Tim Lee

Bailey on Inconvenient Truths

Reason’s Ron Bailey has an interesting review of Al Gore’s new movie:

Gore has won the global warming debate–the world is warming as a consequence of human activity, chiefly the loading up of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Yet he feels that he must exaggerate the dangers by propounding implausible scenarios in which sea levels rise 20 feet by 2100. He pretends that the science is settled with regard to the effect of global warming on hurricanes. And he pushes a scientifically tenuous connection between the spread of diseases and global warming. These are little inconvenient truths that cut against his belief that global warming constitutes a climate emergency. On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we’ll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He’s a global warming exaggerator.

As he points out, the folks who denied the existence of global warming will have a credibility problems when it comes to the policy question about what, if anything, should be done to reverse the trend.

June 18, 2006 | Comments |

Viewing 6 Comments

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    Yea, Katrina was such a huge exaggeration.
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    And let's not forget the Galveston Hurricane of 1900!

    JT
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    I haven't seen the movie yet though I did see Gore's lecture early this year.

    Gore's tactic is bait and switch. He sells the fact of anthropogenic global warming but tries to get you to buy imminent global catastrophe.

    Bailey is right about global warming skeptics having credibility problems. It pains me to see people like Arnold Kling clinging (no pun intended) to the skeptic line.
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    So we have a guy that get's paid a lot of money saying there is no problem and we have a guy gettting paid a lot of money to say there is a problem? Clear as mud to me.

    The thing I don't understand is this: Why NOT worry about what we are doing to the planet and ourselves? Can anyone say for certain and with no reasonable doubt that we are not making changes to the earth in some way by what we do? I know I can't. How about you?

    Anyway, it won't be us that have to worry about whether or not this is true. We will be dead and buried and won't get to see the end of this little story anyway. I love gambling - it's exciting, and I can possibly win big too!
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    "Gore's tactic is bait and switch. He sells the fact of anthropogenic global warming but tries to get you to buy imminent global catastrophe."

    The catastrophe is already real--the changing habitata, the destruction of forest in British columbia, these are all happening now.

    Those who are arguing against policy actions to prevent global warming have just changed their arguument, saying that it really not that bad.

    What they ignore is that Global Warming is part of a process that will take a very long time to slow down. So it's not that bad--yet. It will be much worrse in the future.
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    For a saner perspective, by someone who has actually been to the polar ice cap (and been writing about climate for decades, most recently in the New York Times), one might want to listen to Andrew Revkin, available as a replay from the June 14 Fresh Air with Terry Gross program, over at NPR.

    He believes in man-caused global warming, but thinks that Algore's presentation was more "lawyerly" than scientific. It is irresponsible to connect climate change to individual events like Katrina. That is not the way science is done. And if one actually reads the reports of the IPCC, one will find all kinds of "ifs," "maybes," "probablys" and many other fudge-words.

    There is a simple problem which we cannot overcome, even if we believe that man is causing global warming (and personally I believe man is responsible for only a small part of a very modest warming). That problem is bad computer climate models. None of them give accurate results if backtested. What that means is that we can't be sure that whatever corrective action we take will fix the warming "problem."

    Why this hubristic urge to tinker with a machine we cannot understand? We may be about to plunge into another ice age. Ice ages came and went long before man could have had anything to do with them. If we cut down carbon emissions to stop "warming" we might make the next ice age worse. Do you really want to take that risk???

    Without accurate knowledge of why the climate changes, which involves many factors, co-factors, and feedback loops, attempted corrective action could be as disastrous as the alleged effect we've already had. People who deny this simply do not understand chaos theory.
 

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