Adam's Apple
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- Apr 25, 2004
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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 its 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, Gores dogged devotion to his causeraising the alarm on global warmingis admirable.
But the Al Gore of "An Inconvenient Truth", which is built around his PowerPoint presentation on the topic, isnt really that new. There is the same earnestness. The same dire comparisonshe likens global warming to the threat from Nazi Germany and Islamic terrorists. The same nearly religious fervor. Gore has a gnostics 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 decadea 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 worlds two largest ice sheets cover Greenland and Antarctica. The Antarctic Peninsula has indeed been melting, but it constitutes only 2 percent of Antarcticas 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 Antarcticas surface area and reported that the East Antarctic ice sheet had gainedyes, gained45 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 its 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 Gores film is that C02 is basically the only important driver of climate change. Its not so. Climate is astonishingly complex. Greenlands 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 yearsexcept the warming 80 years ago happened at a faster rate. Since CO2 wasnt a major factor then, this datum steps on Gores message and doesnt make his PowerPoint presentation.
Global warming is real, and C02 almost certainly contributes to it, but this doesnt mean the planet as we know it is ending. Gore obviously feels the need to be hyperbolic to get peoples 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.
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 its 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, Gores dogged devotion to his causeraising the alarm on global warmingis admirable.
But the Al Gore of "An Inconvenient Truth", which is built around his PowerPoint presentation on the topic, isnt really that new. There is the same earnestness. The same dire comparisonshe likens global warming to the threat from Nazi Germany and Islamic terrorists. The same nearly religious fervor. Gore has a gnostics 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 decadea 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 worlds two largest ice sheets cover Greenland and Antarctica. The Antarctic Peninsula has indeed been melting, but it constitutes only 2 percent of Antarcticas 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 Antarcticas surface area and reported that the East Antarctic ice sheet had gainedyes, gained45 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 its 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 Gores film is that C02 is basically the only important driver of climate change. Its not so. Climate is astonishingly complex. Greenlands 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 yearsexcept the warming 80 years ago happened at a faster rate. Since CO2 wasnt a major factor then, this datum steps on Gores message and doesnt make his PowerPoint presentation.
Global warming is real, and C02 almost certainly contributes to it, but this doesnt mean the planet as we know it is ending. Gore obviously feels the need to be hyperbolic to get peoples 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.
