CO2 , what does drive climate change?
I don't know.
One convincing theory is that of solar magnetic activity and irradiance - two separate but generally coinciding phenomena. An article in the Astrophysical Journal in 1996 argues for a combined effect of greenhouse gasses and solar factors, with solar factors contributing a more significant amount. (The Astrophysical J., 472: 891-902, 1996 Dec 1) The authors of the article on the saw-toothed climate pattern favor the solar explanation, saying, "All centennial to sub-millennial scale cycles exhibited by the WTR [warm season temperature record] could be connected to solar variation cycles of about 208, 350, 700 and 950 years." (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 12, 1617, 2003) Other articles expressly denounce these solar theories or claim they are insufficient to account for the full extent of the warming. (The Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 25, No. 23, pp 4377-4380, Dec. 1, 1998; GSA Today, v. 14, no. 3, 1052-5173, 2004) There is the potential for localized anthropogenic warming effects secondary to changes in land use, which have been widely documented and are known as the "urban heat island effect". (eg. The Urban Heat Island Effect at Fairbanks, Alaska, Theoretical and Applied Climatology http://www.springerlink.com/content/1434-4483/; Volume 64, Numbers 1-2 / October, 1999 <http://www.springerlink.com/content/k7c2nknnucw2/>, pp. 39-47) There are the ocean currents and oscillations, such as the Gulf Stream and El Nino, that have changed throughout the Earth's history and to which many significant warming and cooling effects are attributed. The fact is, weather is a complex, perhaps even chaotic, system. It is determined by multi-factorial processes. Some variables are independent and others are interdependent in complex and unpredictable ways. Some are subject to human manipulation, but we are utterly at the mercy of others.
Crichton states, "Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?" He goes on to point out:
"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say,
"But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000,
"Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it."
Counting the cost of the precautionary principle
People will appeal to the Precautionary Principle - that it's better to be safe than sorry. Why not sign global treaties to limit carbon emissions? The April 16th Newsweek had a telling map entitled "Leaders and Laggers". Based on the Environmental Performance Index from Yale, it rated countries based on how environmentally friendly their policies were - the "leaders" dark green and the "laggers" in coal black. One immediately notes a rough correlation between wealth and environmental policy on this map. Why not encourage developing nations to get with the program and use more "clean energy"?
Well, why don't you have a solar paneled house? Probably because it's too expensive. No matter what we say about saving costs down the road, as a practical matter these solar technologies involve too much of an initial capital investment to be feasible for most Americans. Installation costs for one entirely solar house in
Of course, there are places where solar energy is the best option for electricity in developing countries. These are generally places that have no hope of getting connected with a power grid, such as remote clinics in agricultural communities in
These affordable solar panels are a valuable stopgap, but they are by no means a permanent panacea for the word's energy needs. Economist James Shikwati says, "I don't see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway train network. It might work to power a small transistor radio…. One clear thing that emerges from [this] debate is the point that there's somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop." By telling developing countries to use "clean energy sources" what we are saying is, "You will not have electricity at all." We are saying, "You will live a life of backbreaking work. You will see at least one of your children die in early childhood, probably more than that. You will experience incomparably more painful and dangerous pregnancy and labor than women in developed countries, and you will face it more frequently because you will fear losing your children to disease, starvation or violence. You will be too busy struggling for survival to protest the rampant official corruption or the government troops who rape you, destroy your villages and disregard your votes. Ultimately, you will die 20-30 years younger than I will.
"But it will be worth it, because I've been told there is a scientific consensus that all this is necessary to avert global warming."
The following Conclusion paragraphs were excerpted from an extensive article on:
www.GlobalWarmingHoax.com
(There are also many good links on the “opposite” side of the debate on this site)
………….
Conclusion
It’s easy to see why Al gore’s movie should not be shown in schools. An Inconvenient Truth is a political commercial that misrepresents a whole area of science. He admittedly uses scare tactics to get people to listen then shows them a professional slide show that blames every thing bad on so called man made global warming.
Al did not make and publicize this movie because he cares; something obvious when you consider his own lifestyle. He did not make this movie to run for president. This movie has grossed over 60 million dollars to date and it hasn’t even made it to cable. Al charges over $100,000 per slide show. But the real money that Al will make is through his new company, Generation Investment Management, a company that seeks to establish the rules and licensing for the new carbon-trading scheme. We have all heard of politicians who lie for money and power; it looks as if Al did not retire after all.
© Kristen Byrnes and Ponder the Maunder - All Rights Reserved. Reprinted on GlobalWarmingHoax.com with Permission.
Gore’s Refusal to take a pledge to reduce his personal energy usage footprint:
