An Inconvenient Truth?

Question

Ok, has anyone else seen this film and found it transformed their whole views on the environment? I found this....
Really making an effort to cut the energy my household use.

If you think was a load of rubbish, why? Isnt Al Gore just saying what scientists have found without smoothing it over to make us all feel better?
You have to admit though, whether you loved it or hated it, global warming is alarmingly speeding up and we all need to make an effort.
What are your views??
Hannah xx

Thank you all v much for the answers, alot of you are of the same opinion as myself, i cant believe that some of the answers question global warming or that we are speeding it up!! Blimey! Some of the facts may have been blown out of proprtion, or not... But open your eyes!! Make small changes and we'll make a big difference together.xx

Answer 1

The old saying is,
By the time you see it happening it is too late to stop it.
Climate change has been forcast now for many decades,
we are now seeing the effects of what was predicted.
We may be able to make a slight difference, but it is too late to turn it around.
All we can do is dig our heels in, hold on and ride it out, hoping that the climate will eventualy sort itself out, stabilise and go back to being close to what it was 50 years ago.

Answer 2

I am of the opinion that global warming is a POORLY understood concept that starts out with a flawed premise (i.e. that there is actually valid global temperature).

The following five points are quotes from some sources that are not blogs, newspapers, magazines, TV news, or any other ill-informed non-scientific source. Rather these are excerpts from papers and lectures given by a number of different scientists. All but number 6 are peer reviewed materials.

Read what they say and think about the arguments they make. These are no longer voices in the wilderness, but rather they are part of a growing body of science that brings the concept of global warming into question.

1. "Inspection of the global atmospheric temperature
changes during the last 1,000 years (Fig. 11) shows that
the global average temperature dropped about 2C over
the last millennium."

2. "Despite the increasing trend in atmospheric CO2 concentration, the patterns of 20-year and 60-year oscillation of global temperature are all in falling."

3. "Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere. A given temperature field can be interpreted as both 'warming' and 'cooling' simultaneously, making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed."

4. "The Arctic was as warm as or warmer in the late 1930s than it was at the end of the 20th century. "

5. "The main cause of climate change during the last millennia is the corresponding cyclic variation of the 80- and 200-year component of irradiance correlated with activity. That is why, the contemporary is not anomalous but is ordinary secular global warming (Aguilar 2003; Reid 2000)."


There are four premises that underly AGW:

1. That 1990 levels of CO2 are the appropriate baseline.

Why was this year chsoen? Is there some sort of scientific basis for this? Or was it arbitrary?

2. Global temperature is a meaningful statistic.

It could be argued that basing decisions on meaningless numbers is a fools errand.

3. Global temperature and CO2 levels are intimately linked.

It has been argued that they are linked, except that temperature leads CO2, not the other way around.

4. CO2 drives global temperature.

There are two gases that have a stronger greenhouse effect, relatively speaking, than CO2. They are methane and water vapor(not from clouds, which are droplets). These should have a greater affect than CO2.

Outside of any of the arguments regarding the causes of warming (solar variability, cosmic rays, tectonic heating, volcanic emissions, CO2 emissions, CH4 emissions, Milankovitch cycles, etc) I question these four underlying premises of global warming itself.


If my interpretations are correct, global warming is hogwash. If my interpretations are incorrect, I am wrong. I don't mind being proven wrong, it is a good way to learn about things that I have overlooked.

Answer 3

We live in a society of waste. Everyone has to have a bigger and badder car, guzzling fuel and spewing tons of emissions into the air. We always want more. Most people kid themselves into thinking the melting of the polar ice caps will never really happen; it's like a tragedy that happens in another state- e.g. "Oh, how terrible", but it doesn't really change your life because it doesn't affect you personally. For some reason, people are all about trying frantically to solve problems once they rear their head, instead the smarter route of doing damage control. I.E. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I thought it was rather chilling to see the comparison pictures of places like the Red Sea and other bodies of water that have been significantly reduced due to global warming.

It's time to do some self-sacrificing to keep what we can. Turn off any lights you don't need on (they did this in Sydney Harbor last week). Car pool- what, you're too cool to pool? Walk to work if you can. Don't buy anything in aresol cans. Avoid styrofoam or anything that's not biodegradable. If you think we're being panic mongers, rent "Soylent Green" with Charleton Heston. It's a depiction of what NY would be like if the Greenhouse Effect rises temperatures and makes water something to be rationed; at one point, Heston is offered a shower by a rich man's mistress- "you can take a shower and run the water as much as you like". Fruit is sold for $150 a glass. Do we really have to get to such extremes before we do something?

Answer 4

The "swindle" movie suggested above is wrong. It is simply a political statement which distorts science. The director has a history of putting out misleading stuff. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which compared environmentalists with Nazis. Channel 4 had to apologise for the misleading stuff in that one. The present movie is also a distortion of the science. More here:

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece

"A Channel 4 documentary claimed that climate change was a conspiratorial lie. But an analysis of the evidence it used shows the film was riddled with distortions and errors."

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php

"Pure Propaganda"

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/

Explanations of why the science is wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Durkin_(television_director)

History of the director.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2032572,00.html

"The science might be bunkum, the research discredited. But all that counts for Channel 4 is generating controversy."

Gore's movie may be a little over dramatic, but it has the basic science right. This movie does not.

Channel 4 itself undercuts the movie in a funny way. If you go to their website on the movie you find links to real global warming information. They also have a way to "Ask the Expert" about global warming. The questions go to a respected mainstream scientist who supports (mostly) human responsibility for global warming.

Answer 5

When I studied science at Uni, the predictions were that earth was entering a cooling phase - that was certainly wrong! Whether or not earth is naturally entering a warming phase, you cannot deny that the actions of humans are speeding the process.

Unfortunately, the courts in Qld have recently ruled that they, like the Australian Prime Minister, remain unconvinced that global warming is a human problem!

Answer 6

The truth of the matter is that we may not be the cause or the remedy. We are at the end of an ice age (we still have glaciers) and the sun's output has gone up .2% in the last 40 years and Mars and Pluto are also warming up. Read about it here;

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html

I just wish that Al Gore would practice what he preaches and not use 8 times the average amount of electricity in his home compared to us.

Answer 7

Al Gore is a hypocrite. He claims to live a carbon-free lifestyle, yet his mansion comsumes more than 20 times the amount of energy as the average family.

He claims to use renewable energy credits to offset his huge energy comsumption. In reality, the credits are generated by a company Gore himself owns - kind of like buying your own stock and trying to fool millions of others to buy it as well.

Al Gore and his family own a large chunk of Occidental Petroleum - a company that is accused of drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

If Al Gore is so very serious about changing the world for the better, the least he could do is try leading by example.

Answer 8

This is mainly for Bill W, who seems to be of the opinion man has no effect on the global environment.
Sir, you are misguided. An earlier comment stated that the summit of folly is to assume we have no significant impact on global climate change. This is a brilliant statement. Ignorance is no excuse for inaction.
Can I explain why the last ice age ended w/o any SUV's to start the process?? No. Who can? What I can tell you is that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are approaching, even exceeding levels known to have been present at any time in the past 2 million years.
There is one species in that time that has risen to dominate the planet in a way unlike any before. Can we really be so arogant to assume we have no impact whatsoever? the problem stretches beyond simply reducing energy consumption. Overfishing, large-scale industrial pollution, etc. etc. The list of behaviors impacting the global environment unique to humans is profound.
Can I explain why the last ice age ended w/out SUV's? No, but I can state with certainty that the last global ice age, known here as the Wisconsonin glacial period, did not end abruptly. This was a natural process, not fully understood, that took well over 10000 years to occur. So we had an average global increase in temps of 3 - 4C in 10,000 years. We have seen an increase of 2C in the past 50.
Coincidence? Perhaps. Are you planning on mortgaging your children's children's lives to prove your manhood?

As for Gore - it does pain me to see and read about his apparent hypocrisy. 20x the average person's energy use is excessive. There could be another angle though. How much has his movie impacted the general population as far as climate change is concerned. People are talking about it now, seriously. Do you think it impossible that 2000 people have reduced their energy consumption by 1% annually? This offsets Mr. Gore's usage. That is an energy credit that cannot be attacked.
My household has seen about a 30% drop in energy usage the past 3 years and we have not changed our lifestyle. We are simply more aware now than before. Simple changes dude, like lowE light bulbs, can have a profound impact.
I offer as a simple example of reducing excess -
In my front yard we have a light post on a photo-timer. It is on an average of 10 hours per day, every day of the year. By replacing the 60W incandescent light bulb with a 13W flourescent, we realize a daily savings of .47kwh. Do the math - 172 kwh per year from one light bulb change. Average US home uses 10,000 kwh per year. My 1 bulb change reduced my useage by 1.5%. Multiply that by the 15 lights or so in my house, there is a real opportunity to actually do something by doing almost nothing.

Answer 9

Over the entire 400,000 year Vostok Ice Core record ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg ), proudly referenced in The Inconvenient Truth, there is not one incidence of a change in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration preceding temperature change. In every case, the temperature changes first, and then the carbon dioxide concentration changes. This is easily, and completely, explained by the decrease in carbon dioxide solubility in the oceans with a rise in temperature ( http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com ). So, carbon dioxide concentration is nothing more than a thermometer. It tells what the temperature is but, just as when someone adds mercury to a thermometer one does not expect the room to warm up, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere does not make the planet warm up.

Therefore, what anthropogenic global warming proponents, like Al Gore, want you to believe is that, somehow, the carbon dioxide/temperature relationship now is different than it has been over the entire ice-core-recorded history of the planet. That is, they want you to believe that carbon dioxide concentration affects temperature even though it never has in 400,000 years.

In the absence of any recorded climatic temperature change resulting from a carbon dioxide concentration change, one cannot attribute climate temperature to carbon dioxide concentration. If one cannot attribute temperature to carbon dioxide, then CO2 emission by man cannot be responsible for temperature change. If CO2 emission by man is not responsible for temperature changes, then man cannot reduce climatic temperature changes by reducing carbon dioxide emission.

Therefore, diverting economic resources in order to change carbon dioxide emissions will not affect global temperature changes but will create economic hardships for the poor and middle class since they, as always, will bear the brunt of any government mandated program.

Answer 10

While nobody can defintively state precisely what the effect of man's industrial emissions is on the climate (since there is no way to perform a controlled experiment), it would be the summit of folly and irresponsibility for us to assume we have no effect -- especially considering the fact that basically nobody disputes Earth's climate *is* changing rapidly. Thus, we must do everything in our power to minimize the environmental impact of our species, for our own future.

Those who claim the climate change movement is a hoax perpetrated by government-influenced scientists is ignoring the fact that these scientists are proposing a very expensive and difficult transition that nobody wants to make unless we HAVE to. There is simply no motivation for anyone to make this stuff up.