Globe Warms to Gore

Unexpectedly, I recently got to see parts of An Inconvenient Truth. It was shown on our campus as part of our extensive Earth Week celebrations.

How extensive? This extensive: they brought in David Suzuki. Here. In the Persian Gulf. On the one day of the year he is surely in greatest demand.

My first impression from the movie is, if this was not intended by Gore as a launching pad for a presidential run, I’ll be an Arctic ringtailed monkey’s uncle. Lots of humanizing warm fuzzy clips of Gore’s childhood and family, which otherwise have nothing to do with the purported subject of the film. Of course, he might still not run; depends on how well the film works for him. But winning a couple of Oscars surely helps.

To cap it off, he has now been nominated for the Nobel Prize. And there are at least two active “draft Gore”websites.

At one point in the film, he shows a dramatic chart of the past several hundred thousand years, based on core samples from glaciers, on which rises in levels of CO2 correspond very neatly with rises in the world’s temperature. He concludes by showing the current CO2 level, then that projected for the next forty years, rising off the chart. He rather unsubtly emphasizes the point by using a crane to lift himself up to the final, high point in the graph.

Now, watching this, one question occurred to me immediately: before man started burning fossil fuels, what was causing these regular dramatic rises in CO2 levels? This point Gore did not address.

A new British made-for-TV documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, suggests an answer. In it, paleontologist Ian Clark points out that the rises in CO2 in the core samples actually follow the rises in temperature by about 800 years—a small enough gap not to be apparent on a graph spanning hundreds of thousands of years. But enough to make it certain that the rise in temperature caused the rise in CO2. And not the other way around.

Apparently, when oceans heat up, they emit higher levels of carbon dioxide.

If so, this seems to throw the entire premise of “greenhouse gases” causing the current global warming into confusion. No; it is then global warming that is causing the greenhouse gases.

More info on the new movie here and here.

Some choice quotes:

“billions of pounds is being provided by governments to fund greenhouse effect research, so thousands of scientists know their job depends on the theory continuing to be seen as fact.”

“in science the experts are usually wrong.”

"The few millions of dollars of research money from multinationals can’t compare to government funding.”

"At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion and this is dangerous."

What didn't quite work for McCarthy might work for Gore.