xero

About Al Gore's new documentary:

Trivia: The continuous shot of the Ocean Surface to the Ice Shelf is presented to the audience as actual footage of Antarctica, when really it is a CGI shot taken from the opening credits of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow".


Bahahahaha.

VVO]2M

link, please.

XenoKnight

I'm related to Al Gore.

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kamikaze21

proof or shens

danwest

I've seen the movie. Yes, a CGI clip from The Day After Tomorrow was used, you can even see it in the credits after the movie. However, it never was presented as actual footage. In fact, there were many other CGI scenes and even a humorous clip from "Futurama."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth

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VVO]2M

Thanks, Dan.

Xero, you're an idiot.

PurdueDoubleE

I would bet large amounts of money that Al Gore included that scene specifically with the intent of tricking viewers into thinking it is real footage.

danwest

And what do you have to base that on? Have you seen the movie?

Al Gore's not tricking people here. Remember, this was directed and produced by reputable directors, not Al Gore. Al Gore's Global Warming presentation that he gave for years is the subject matter of this film, as seen through the eyes of the directors/producers. So any input on the CGI probably wasn't even Gore's decision.

So please, see the movie before you make baseless judgements. It's very clear what's CGI and what's not.

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PurdueDoubleE

The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.

-Al Gore


Lets see, what do scientists really believe?

Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, on Gore’s film:

"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

"The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." – Bob Carter as quoted in the Canadian Free Press, June 12, 2006

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, wrote:

“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.” - Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal

Gore’s film also cites a review of scientific literature by the journal Science which claimed 100% consensus on global warming, but Lindzen pointed out the study was flat out incorrect.

“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”- Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal.

Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, wrote an open letter to Gore criticizing his presentation of climate science in the film:

“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?”- Roy Spencer wrote in a May 25, 2006 column.

Former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball reacted to Gore’s claim that there has been a sharp drop-off in the thickness of the Arctic ice cap since 1970.

"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology,” –Tim Ball said, according to the Canadian Free Press.

CMetzger42

Took almost no time at all for the right wing spin machine to get going on something. More cherry picking from the Republicans. Why, I'm shocked, SHOCKED!


An embarrassment to Australian science

Category: Global Warming • bobcarter
Posted on: June 15, 2006 3:00 PM, by Tim Lambert

Matt Drudge recently linked to a web site claiming that climate experts disagreed with Al Gore about global warming. Hundreds of blogs uncritically swallowed the claim.

One of the few skeptics was Bruce Perens who wrote

We ran a pointer to a global-warming-doubter story this morning. Here's the link. I decided to pull the story after reviewing the author attribution (he's from a paid political PR agency), and the venue's other coverage on this issue. Sorry.

Hey, I've got my doubts about global warming too. But it does seem that the "con" side of the argument often comes from people who are paid to have those opinions.

Is Perens correct about the author? It seems so. The author of the article, Tom Harris, works for the High Park Group, a consulting firm that "focuses largely on energy issues" is "retained by the Canadian Electricity Association". The Canadian Electricity Association appears to oppose Kyoto and has help fund a Canadian anti-Kyoto astroturf group.

Of course, this doesn't prove that Harris is wrong, but unless you have the time to go through and carefully check his claims, it would be unwise to believe him.

I've examined Harris' claims and he's wrong. The genuine experts in the field say that Gore, basically, got it right.

Harris writes:

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Hundreds? Really? Earlier they could only come up with sixty scientists who denied that global warming was a problem. And most of them were not actual climate scientists. Harris hasn't found anyone new either. All the scientists he quotes happened to be on that list of deniers.

He is right about one thing -- what is really important is the opinion of the experts who actually work in the field. If you want to find out what they think, I recommend the IPCC Third Assessment Report. Harris doesn't seem to have talked to any of these experts.

And the people he did talk to got the science wrong. For example:

Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."

Look at the picture. Firstly it's not a Mercator projection, but a Plate carrée projection. And pretty obviously there are not massive areas of cooling and the dominance of warming (in red) is not because of the map projection.



Or this:

Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

Well yes, over hundreds of millions of years, things like continental drift and long term changes in the sun are more important to climate than CO2. I'd keep that in mind if I was try to predict what the climate would be like in 100 million years. What about over the last 400,000 years? Study the graph below.



Harris winds up with:

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Yeah, they'd speak out but George Deutsch is stopping them. Oh no, that's right, he was censoring scientific results that supported global warming. And Bob Carter is an embarrassment to Australian science: his propaganda campaign is based on blatant cherry picking and getting scientific "facts" from Fox News.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/200..._australian.php

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SmokeDis

who cares what gore has to say? an inconvenient truth bites

kamikaze21

I thought it was great.

PurdueDoubleE

Metzger, how is the opinion of scientists who oppose Global Warming considered "spin", while many of those scientists lose funding if they do so? The amount of funding for global warming research is staggering, which is why not a lot of opposition is seen.

CMetzger42

I dunno, maybe the same reason why it's "spin" to find a scientist who disagrees with evolution. The amount of funding for evolution research is pretty high compared to that for "intelligent design". Must be a conspiracy, huh?

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SmokeDis

who cares about global warming? so it's gettin hot in herre...just take off all ur clothes

VVO]2M

Politicizing something like global warming encourages people to sign on or off of it based solely on their personal, political likes and dislikes, removing science still further from the issue. And that's just fucking stupid.

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PurdueDoubleE

I agree Worm.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220



Spin indeed. The global warming issue has been so politicized it's ridiculous. Greenpeace has strayed so far of course from its original intentions that its very founder, Dr. Moore, now denounces the group as a politicized group that borders on eco-terrorism. It's rather sad, because there probably ARE some thing we could do to make places a bit cleaner and safer on local levels, but this fear-mongering about how we're causing destruction on a global scale and can only cure it through things like the Kyoto Protocol reeks of Socialism disguised as science.

PurdueDoubleE

"Intelligent design" is not science, so that analogy is N/A.

I also find one of the charts you posted to be interesting. It shows periodic fluctuations in CO2 levels going back half a million years. Those must have been caused by humans, huh.

SmokeDis

let's all just drive a whole lot more and cut down some more trees

cathryn

once i attended a church service and the sermon was about how we must worry about sin and not the environment, because god decides when the end of the world happens and not us. tehy actually mentioned the pointlessness of recycling. my family didn't go back.

but it made me understand certain people's reasoning, i guess.

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PurdueDoubleE

An episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" also deals with the pointlessness of recycling. And they're hardly religious.

cathryn

i don't think recycling is pointless. i don't like overconsumption.

clearly, though, my post wasn't about recycling.

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BoilerBall24

That's ironic...because worrying is considered a sin...what kind of church was this anyway?? It's probably for the best that you didn't go back!

cathryn

worry was My word, not theirs. more accurately, the sermon instructed the congregation to focus on removing sin from their lives, rather than "silly things" like the environment. it was definitely politically driven, basically just implied that we should vote for people who'd ban gay marriage and std vaccinations and emergency contraception becuase nothing else matters.

this was several years ago. i don't go to church now because there isn't a religion i like. and because i really just don't care about god.

i'm not sure how i feel about global warming, but i do believe we should take care of this planet. i don't think it's stupid or bad to recycle.

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