Al Gore's Science Fiction Film Wins Oscar

[Ed Hudgins]

[Pat Michaels, an actual climatologist and Cato Institute scholar, mounts another attack with facts on the environmentalist cult. It's not just the assault on freedom from this cult that's the danger; it's the assault on science and objectivity. Scientology had L. Ron Hubbard and this cult has Al Gore.]

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February 26, 2007

Inconvenient Truths

by Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick Michaels is senior fellow and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.

The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where's the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker's Summary from the United Nations' much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore's film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn't changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC's methane emissions scenarios as "quite unlikely."

Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.'s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. "The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993," according to the IPCC, "but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future."

According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

"Was" is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.

Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore's hypothesis. Instead, there's an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change — edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose "the right balance between being effective and honest" about global warming — and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.

These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to "do" something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years!

It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various "solutions" for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That's too small to measure, because the earth's temperature varies by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.

And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

And there's other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can't even do Kyoto?

When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too.

This article appeared in the National Review (Online) on February 23, 2007.

[Brant Gaede]

No one's economy is going to be sacrificed to the God of Global Warming--not directly--in spite of Kyoto. The environmentalists are only setting themselves up ultimately for looking ridiculous as with recycling. The danger is whether any kind of trade war develops out of this acorn of stupidity. The interconnectedness of the world's various economies has never been greater. A collapse of liquidity would be felt worldwide and is one of today's major economic dangers. Such a collapse doesn't need a trade war to happen, but it could help.

--Brant

[Chris Grieb]

I already told someone that I think this is the year I stopped watching the Oscars. Self-indulgence can get a little much. In the best documentary category I was told that An Inconvenient Truth was the least left wing. The only good news was best foreign film which I posted about earlier. When Atlas get made I don't any of the people involved should prepare acceptance speeches.

[Charles R. Anderson]

I highly recommend Patrick Michael's book Meltdown.

He does a very convincing job of showing how poor the science of the catastrophic global warming doom is. In case after case of research and reporting he shows how a focus on a portion of the record distorts the view given. He shows case after case in which other factors than CO2 or other greenhouse gas emissions caused or were major contributors to the effect claimed. And then there is the question of how bad it would be to have modest global warming.

He points at the effect of wind on the Arctic ice thickness and notes that slight increases in the winter temperature (greenhouse gases most increase the temperature in cold and dry areas) do not cause the ice to melt. He points out that the ice thickness in most of Antarctica is increasing, though the melting ice on one peninsula is given all the media attention. He discusses the real meaning of many studies on the distribution and numbers of plants and animals. He talks about the effects of variations in radiation from the sun and about the effects of ocean currents. He explains that claims that some areas will both become much more wet and much hotter do not make sense due to the cooling effects of evaporating water. The book is fascinating. You will learn a lot about weather and climate, plants and animals, and the earth.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'? -- $30,000 utility bill

ABC News

February 27, 2007

Apparently you do not have to practice what you preach to win an Oscar for a documentary.

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Thursday the TV ratings are released and I am going be interested to see how the Oscars did. I suspect that they will continue to be down. The Drudge Reports say Gore has the highest electric bill in Nashville. Gore doesn't deny the report but he says he is doing everything to reduce his carbon footprint.

[John Dailey]

~ I'm sure that Gore's trying to erase his 'carbon footprints' (gah, these new buzz-words); especially the history of the one's he'd been hypocritically making since his politically-agended 'crusading' book got popular

~ You know how to erase 'footprints', right? You pay professional-erasers to erase them! Would that we all could afford such...from govt funding.

LLAP

J:D