Report From Freedonia: Al Gore's Global Warming for Dummies

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Having actually watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in its entirety, without becoming drowsey, I feel I am now qualified to comment on his theater grade powerpoint presentation. (Or whatever the equivalent software Mr. Gore uses in his powerMac that the film's directors made sure to cameo as he was riding in his Lincoln limo from the airport.)

I watched the movie because another trained engineer, who I have worked closely with for two decades and whose judgement I consider sound, urged me to see the Gore effort so that I could fairly balance it and some of its compelling claims against an earlier work of fiction which he had recommened to me, State of Fear by Michael Crichton.

I had read enough of State of Fear and Crichton's alter ego feelings on the global warming debate to understand the premise of his novel: fear, as in the global warming crisis, is being used as a political weapon to control people. Since Critton's position on this matter is close to my own, I did not see the point of reading his whole work just to engage in self-gratification.

In watching Gore's documentary, I set aside the emotive pictures Mr. Gore and his producers selected to show of disappearing glaciers and despondant polar bears in search of ice packs. The money slide in the Inconvenient Truth presentation is the one depicting the hockey stick shaped trend of CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere over the last 1000 years. During this point in the show, Gore also slips in an additional chart that was virtually identical in shape to his 1000 year CO2 chart. This was his chart for human population.

I failed to capture the video on the Gore population chart but, what it showed was that the zoom in reported CO2 readings clearly matched the zoom in human population reported by governments worldwide. The juxtaposition of these two trends forms then one basis for arguing that global warming is anthropogenic. In his presentation of the two charts, Gore only makes note of their similarity and treads no further.

I will admit I may be guilty of harboring a misconception, but it does appear to me that global warming alarmists spend the bulk of their time detailing all the ways per capita CO2 emmissions can be effectively reduced. It only seems to be in the darker corners of the discussion that the capita side of the equation is addressed.

This is where I think human caused global warming proponents need to fess up. They publish plenty of position papers and protocols for targeting CO2 emmissions per person, but they remain, in the main, publicly silent on what they targeting as the actual number of persons they believe are sustainable on Mother Earth.

The politically minded understand that you have to build paniced support for passing legislation first. The truth behind the legislation often is not revealed until the finer realities of the legislation are implemented. Work will set you free looks good in print, but in reality it can be an entirely different matter.

There is a good reason Crichton chooses to compare the global warming crowd of this century to the crowd of eugenicists early in the last century. Financial backing by the Rockefeller and Carnegie trusts is not the only commonality between the two movements. As before, the goal is to gain the authority to dictate harsh decisions upon other people.

The argument as to how any climate change (human induced or not) should be addressed then becomes a moral debate, not a scientific debate.

As for science, I find the Gore movie difficult to take seriously. Most of the arguments offered by global warming adepts against Crichton's work of fiction also apply to Gore's documetary.

Gore, whose formal scientific training appears to be a single class on weather that he took in college, makes his most hysterical claim in the movie when he shows a slide with an ice core sample and exclaims, "There, right there is where we passed the Clean Air Act." (I've provided captions to assist the viewer. If I have to assist you beyond this, we are simply not on the same page.)

Equally telling is how this exposure of Gore's capability for critial thought is dispensed with in the propoganda piece USA Today ran to promote Gore's flick:

"Some scientists said Gore confused his ice sheets when he said the effect of the Clean Air Act is noticeable in the Antarctic ice core; it is the Greenland ice core."

Another scientist quoted in the USA Today article, Robert Corell, was even more generous, "I sat there and I'm amazed at how thorough and accurate...After the presentation I said, 'Al, I'm absolutely blown away. There's a lot of details you could get wrong.' ... I could find no error."

Forgive me charging the scientists on the USA Today go-to list as practicioners of scatomancy, for imagining they can divine out the effect of an act of Congress from tiny gas bubbles trapped in a layer of ice.

Another telling aspect of the Gore film: An entire documetary on a scientific issue with not a single scientist speaking on camera to support Gore's arguments. OK, so the directors maybe used artistic license there. Watch their credits at the end of the film. Under image acknowlegements, because Gore displayed a picture of the Earth taken from space, you can be impressed by a credit for NASA, ditto for some other image-source combinations.

What you will not find is a single acknowlegement of thanks to any scientist or scientific organization. No, not even a single scientist as an advisor to the director or editor.

You can note that the film had six "researchers." Here is what I found on a web search of their names:

Lynda Hayden - other research credits include Surf Girls and Sorority Life III.

Keith Relkin - If I've found the right guy, being a Scientologist makes him the closest thing to a scientist on the Gore team.

Marianna Yarovskaya - cut her investigative journalist teeth with Russian State Televison. Also worked on the documentary KAL007

Stephen Ruskowski ranks no more than a below the line credit for Director Guggenheim

Gwen Cassidy noted on only one other production: Travel Channel's Made in America.

Carey Ann Strelecki - one generic reference: "production supervisor - broadcast media"

Even in his "novel" Crichton provides 32 pages of scientific refenences and bibliography at the back of the paperback edition. In place of this, An Inconveneint Truth gives us touchy feely moments of Al reminising on his life growing up on his family's now dormant tobacco farm (that sits upon a royalty producing zinc mine.)

Seriously, in all his travels, Gore could not come up with a single scientist to retain as a creditable advisor to his film?

In the end, while Al Gore impresses us with a likeable personality we never knew he had, An Inconvenient Truth is really about the quixotic man who would be President, not science.

We will pray that, whatever final solution Mr. Gore and his supporters arrive at to solve their global warming crisis, they do not travel down the path taken by Margaret Sanger and and her advocates of a century ago.