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I'm watching An Inconvenient Truth. I'm writing this as I watch the movie.
The first few minutes are a shocker; Al Gore seems to have a personality now.
At one point, Al Gore simply says The atmosphere is thin. So thin that it makes sense that humans can affect it. Then, having proven nothing, he simply moves on. No facts, no data, nothing.
He shows a graph of the CO2 levels. He draws it at a 45 degree angle while talking about temperature levels. He's trying to imply that the graph is about temperatures. This brings up an interesting question: if CO2 levels are rising so fast, where's the correlation? The average temperature has risen about 1 degree in the last hundred years. If CO2 has such a great affect on temperatures, then where is the huge spike in temperatures in the last 50 years? And don't give me that crap about the ???hottest x day in the past x years???, the temperature has been rising for over 10,000 years, so the hottest days should be now. But where is the big spike in the last two or so years?
He also goes on and on about the affects of global warming. He talks about the loss of glaciers like it's a man-made problem. Never mind that they started to recede over 10,000 years ago. At this point in the file (about 16 minutes) he has yet to make a mention of the natural trend of th globes temperates. $100 says he never does; Not once in the movie.
Oh God, this stuff is good. He talks about the loss of a water source for the people living in the Himalayas and blames it on global warming. So, what's the source of this water? The melting glaciers. All righty then...
Okay, now he's showing a temperature graph that only goes back a thousand years. Even creationists go back 6 thousand years. Every time a person that endorses a man-made global warming provides a temperature graph, they only go back a thousand years or so. Why don't they go back any further? Because if they do, they'll get to the point 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. Which is just a tad before the CO2 emissions (and industrialization) started to rise. Which doesn't fit with their world view, so they just ignore it.
Then he talks about the ???anti??? crowd bringing up the cyclical nature of global temperatures. And proceeds to point to the medieval ???hot spot???. Still ignoring the previous 4.5 billion years before that.
Okay, I stand corrected. He actually went back 650,000 thousand years. He even showed a seeming causality between CO2 levels and the ambient temperature. This is the best piece of science so far. The only problem is that he shows this huge C02 spike at the end, but the temperature does change. There goes any causality. He is correct though, pollution is a real problem, unlike man-made global warming. He never did make mention that the glaciers started to recede 10,000 years ago.
He just said that the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 14 years. I like that ???on record??? qualification. It's like Penn Jillette said, ???The numbers aren't bullshit, the bullshit is bullshit!??? If Gore actually looked beyond ???the record???, these are no where near the hottest days the Earth has ever seen. Not even in the last 10 million years.
Now he's trying to tie in Katrina's damage to global warming. Plenty of class 5 hurricanes have hit the US. The only thing that made Katrina something special was shitty planning by state and local officials. Natural global warming is real; and increased water temperature does provide strength to storms. So will we see greater storms, but no amount of anti-CO2 efforts on our part is going to stop that.
Okay, enough.
I made it about half-way though and it looks like all he's going to do is keep talking about the affects of increased global temperature. Which, for the most part, are true. But he seems to have just taken it as a given that it's all man's fault. So far, again, about half way through, he's said nothing about any sort of natural warming affect. Not a single sentence, other than to say that's the defense the ???other people??? use. Never mind that the same ice core science that he relies on shows that the Earth has been much hotter; and without man's intervention.
But that information would be...inconvenient...
The first few minutes are a shocker; Al Gore seems to have a personality now.
At one point, Al Gore simply says The atmosphere is thin. So thin that it makes sense that humans can affect it. Then, having proven nothing, he simply moves on. No facts, no data, nothing.
He shows a graph of the CO2 levels. He draws it at a 45 degree angle while talking about temperature levels. He's trying to imply that the graph is about temperatures. This brings up an interesting question: if CO2 levels are rising so fast, where's the correlation? The average temperature has risen about 1 degree in the last hundred years. If CO2 has such a great affect on temperatures, then where is the huge spike in temperatures in the last 50 years? And don't give me that crap about the ???hottest x day in the past x years???, the temperature has been rising for over 10,000 years, so the hottest days should be now. But where is the big spike in the last two or so years?
He also goes on and on about the affects of global warming. He talks about the loss of glaciers like it's a man-made problem. Never mind that they started to recede over 10,000 years ago. At this point in the file (about 16 minutes) he has yet to make a mention of the natural trend of th globes temperates. $100 says he never does; Not once in the movie.
Oh God, this stuff is good. He talks about the loss of a water source for the people living in the Himalayas and blames it on global warming. So, what's the source of this water? The melting glaciers. All righty then...
Okay, now he's showing a temperature graph that only goes back a thousand years. Even creationists go back 6 thousand years. Every time a person that endorses a man-made global warming provides a temperature graph, they only go back a thousand years or so. Why don't they go back any further? Because if they do, they'll get to the point 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. Which is just a tad before the CO2 emissions (and industrialization) started to rise. Which doesn't fit with their world view, so they just ignore it.
Then he talks about the ???anti??? crowd bringing up the cyclical nature of global temperatures. And proceeds to point to the medieval ???hot spot???. Still ignoring the previous 4.5 billion years before that.
Okay, I stand corrected. He actually went back 650,000 thousand years. He even showed a seeming causality between CO2 levels and the ambient temperature. This is the best piece of science so far. The only problem is that he shows this huge C02 spike at the end, but the temperature does change. There goes any causality. He is correct though, pollution is a real problem, unlike man-made global warming. He never did make mention that the glaciers started to recede 10,000 years ago.
He just said that the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 14 years. I like that ???on record??? qualification. It's like Penn Jillette said, ???The numbers aren't bullshit, the bullshit is bullshit!??? If Gore actually looked beyond ???the record???, these are no where near the hottest days the Earth has ever seen. Not even in the last 10 million years.
Now he's trying to tie in Katrina's damage to global warming. Plenty of class 5 hurricanes have hit the US. The only thing that made Katrina something special was shitty planning by state and local officials. Natural global warming is real; and increased water temperature does provide strength to storms. So will we see greater storms, but no amount of anti-CO2 efforts on our part is going to stop that.
Okay, enough.
I made it about half-way though and it looks like all he's going to do is keep talking about the affects of increased global temperature. Which, for the most part, are true. But he seems to have just taken it as a given that it's all man's fault. So far, again, about half way through, he's said nothing about any sort of natural warming affect. Not a single sentence, other than to say that's the defense the ???other people??? use. Never mind that the same ice core science that he relies on shows that the Earth has been much hotter; and without man's intervention.
But that information would be...inconvenient...
True.
