Al Gore's New Documentary

[Adam's Apple]

The New Al Gore
By Rich Lowry, National Review
May 26, 2006

The global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" supposedly raises the curtain on the new Al Gore. And it does, in the sense that it’s not possible to have a nearly two-hour feature film devoted to lionizing you and your views without sprucing up your image. If nothing else, Gore’s dogged devotion to his cause—raising the alarm on global warming—is admirable.

But the Al Gore of "An Inconvenient Truth", which is built around his PowerPoint presentation on the topic, isn’t really that new. There is the same earnestness. The same dire comparisons—he likens global warming to the threat from Nazi Germany and Islamic terrorists. The same nearly religious fervor. Gore has a gnostic’s faith that he gained special insight into the most important force in the universe when a college professor of his warned of rising C02 levels in the atmosphere decades ago.

Thus, his movie has about as much nuance as "Basic Instinct II". It plays by the rules set by Michael Moore, which established that no left-wing political documentary can hope for success unless it is dishonest, or at the very least, extremely tendentious. Gore scores his most compelling points on behalf of his inconvenient truth by leaving out inconvenient facts.

His account of melting glaciers causing increased sea levels will be enough to prompt some people to begin to plan their evacuations of New York City, San Francisco, and most of Florida right now. Gore even raises the prospect of a total melt-off of the Greenland ice sheet, causing a change in ocean currents that could bring a new ice age to Europe in a decade—a scenario ripped from the script of the ridiculous global-warming-cum-ice-age film "The Day After Tomorrow".

For someone who is such a self-professed stickler for science, Gore leaves out all the complications in the glacier picture, as Jason Lee Steorts argues in the latest National Review. The world’s two largest ice sheets cover Greenland and Antarctica. The Antarctic Peninsula has indeed been melting, but it constitutes only 2 percent of Antarctica’s total area. A 2002 study in Nature found that two-thirds of the continent actually got colder from 1966 to 2000. A 2005 study published in Science looked at about 70 percent of Antarctica’s surface area and reported that the East Antarctic ice sheet had gained—yes, gained—45 billion tons of ice annually between 1992 and 2003.

A more recent Science article argued that Antarctica has been losing ice over the past three years. But Steorts notes, “2002 was a high-watermark for Antarctic ice, so it’s not too surprising to see some decline since then.”

In Greenland, warmer temperatures are also causing the ice to melt at the edges, but the ice sheet is building up in the interior. A study in Science showed that the ice sheet had gained 5.4 centimeters of elevation annually between 1992 and 2003. If that increase is taken into account, the loss of ice in Greenland becomes too small to terrify anyone.

A central conceit of Gore’s film is that C02 is basically the only important driver of climate change. It’s not so. Climate is astonishingly complex. Greenland’s rising temperature might be mostly the result of a pattern of changes in the oceans’ surface temperature known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Greenland experienced just as much warming between 1920 and 1930 as it has in the past ten years—except the warming 80 years ago happened at a faster rate. Since CO2 wasn’t a major factor then, this datum steps on Gore’s message and doesn’t make his PowerPoint presentation.

Global warming is real, and C02 almost certainly contributes to it, but this doesn’t mean the planet as we know it is ending. Gore obviously feels the need to be hyperbolic to get people’s attention. But simplistic alarmism is only self-discrediting, and might mean that people pay as little attention to the new Al Gore as they did to the old.

http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjE1NQ==

P.S. Had to laugh when I read Lowry's article about how the facts are fudged in Gore's documentary. I read a news story last week re Al at the Cannes Film Festival to promote this documentary. He told French news reporters that he had spent the summer of his 15th year in France studying existentialsim. When the bloggers looked up the facts, they found out that Al had spent the summer of his 15th year working on his father's farm in TN. This man really has a thing for stretching the truth.

 

[Stephanie]

I do believe Al Bore has found himself a new cash cow...

And of course global warming, is all the fault of the United States...

 

[jillian]

Al Gore's hot flashes

Global warming is rising up the public agenda, thanks to evangelizing by Al Gore in a new documentary and book that are far scarier than anything ever produced by Stephen King. The fright is all the more real because Gore is talking fact, not fiction.
The oft-wooden wonk who jokingly says he "used to be the next President of the United States" has done a service by channeling his love affair with charts and graphs to produce a citizen-friendly explanation of why the human race faces lethal consequences unless we change our polluting ways.

The planet is simply getting warmer, with devastating effects on ice caps and coral reefs and every coastal city that sits, like New Orleans, in the potential path of storms strengthened by a rise in ocean temperatures. The proof is indisputable.

As Gore points out in the film and print versions of "An Inconvenient Truth," scientists have produced 928 studies of global warming in peer-reviewed journals - and all concluded the phenomenon is real. Beyond that, something's melting the poles. What difference does a little less ice make? Well, defrost enough, and the lower Manhattan shoreline will be under water.

Yes, there are skeptics, but their ranks are shrinking faster than the world's glaciers. It is becoming harder and harder for the likes of ExxonMobil to sell the denials, to claim humans are not hastening the thaw by spewing carbon into the air from auto exhausts and smokestacks. And it should become even tougher for Washington, from denier-in-chief George W. Bush on down, to sit back and do nothing.

Democrats and Republicans alike have an obligation to safeguard the future by developing an energy policy that gets beyond the same-old-same-old arguments over conservation vs. drilling vs. nuclear. Important as those debates are, they've led only to $70-a-barrel oil in an unstable world ever more thirsty for petroleum. The White House and Congress decry America's "addiction to oil" when pump prices run wild, but they forget about imposing higher mileage standards as the public gets used to paying up.

What's needed in Washington is a sea change in thinking before the seas themselves change, to the detriment of life on Earth.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/421954p-356202c.html

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Human caused global warming is the lie being used so regular people will accept it when the elites of the world save the dwindling supplies for themselves and cut the rest of us off.

 

[dilloduck]

Human caused global warming is the lie being used so regular people will accept it when the elites of the world save the dwindling supplies for themselves and cut the rest of us off.

The dwindling supplies of what--firewood?

 

[shepherdboy]

I love those Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies. Where is it playing?

 

[Hobbit]

I watched the Al Gore channel from the second it came on the air until five minutes later, when the buzz wore off and I realized that it was boring me to tears. About 8 hours later, DirecTV had already dropped the channel.

If that's any indication of the level of the movie, I have no interest in it. In fact, this is probably the most scientificially bogus movie since "The Core." (If you really want to know how bad "The Core" is, I have links, but suffice to say that if you took all the bullcrap out of the movie, you'd have credits)

 

[BATMAN]

Anything or anyone that Gore endorses or promotes - loses.

 

[Dan]

I don't know what Gore's expecting to accomplish with this movie. First off, he's preaching to the choir. No right-wingers are going to see this movie. Second, those that do will be thinking of this as the same thing as a movie by Michael Moore, so I'm sure there will be plenty of "this is what he's lying about" type sites to pop up once this things come out. Put simply: the only ones this movie will enlighten will be the ones who felt enlightened before they saw it.

 

[Lefty Wilbury]

come on guys! it's a cereal movie. i mean cereal guys

 

[insein]

He's super Serial guys.

ManBearPig

(has a few seconds of commercials but well worth it)

 

[BATMAN]

I read this review and thinks it's worth the reading:
FLAKY FLICK SUFFERS FROM 'TRUTH' DECAY

 

[Stephanie]

I read this review and thinks it's worth the reading:
FLAKY FLICK SUFFERS FROM 'TRUTH' DECAY

Just the title made me So does the *sky is falling* al bore.

 

[Stephanie]

:rotflmao: That was a great article..
Sums it up, right on..