Al Gore: Eco matinee idol?
An Inconvenient Truth showcases science of climate change.
An Inconvenient Truth, a feature film starring former vice-president Al Gore as Al Gore giving his PowerPoint presentation on climate change, opens in New York and Los Angeles on 24 May and elsewhere throughout the summer. News@nature.com tackles the big questions surrounding this much talked-about film.
Read our review here.
Comments
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Posted by: Dr. Glen Barry | May 23, 2006 06:57 PM
Dear Editor,
I noticed that this article inaccurately referred to the Competitive Enterprise Institute as "free-market" think tank. In fact, the CEI is an mouthpiece of various corporations, whose promotion of free-market policies is limited to the situations where those policies advance the interests of its benefactors. The perspective and funding of the CEI is well documented by Sourcewatch. Morton Mintz has provided a reporter's critique of the problems arising from how reporters take a think-tank's self-description at face value.
Another commentator neatly summed up the absurdity of calling the CEI a “free market” think-tank:
“An advocacy group funded by and acting on behalf of an industry that gets at least half its R&D funding from government, depends on government-enforced patent monopolies, and fights obsessively to keep up trade barriers against competition from cheap imports. You know, a 'free-market' think tank!"
Posted by: Adam Ricketson | May 24, 2006 03:43 PM
"they call it pollution - we call it life"
lol that is gold. only in america...
Posted by: captain planet | May 24, 2006 04:02 PM
We here in the Nature newsroom have just seen that one of the authors of a Science paper used in the CEI ad has spoken up, saying that they have warped the message of his research. You can read that story here: http://www.columbiatribune.com/2006/May/20060523News003.asp
Posted by: Nicola Jones | May 24, 2006 05:36 PM
This article and the comments that follow are a good example of why Nature has come to be seen as a "yellow" journal with little or no interest in science but quite a lot of interest in politics. Nightmare politics.
Posted by: Jo Ma | May 25, 2006 07:10 AM
CEI has a new, online only ad which bizarrely goes against their previous message... the new ad reveals Al Gore's carbon dioxide emissions from his round-the-world slide-show presentations, effectively calling him a hypocrite. But I thought CO2 was life, not pollution...?
http://streams.cei.org/
Posted by: Nicola Jones | May 25, 2006 10:24 AM
I live in Fairbanks Alaska. When it is -45F or less for several weeks during the winter, please be assured we look forward to "global warming". Also, as the climate warms, the permafrost will melt making more water fowl nesting grounds. That is a win-win situation for the locals who like fresh duck. ;)
Posted by: JIm | May 30, 2006 01:43 AM
I have been reading with interest the responses to Katharine Ellison's OpEd column. Not only she, but also the most alarmist believers in human influence on climate, are quilty of Old Think, in that they think anything we can do will help. The train has already left the station; the positive feedback mechanisms, independent of us, have kicked in, if you know how to read between the lines in the geophysical reports. As an academic astrophysicist, I'm good at that. We are too late.
In 100-200 years the Global Conveyor (try Google) will shut down, and in 300-400 years the next ice age will begin. There is no longer anything we can do about this. I can't see how an ice-age world could possibly support more than 2 billion persons, even in fairly desperate conditions, so we have some serious birth control work to do, starting now. This is merely a logical conclusion. I wish that I were younger than 64, so I could see more of this disaster develop.
Jim Roberts
Baltimore, MD
May 24, 2006
Posted by: Jim Roberts | May 30, 2006 05:38 PM
Jim, I've been a meteorologist for nearly 35 years. We have a hard time getting tomorrow's forecast right, much less 300 years from now! Global climate is an extremely complex issue. There are many variables such as volcanic activity that are impossible to predict. Too many people are making an ocean of conjecture out of a drop of fact.
Posted by: Bill Steffen | May 31, 2006 04:19 AM
The Focus of Emma Marris' review is more on the man than the message and refers to "those who believe in climate change", as if the issue were similar to a debate about poltergeists, telekenisis or evolution. This slyly represents the entire peer-reviewed scientific community that deals with climate issues as just another group of religionists. This is a truely appaling attitude to be pushed by Nature, once known as a premier venue for objective, rational analysis.
[Editor's note: Hello, and thanks for this comment. We do our best to use the word 'think' rather than 'believe' when referring to scientific opinion (on all topics) for just this reason! In this instance the phrase is being used as a stand-in for 'those members of the public who are convinced that climate change is being caused by human activities' - apologies if this short-hand gave the wrong impression.]
Posted by: George R. Hendrey | May 31, 2006 02:38 PM
Al Gore movie is more like 'A questionable Truth'. Check this site and judge for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus
That site has more likely alternative explantions to global warming than the one in which Gore blames humans.
I don't see how a few hundred particles of CO2 per million can have an influence in the temperature of something as vast as a planet's atmosphere. I am a chemist and a Computational Biology PhD student working on molecular mechnics simulations and I can't conclude global warming is cosed by humans, and I don't believe so.Please some one stand up to Al Gore. He is using his 'celebrity' status to
preach his questionable personal/political agenda.
Note: I also care for the environmet but I won't agree with questionable conclusions.
Posted by: Noel Carrascal | June 1, 2006 05:43 PM
Re: Jim post
If Jim’s prediction is to happen, in opposite to Jim’s standpoint, I would suppose that we need to stop using any birth control whatsoever, so that when we enter the bottleneck conditions with as large a population as possible. Then we would have a greater chance of emergence of a new, more efficient gene combination which would, for example, allow new humans to simultaneously eat less and produce more heat. :)
Posted by: Frittilaria | June 2, 2006 09:22 AM
Re: Joe Carrascal:
"I don't see how a few hundred particles of CO2 per million can have an influence int the temperature of something as vast as a planet's atmosphere." Your argument sounds convincing, but relies upon a very limited understanding of the interactions between electromagnetic radiation and molecules in the atmosphere. Have you tried to do this simple experiment: take two glass-bottles, add a little more CO2 to one of them, and close them tightly, after inserting a shaded temperature sonde in each. Then place them in the sunshine and watch what happens to the temperature in each of them. It's a fact, that without CO2 and H2O, the mean temperature in the atmosphere would not have been plus 15 degrees Celsius as now, but minus 17. It's another fact, that the atmosphere of Venus holds a lot more CO2 and has a temperature over plus 500 degrees Celsius.
Posted by: Karsten Johansen | June 3, 2006 10:04 AM
II Re: Joe Carrascal:
Scientists opposing global warming consensus: The list is very short indeed (I can come up with a few names more). Remarkable is this: all scientists on the list are from the US, except one, who is israeli. This fact strongly suggests a certain all too well-known political bias (Bush-neoconservative-likudnik) among them. And: only two of them are climatologists and seems to have done science on the subject.
Posted by: Karsten Johansen | June 3, 2006 10:21 AM
Karsten points out the wide spread claim that if there was no CO2 then the Earth's surface would be about 255K. The calculation for this is straitforward but when I try it for the Moon or Mercury I get the wrong answers and there is no atmosphere to blame the dicrepancy on. What's going on here? I note in passing that the well known Kiehl and Trenberth diagram doesn't seem to include heat lost by conduction downwards into the ground during daytime.
Posted by: chiz | June 8, 2006 09:00 AM
Greenhouse gas (GHG)emissions are not good period. Whether they come from the ocean, volcanoes, or humans they all have the same effect of climat change. Will be we able to put slow down the warming trend? Models seems to suggest we may be able to. For those who contest that we should curb our GHG emissions are missing the point. GHGs are not only about climat change, but air quality and that includes smog and health issues. Even if all our actions at reducing GHG emissions may not have a significant effect on climat change, our actions may help the quality of our air and help us rethink how we continue to industrialize our planet. I doubt that those who don't talk about air quality, have ever been to Bangkok, Guangzhou, Beijing or many other industrialized cities where environmental controls are non-existent. The air in those places is not breathable for a long time. We have only one planet, let not blow it!
Posted by: Yves Prévost | June 12, 2006 06:06 PM
I've just seen Al Gore's slide show, and as a geologist one aspect in particular stood out to me. The global temperature record (as recorded by oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in glacial ice cores) shows an extremely strong correlation of CO2 and surface temperature. CO2 levels and global temperatures are currently both equal to their previous interglacial highs from the last 600,000 years (CO2 at 380 ppm, up from 280 ppm circa 1950). Any reasonable extrapolation puts both CO2 and temperature far above normal geological levels within another fifty years. In other words something is driving the climate system far outside of its normal extremes, and the simplest and therefore preferred explanation has to be that the driver is anthropogenic activity. In fact, I'd like to see a reasonable alternative explanation that honors the geologically long baseline we now have on natural climate variation.
Posted by: Kevin Maher | June 12, 2006 09:57 PM
With no political connections, and seeing this movie, it appalls me to read these emails and actually think that these are intelligent people.
You should be ashamed of yourselves. Obviously putting your agenda of politics ahead of the planet.
Posted by: Brett Catanese | June 20, 2006 01:45 AM
Is Gore going to run for president in 2008?
Poor man, that's all anyone can think about. He denied it at the Cannes Film Festival on 20 May. But in one of the film's last lines, Gore says "It is our time to rise again to secure our future." He is ostensibly talking about all the other times humans have gotten together to do the right thing (abolishing slavery, defeating Nazism, curing polio, and so on), but it sounds just a bit like an election slogan. If he does run, it will be interesting to see how firmly he might stick to an anti-global-warming campaign platform.
------------
Joe,
http://pointniche.org
Posted by: Joe Volpe | December 12, 2006 12:58 PM