Madam Speaker, I rise to bring attention to the House an article published in the New York Times regarding former Vice President Al Gore's documentary, ``An Inconvenient Truth.'' As this documentary continues to shape the discussion on the…
Madam Speaker, I rise to bring attention to the House an article published in the New York Times regarding former Vice President Al Gore's documentary, ``An Inconvenient Truth.'' As this documentary continues to shape the discussion on the controversial issue of global warming, I would like to highlight the following article, which identifies the inconsistencies of the film.
[From the New York Times, Mar. 13, 2007]
From a Rapt Audience, a Call To Cool the Hype
(By William J. Broad)
Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film
on global warming, ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' which won an
Academy Award for best documentary. So do many
environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many
scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of
climate change.
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks,
articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film
and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists
argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are exaggerated
and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call
his alarmism.
``I don't want to pick on Al Gore,'' Don J. Easterbrook, an
emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington
University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of
the Geological Society of America. ``But there are a lot of
inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to
temper that with real data.''
Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his
work made ``the most important and salient points'' about
climate change, if not ``some nuances and distinctions''
scientists might want. ``The degree of scientific consensus
on global warming has never been stronger,'' he said, adding,
``I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay
language that I understand.''
Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily
on the authority of science in ``An Inconvenient Truth,''
which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and
claims.
Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative
groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but
also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who
told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few
see natural variation as more central to global warming than
heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in
the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat
but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics
and zealots.
Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and
Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado,
said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration.
While praising Mr. Gore for ``getting the message out,''
Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were
``overselling our certainty about knowing the future.''
Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate
change, or the idea that the human production of heat-
trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe's
recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone
beyond the scientific evidence.
``He's a very polarizing figure in the science community,''
said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a
colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center.
``Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the
person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.''
``An Inconvenient Truth,'' directed by Davis Guggenheim,
was released last May and took in more than $46 million,
making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The
companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller,
reaching No.1 on the New York Times list.
Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice
sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and
people die en masse. ``Unless we act boldly,'' he wrote,
``our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.''
He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who
commend his popularizations and call his science basically
sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American
Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star
from thousands of attendees.
``He has credibility in this community,'' said Tim Killeen,
the group's president and director of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change.
``There's no question he's read a lot and is able to respond
in a very effective way.''
Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as
reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an
environmental scientist, director of NASA's Goddard Institute
for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, ``Al
does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the
trees,'' adding that Mr. Gore often did so ``better than
scientists.''
Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president's work
may hold ``imperfections'' and ``technical flaws.'' He
pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights
the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research
suggesting that global warming will cause both storm
frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic
season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted
(five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.
``We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane
story than he is,'' Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. ``On the
other hand,'' Dr. Hansen said, ``he has the bottom line
right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat
of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the
potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.''
In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as
fundamentally accurate. ``Of course,'' he said, ``there will
always be questions around the edges of the science, and we
have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask
and to challenge and to answer those questions.''
He said ``not every single adviser'' agreed with him on
every point, ``but we do agree on the fundamentals''--that
warming is real and caused by humans.
Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among
scientists against his work. ``I have received a great deal
of positive feedback,'' he said. ``I have also received
comments about items that should be changed, and I have
updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.''
He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.
He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the
dangers of global warming, ``I think that I'm finally getting
a little better at it.''
While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal
skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately.
Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy
of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire
climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street
Journal of ``shrill alarmism.''
Some of Mr. Gore's centrist detractors point to a report
last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel
went further than ever before in saying that humans were the
main cause of the globe's warming since 1950, part of Mr.
Gore's message that few scientists dispute. But it also
portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.
It estimated that the world's seas in this century would
rise a maximum of 23 inches--down from earlier estimates. Mr.
Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up
to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other
heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves,
implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.
Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in
Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said
in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had
refrained from scaremongering. ``Climate change is a real and
serious problem'' that calls for careful analysis and sound
policy, Dr. Lomborg said. ``The cacophony of screaming,'' he
added, ``does not help.''
So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed
to contradict Mr. Gore's portrayal of recent temperatures as
the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said,
current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail
end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.
Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama,
Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore's film did ``indeed
do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.''
But the June report, he added, shows ``that all we really
know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last
400 years.''
Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore's claim that the
energy industry ran a ``disinformation campaign'' that
produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said,
was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans
were the main culprits.
But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who
runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet
newsletter on climate change and natural disasters,
challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of
pointed disagreement.
``Hardly a week goes by,'' Dr. Peiser said, ``without a new
research paper that questions part or even some basics of
climate change theory,'' including some reports that offer
alternatives to human activity for global warming.
Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings,
and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.
``Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the
phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of
environmental change on our planet,'' Robert M. Carter, a
marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said
in a September blog. ``Nor does he present any evidence that
climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its
historical pattern of constant change.''
In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the
geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed
Mr. Gore's claim that ``our civilization has never
experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to
this'' threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He
flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past
15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the
medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to ``20
times greater than the warming in the past century.''
Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore's assertion that
scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had
corrupted. ``I've never been paid a nickel by an oil
company,'' Dr. Easterbrook told the group. ``And I'm not a
Republican.''
Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul
Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming's effects and
director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the
Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his
portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.
``For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against
the unsubstantiated claims,'' Dr. Reiter wrote in The
International Herald Tribune. ``We have done the studies and
challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the
facts.''
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and
international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on
the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed
on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had
raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished
himself for integrity.
``On balance, he did quite well--a credible and
entertaining job on a difficult subject,'' Dr. Oppenheimer
said. ``For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake
him over the coals, you're going to find people who disagree.
But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.''