An Inconvenient Truth

Work in Progress: Last updated 06/09/06 7:36AM

Synopsis? One-time self-proclaimed "Next President of the United States" (The ONLY attempt at humor in this graphic lecture) portrays himself as a scientific expert by spewing statements like, "We all know...", "All scientists agree that...", "It is obvious that...", and "No one can argue that we are doing this to ourselves...". He falls short of claiming to have invented Global Warming in his spare time at Harvard, but other than that, there is no solid science, no scientific rebuttal, and an over-abundance of political bravado and blustering posturing. However, I have lots to say about the real SCIENCE involved!

• First, let's take a look at the movie poster.
  
  
  This is an unmistakable correlation between man-made pollutants and the current cycle of vicious weather we are dealing with; intended or unintended, it's still a blatant attempt to correlate them. It's sorta a satellite image of Katrina, or some other hurricane, swirling from a smokestack! According to a recent (11/29/05 ) NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) report,

  "The nation is now wrapping up the 11th year of a new era of heightened Atlantic hurricane activity. This era has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995, and is expected to continue for the next decade or perhaps longer. NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. These cycles, called the tropical multi-decadal signal, typically last several decades (20 to 30 years or even longer). As a result, the North Atlantic experiences alternating decades long (20 to 30 year periods or even longer) of above normal or below normal hurricane seasons. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming."
  (http://www.magazine.noaa.gov/stories/mag184.htm).

  Hmmm. So, it appears this hurricane thing is just another fear-tactic that perpetuates itself and is repeated so often it takes on a life of its own.

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• To start a "documentary" with a statement like, "We are killing ourselves...", is not only ludicrous, but silly. This statement, however, does set the scientific tone for the next hour and 45 minutes; there is no science here. Every statement he utters is either wild speculation or a simple repeat of the popular beliefs the media has shoved down the masses throats. A few cases in point.

  • Showing the often referenced and photographed Argentinian area of the Upsala Glacier (Image: Gary Braasch ©) where a portion of the glacier has obviously disappeared within the last 70 years, he fails to even mention why this happened or how it happened. He only says, "Here is scientific proof of global warming's devastating affects."
    
    
    
    The Upsala Glacier and six other glaciers descend from the South Andean icefield into a lake, surprisingly called Upsala Lake. "I was astounded to discover that while the Upsala glacier had retreated rapidly, the other glaciers [that fed the lake] showed little movement, and one had advanced across the lake into the Magellan peninsula. If in the same area some glaciers advance and others retreat, the cause is clearly not global warming but local micro-conditions." (Dr. Swaminathan Aiyar, U of New Delhi, Global warming or global cooling?; The Times of India.) (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1034077.cms)
    • Aside; In science, a proof is an almost impossible venture. The word has meaning in geometry and in civilian everyday life. However, in science, to prove something would take an eternity of 100% tests and no dead rats or monkeys or Freshmen.
  
  Other atrocious uses of photography to get a pointless point across:
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    This shows the "destruction of Alaskan Spruce trees in Alaska caused by Global Swarming (Image: Gary Braasch ©). I MEAN, Warming! These are simply diseased trees caused by pests near the Yukon border of Canada. Taken in the 80's, the picture does not shoe the results of the Canadian government taking care of their trees. Unfortunately, the US government apparently figured they were too far off the beaten path to take care of and no one would care anyway. Most of those trees are dead now. Associated with Global Warming? I think not. Show me the money!

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    This is Mount Hood in Oregon taken in '85 and '02 in late summer both years. (Image: Gary Braasch ©) Well, let's see how many of you, show of hands, sees almost NO DIFFERENCE! It's unbelievable that a little shadowing effect can fool the masses into thinking there is a significant difference in the snow amounts.

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    Rhone Glacier in Switzerland. Let me quote the author. "The image on the left is from an 1859 etching of the Rhone glacier in Valais, Switzerland, and shows ice filling the valley. In 2001, the glacier had shrunk by some 2.5km, and its 'snout' had shifted about 450 metres higher up." An etching from 1859? This is now scientific evidence?

    Allow me the literary latitude to compare a Van Gogh painting to the real scene. I know, this is whacky. Bear with me.

    
    This represents the last known picture of Van Gogh.

    
    This represents a self-portrait.
    Now, I ask you, which is more acurate of the reality of a guy who cuts off body parts?

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    This is the best of them all! Photo copyrighted by the same guy, (Image: Gary Braasch ©). It shows the same stretch of road somewhere in the world; no details given. It intimates the ocean levels are rising. According to the BBC News site I got it from, BBC News , "This would threaten low-lying islands such as Tuvalu in the Pacific. These images, taken on the same day this year, show the effects of a higher than usual tide."
    Well, do I have news for you! The island of Tuvalu, a member of the Polynesian family north of Fiji, has been reported as sinking as the ocean levels of the Pacific rise. What? An island sinking due to rising waters? Which is it? Sinking or being covered up? Well, according to Australia's National Tidal Facility (NTF), at Flinders University in South Australia, which is charged by the government of Australia to monitor sea levels in the Pacific, "there has been no significant rise in the Pacific Ocean. NTF has had a monitoring station in Tuvalu since 1993 and over the last nine years, the sea level around Tuvalu had risen an average of 0.9 millimeters per year -- that's a whopping 0.03 inches per year or a grand total of .27 inches since 1993. Going back and comparing current sea levels to those of 1978, the sea level has increased a mere 0.07 millimeters or 0.002 inches."

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    These are two shots, again by (Image: Gary Braasch ©), of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. It implicates Global Warming as melting the polar ice caps and raising the ocean levels to the point that a house five blocks inland will be prime beachfront property by 2050! According to Mr. Braasch, "This is a section of shoreline at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina in the USA, pictured in 1999 and 2004. The southern United States and Caribbean region were battered by a series of powerful hurricanes last year." OK. And, your point is? Anyone can see the beach is still the same size, the dunes have eroded. It happens every year in Avalon, NJ. I used to stay there in the summers in the mid-80's. Every season started with the City of Avalon spending a million bucks and a few weeks building up the dunes to protect those multi-billion dollar properties. (I stayed in one of those multi-hundred dollar properties; shared with about 30 other teachers since none of us could afford a real place...)

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• He constantly implies that there are no reputable scientists who dispute anything he says. However, there is wide disagreement about this AND whether humans are causing global warming and about whether we should be worried about the trends. According to a 2004 Gallop survey of members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society, the folks responsible for actually DOING the weather, found that only 17% of them, all with advanced degrees, thought the warming during the 20th Century was the result of an increase in greenhouse emissions.
  
  
  
  Meanwhile, a Times/ABC poll of 1000 blind phone calls to American citizens shows that 87% of them DO think we are causing it (Time Special Issue, "Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid"). Well, who ya gonna believe? Joe Sixpack or Dr. Mel and Hurricane Schwartz?

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• Gore claims, with a glazed look, that unspecified measures can reduce emissions to pre-1970 levels. He assesses the tradeoff between the economy and the environment by displaying a cartoon, YES A CARTOON, of a scale with Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other. "OK, on one side we have gold bars," he says. "Mmm, mmm, don't they look good!" Someone, please, let me know what that scene was all about...

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• Gore, as well as the Kyoto proponents, claims that the US, alone, is the problem. Traveling virtually to China, he is oblivious to the amount of uncontrolled soot and dangerous gases being pumped into the air by China's coal-fired infrastructure. He does not meet with Chinese citizens who wear surgical masks outdoors and can't catch their breath. Instead, he tells us America is lagging behind. "China," he says, "is on the cutting edge" of environmentalism. WHAT? Not according to every source I've been able to find! China is dumping ALL of it's burn-off (chemical crap by-products of coal burning) directly into the air at a staggering rate. Take a look at this NASA satellite image of Eastern China. ICKY!
  
  
  Credit Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE

  Even according to Gore's backers, all those GreenPeas folks, cry about the problems in China. CBS News reported (YINCHAUN, China, March 31, 2000):

  (CBS) In this CBS News World WeatherWatch report Correspondent Barry Petersen tells us why when China smokes, you might get a cough. It is easy to see the pollution problem in an industrial city like Yinchuan in northwestern China but it is hard to realize this is typical across the world's most populated country. The culprit is sulfur dioxide from coal, which is burned for everything from making electricity to cooking dinner. China produces twice the sulfur dioxide as America does, and by some estimates China may one day generate five times more than what we see today. That's why just breathing is making Dr. Jiang's patients sick. He knows of only one cure, and it's not medicine. The best cure is to leave for the countryside, he says. "And these things...are coming from manmade sources in China, and laced in those materials are things like arsenic, lead and zinc," Cahill says. China's far-reaching dust and soot cloud traveling to the West Coast hits Hawaii first...

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• I was taken aback a little when he compared himself to Churchill. The final scene is of Gore bravely silhouetted against the cosmos, a lone figure tenderly surveying his domain. The job he really wants, no recount can give him.

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri