Inaccuracies in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

[Peikko 1,575]

I am curious about one thing. well many things, but this thing I am really curious about.

What do the 'liberasl' or Gary's 'deniers' scientists have to gain by hanging onto a dead theory? Why would scientis cling to the 'flat earth' scenario if indeed their was a significant/majority body of evidence proving the 'earth is round' Put another way if humanity really has such an insignificant part to play in GW why are there so many scientist clinging on to the GW idea? What do they gain from their position?

Someone has probably gone over this before, but I must have missed it along the line.

[mendeleev 68]

Not trying to beat a dead horse here but if you want the latest peer reviewed studies on GW here are a few to read.

This one I really like and is germane to the topic of AlGore

Climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels of University of Virginia and the Virginia State climatologist wrote the scenario promoted by former Vice President Al Gore and others showing Greenland’s ice melting and raising sea levels by 20 feet is not supported anywhere in scientific literature, not even by the United Nations.

(link)

This one is also rather amusing. This climatologist recently resigned his post, after his department chair and his university started investigating what appeared to be unethical payments he was getting from the oil industry.

This guy, and GaryC, are apparently challenged by high school geometry. The Greenland ice cap has a volume of 2.93 million cubic kilometers. The surface area of the planets oceans are about 361 million square kilometers. If the ice cap melts, that water ends up in the ocean. So, 361/2.93 = .008 km = 8 meters which is about 27 feet. It looks to me like Gore was a bit conservative in his 20 foot estimate. Perhaps one reason, Gary, that this simple calculation has not been laid out lately in the scientific literature is that we do expect people reading this work to be able to make simple calculations without having to be told to do so.

The rate of melting at Greenland is accelerating for unknown reasons. J.C. Chen, C.R. Wilson, B.D. Tapley, "Satellite Gravity Measurements Confirm ACcelerated Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet", Science, vol 313, 1958-1960, 2006.

The rate of accelerating seems to be variable, and hte origins of the variations are similarly not yet understood. It may have to do with the lubricating effect of liquid water penetrating to the base of the ice sheets -- a phenomenon observed this year but not expected to occur for several decades.

Gary seems to have missed this article, and ones like it, as he has assiduously reviewed the literature.

[mendeleev 68]

I am curious about one thing. well many things, but this thing I am really curious about.

What do the 'liberasl' or Gary's 'deniers' scientists have to gain by hanging onto a dead theory? Why would scientis cling to the 'flat earth' scenario if indeed their was a significant/majority body of evidence proving the 'earth is round' Put another way if humanity really has such an insignificant part to play in GW why are there so many scientist clinging on to the GW idea? What do they gain from their position?

Someone has probably gone over this before, but I must have missed it along the line.

YOu might have missed my comments above, so I repeated them for you below.

The first scientific meeting I ever attended on climate change was at Texas A&M University back in 1988. TAMU is not exactly a hotbed of liberalism. If posters criticizing Gore try to dispute that -- well -- let me just say I worked there for a couple years. It is not liberal.

A lot of the presenters, in hallway conversations, revealed themselves to be pretty conservative, as in "I'm not sure I can vote for George Bush because I'm not sure he's a real Reagan Republican".

One of those presenters gave a talk on the disappearing snowcap on Mt. Kilimangaro and how it appeared to be an indicated for climate change.

Another presented model reports discussing the stability of the Greenland ice cap, and how increased temperatures would no be expected to cause melting there. The evidence has since then changed that guys mind. More recently, he has been an author on scientific papers documenting how some of the ice caps in Greenland are melting much more quickly than can be accounted for by modern climate models. In hallway conversations, this scientist has now been wonderful if a "climate runaway" -- like Venus -- might not be implausible. He hasn't said this yet, though, in peer reviewed literature.

I could go on.

There is a very substantial scientific consensus that global warming is real and caused by human activity. Let's keep in mind that IPCC is also awarded the Prize.

I find it fascinating that, in the popular media, climate change is discussed as though it were an idea full of scientific uncertainty. That is *not* what I see, as a practicing scientist (and a chemist, in a field rather far away from atmospheric science) reading Nature, Science, Geophysical Research Letters, and the like over the past decade or so. I guess the popular media needs to find controversy even where there really isn't any.

Perhaps, in popular culture, climate change is a "liberal" issue. But some of the scientists working in this area, and who think that it present a real and present danger to humanity, are among the most politically conservative people I know. Perhaps the fact that there are scientists like this is the reason that even the current President Bush slightly moderates his prior ostrich-in-the-sand stance on this issue. Even President Bush has praised the good work of the IPCC.

[Peikko 1,575]

I guess I wasn't clear. My point really was, why do those people, who support the Gary side of the argument appear to believe that those who are proposing/supporting the theory that GW is mainly, or at least substantially a result of human activity, have to gain from this position, especially in the face of his alleged 'incrontrovertable proof' that it is all hooey thought up by a bunch of left wing 'liberal' empathisers?

Edited October 15, 2007 by Purple_Hibiscus

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I guess I wasn't clear. My point really was, why do those people, who support the Gary side of the argument appear to believe that those who are proposing/supporting the theory that GW is mainly, or at least substantially a result of human activity, have to gain from this position, especially in the face of his alleged 'incrontrovertable proof' that it is all hooey thought up by a bunch of left wing 'liberal' empathisers?

They believe these pro-GW scientists are communist sympathizers who'd enjoy nothing more than to bring down the oil companies. Believe me...I'm not that far off.

[Peikko 1,575]

I was rather hoping that someone on the other side of the debate as it were would answer the question. To second guess would perhaps prove not very helpful.

[mendeleev 68]

One of the things that always amuses me about political partisans like GaryC, when they try to comment on scientific topics, is their obsession with something called "scientific proof".

Scientists do not deal in proof. (Mathematicians do, but pure mathematicians are not scientists.)

We deal with the real, natural world, trying to explain and predict its behavior. We deal in probabilities, trends, and observable phenomena.

Most scientists (I suspect, although I haven't seen a poll on the topic) would agree with the conjecture, "The sun will rise tomorrow morning." We think it is a highly probable event. But maybe it will turn out that our knowledge of solar physics is incomplete and that, between now and then, the sun will go nova and there will be no tomorrow. The weight of scientific opinion indicates that this is unlikely. But we can't prove that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Consider gravity. A well-trained scientist, if he stops and thinks before he speaks (just like other people, a lot of us sometimes have issues in this department) will not say something as silly as "I believe in the law of gravity." Belief is a matter of faith or something else, but not science. Now, Newton's so-called law of gravity is a very useful, if limited, scientific generalization that is now seen as a special case in the theory of general relativity. I suspect that GaryC would admit that he believes in gravity. I don't. But it is a very useful scientific theory. And I will not jump out of a window in order to test it. I find that gravity works.

Theories of climate change are certainly more controversial. The science is newer than the science surrounding gravitation. The science inevitably interacts with aspects of how humanity organizes society. The way we organize society is a topic that some people get emotional about.

However, there are more scientists alive today than ever before and many of us are pretty well trained. I suspect that if we could integrate (in the mathematical sense of the word, you know) over the amount of useful scientific effort concerning climate change and gravitation, we would find that there has been more work on climate change. But this is just my opinion. I'm not sure how I would try to turn my conjecture into measurement. It might be a scientifically interesting measurement, though ...

Twenty years ago, there was a lot more controversy in the scientific literature over the direction of climate change. Feedback loops were very poorly understood then. (And there is still a lot of good work to be done on feedback loops.) The idea that increased CO2 will lead to atmospheric warming has not been controversial for a long time. But, with warming, there is more water vapor in the air and so, more clouds. At that time, there was interesting controversy over whether those clouds would reflect so much incoming sunlight that the planet might, in fact cool. This turns out not to be the case.

Theories of orbital mechanics, which seem to explain the ice ages pretty well, given the recent (past several million years) prevailing atmospheric CO2 levels, predict that we would be entering another ice age sometime soon (either now or in the next few thousand years) if the atmosphere were not perturbed. But humanity is perturbing the chemical composition of the atmosphere at a fantastically fast rate and this is leading to the warming that we are observing. The natural trends indicate cooling, the human induced trends bias the planet toward rapid warming.

These general comments *do* represent scientific consensus as represented by research published in the best scientific journals. Scientists are people, and we are ambitious. We strive to solve puzzles, publish those solutions, and gain the associated prestige from the scientific community. This selection pressure has lead to the creation of premier scientific journals. We want our work to be published in the best possible journals, in order to gain the most notice and secure additional prestige. If you want to know what scientists think is interesting and what is settled, go and read the best scientific journals. Nature and Science are the two general pre-eminent scientific journals in the world. (Nature, a British journal, seems to be successfully displaying Science, published by the American Associated for the Advancement of Science as the "best" single scientific journal in the world.) Start there. These journals, in the past few decades, have started to publish very good news and modest popularizations of the most interesting research articles they publish. They do this primarily to help scientists read accross disciplines. (As a physical and inorganic chemist, it is often difficult for me to penetrate molecular biology or elementary particle physics papers. There is a pretty big gap from my training to those topics.) It is easy to find interesting articles on climate change there. The 8 Feb 2007 issue of Nature is an especially good place to start. It may take a bit of an education to read them, but with persistence they are accessible to anyone with a reasonably good education and good command of English. Follow the citations to find other important journals.

As for a medical doctor (and M.D.'s are not trained to practice science but to live off of medical science that others create) who tried to publish results of a survey (and the science of taking and analyzing a survey is rather interesting in its own right, legitimately subject to peer review) in a third rate scientific journal but was rejected even there -- I repeat there appears to be nothing of interest scientifically to discuss here. This person's opinions might attract a certain attention in the general media and especially amongst political partisans. (It clearly attracted GaryC's attention!) They may try to create the appearance of scientific controversy from the inept attempts of this medical doctor, and only the credulous will be seriously distracted.

The theory of global climate change of very substantial and solid. Human processes forcing warming seem to be overwhelming background natural forces that would tend to cause cooling. The rate of change is frightening fast. Confirmation of certain hypotheses comes much more quickly than I would have expected. Perhaps five years ago a landmark paper was published in Nature, predicting that the intensity (but not the number) of tropical cyclones would, on average, increase in a warming world. Subsequently, the fraction of Category 3 and higher tropical cyclones in the Atlantic to all named storms does seem to be increasing abruptly. This is the first year that two Category 5 tropical cyclones have come ashore in the Americas. They did not attract so much attention, coming ashore in poor parts of Mexico and Honduras. I suspect the political reaction might have been rather different if they had come ashore in the United States of America.

The political debate will continue. People like GaryC will weave and bob, trying in unscientific ways to find isolated tidbits to agree with their preconceived political notions. Scientists will continue our work. It is likely that the scientific basis for theories of global warming will only continue to get firmer. And the planet's climate changes will probably continue to accelerate. And the odd comments of untrained people at places like this will continue to amuse me. I do hope, very much, though, that more and more people will demonstrate common sense, accept the scientific consensus for what it is, and demand effective action.

**applauds** excellent post

A post that denies the truth. People seem to forget that all of the global warming predictions are based upon computer models. These models do not qualify for "experiments". They are not using the scientific method of observe and experiment. All they are doing is cherry pick observations and run flawed computer models in place of experiments. All of the studies that have come out in the last few years have pointed to the fact that global warming isn't happening. I notice that no one addressed the other posts with a full page of peer reviewed studies that say exactly the opposite. But I guess the truth deniers will always be with us. Their scientific dogma is firmly set and nothing short of a command by God will change them.

Gary -- you really don't understand how science works, do you? The "scientific method of observe and experiment" is drivvel taught maybe sometimes in high school by teaching who don't know what they are teaching.

Science is based on models. In the old days -- say before 1960 -- those models were necessarily based either on qualitative ideas or on rather simple mathematical formulations that could be worked out by hand. (Actually, the first computer models were used to help the scientists at Los Alamos design the A-bomb -- and it turned out that those models worked adequately.) Since the advent of modern computing powder, science has changed a lot.

But the initial predictions on global warming (as you might know, if you had watched Gore's movie) were based on CO2 observations that started in 1957 at Mauna Loa and those predictions were quite qualitative in nature. With the advent of modern computing, highly complex computational models were developed and are invaluable in advancing the state of climate science. These computer models are still pretty crude, but they capture the essential dynamics of the system and seem to be accounting for a lot of the observations of the past few decades pretty well.

In my own branch of science, rather interesting innovations in the use of computing to model the quantum mechanical properties of extended surfaces are beginning to occur. Quantum calculations are increasingly being used to address questions that we aren't smart enough yet to be able to probe experimentally. These calculations allow us to develop new, more detailed models of surfaces and to modify our syntheses of them, getting different properties, or to help us figure out how to change the chemical environments around the surfaces, once again gaining different effects.

Computer models do not qualify as experiments -- they guide us in designing experiments or helping us decide what observations to pay attention to. Earlier in this string I mentioned a seminal paper in Nature where computer modelling led to the prediction that the intensity, but not the number, of tropical cyclones should increase in a warming world. An interesting recent article (C.D. Hoyos, P.A. Agudelo, P.J. Webster, J.A. Curry, "Deconvolution of the Factors Contributing to the Increase in Global Hurricane Intensity", Science, vol 312, 94-97, 2006) provides a retrospective analysis of this previously unnoticed trend. They analyzed global hurricane intensity from 1970 to 2004 and found that the increasing numbers of category 4 and 5 hurricanes is directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature and that other aspects of the tropical environment do not contribute substantially to the observed global trend. This study probably may not have been conducted if the earlier computer modelling work had not provoked interest in this specific question.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I was rather hoping that someone on the other side of the debate as it were would answer the question. To second guess would perhaps prove not very helpful.

I've been in these endless discussions with Gary on the subject countless times. At times, he called Global Warming junk science. At other times he just disputed the argument over whether GW is being accellerated by human activity. The REAL argument that Gary and others have is that they don't want the conclusions of scientific study to influence public policy. I realize I'm speaking on his behalf, but on this issue I have a pretty good grasp of his position on it. He's welcome to express it himself for you.

I've said many many times, irrespective of whether or not human activity is accellerating GW, we have a responsibility towards earth and all its inhabitants to conserve nature for future generations (A true 'conservative' view no less). We should approach the use of resources and energy with the attitude of sustainability with our environment - whether it's over the management of forests, our rivers and oceans or the air we breathe. We have an obligation to protect those resources for everyone and not just to the demands of industry.

Edited October 15, 2007 by Mister Fancypants

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Storm delivering snow to Colorado mountains - Oct 14, 2007

Extremely early snow in Germany - Sept. 5, 2007

There, that settles it. It's getting colder not warmer. Above is the definitive proof.

[Widge 0]

Storm delivering snow to Colorado mountains - Oct 14, 2007

Extremely early snow in Germany - Sept. 5, 2007

There, that settles it. It's getting colder not warmer. Above is the definitive proof.

OMG where in Germany is that and when would they normally expect snow there ........ pretty scary after the ####### summer the UK has had for my poor 89 year old mother to face a cold winter too

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Storm delivering snow to Colorado mountains - Oct 14, 2007

Extremely early snow in Germany - Sept. 5, 2007

There, that settles it. It's getting colder not warmer. Above is the definitive proof.

OMG where in Germany is that and when would they normally expect snow there ........ pretty scary after the ####### summer the UK has had for my poor 89 year old mother to face a cold winter too

The Taunus, I believe. This is not an actual picture of this odd occurrence but they did have snow on Sept. 5 far below the usual snow lines.

[Fandango 1,440]

I hope it's snowing when I go to England! I love the winters there

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I hope it's snowing when I go to England! I love the winters there

More likely to get a ton of rain, especially in the south. Down around the London area it snows approximately once every seven years, and its never snowed as much as it did in '86 or '87. We've not really had a cold winter for a good few years.

[Fandango 1,440]

I hope it's snowing when I go to England! I love the winters there

More likely to get a ton of rain, especially in the south. Down around the London area it snows approximately once every seven years, and its never snowed as much as it did in '86 or '87. We've not really had a cold winter for a good few years.

It snowed a decent amt while I lived there....and being as I usually live in FL, it was QUITE a difference.

It wasn't down south, it was NE England...omG the first winter I spent there, I remember crying in November cos I was so cold By winter 2, it was snowball fights and all sorts of fun.

[mendeleev 68]

Those lucky Germans! It hasn't snowed yet in Siberia, where my wife lives? Nor has it snowed yet here in Denver, although we often had first snow (and rapid melt, like it usually is here throughout winter) in the first week of September 40 years ago when I was a kid!

Weather and climate are related but different animals. Weather is like dice. You roll them and you get all sorts of possibilities. Climate has to do with how the dice are loaded. We are loading the dice for hotter weather everywhere. (And as it gets warmer, snowfall distributions will change.)