Read This:
Article from Macleans Magazine, May 14th Issue.
Al Gore's tenuous grasp on the 'truth'
Gore blasted the Tories' green plan, but it includes almost every remedy that he calls for
FROM THE EDITORS | May 14, 2007 |
Of all the memorable scenes in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, it's hard to forget his forecast on rising oceans.
The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet at the hands of global warming will increase worldwide sea levels by nearly seven metres, Gore states. He sketches out the impact this will have: India and Bangladesh will be inundated. Forty million people will be displaced around Shanghai. Florida will all but disappear. Most cruel of all, however, is the effect on New York City. His graphics then show a blue tide of water slowly swallowing up city streets. "This is what would happen to Manhattan. They [scientists] can measure this precisely." In a whisper he adds: "The area where the World Trade Center Memorial is to be located would be underwater." It is perhaps the most powerful moment in the movie. Yet, like the bulk of Gore's message, it is also heavily exaggerated and of questionable practical value.
Those scientists in which Gore puts so much faith do discuss the possibility of a failure of Greenland's ice. In fact, the February 2007 report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentions the possibility of a seven-metre rise in the oceans. But that report also says global warming would have to continue "for millennia" for this to occur. Gore's Manhattan/Atlantis scenario is thus a potential risk sometime after 4007. It's not exactly a clear and present danger.
We bring this up not because global warming or environmentalism are things to be ignored -- they are important issues to be sure -- but to point out Gore's frequent distance from the useful truth. His comment last week in Toronto that the Conservative government's environmental plan is a "complete and total fraud ... designed to mislead the Canadian people" is as exaggerated and misplaced as his movie scaremongering. It is never a fraud to be honest. However painful it may be for single-minded idealists like Gore to admit, it is an absolute impossibility for Canada to meet its 2012 Kyoto targets without triggering economic collapse.
The plan released by Environment Minister John Baird last month includes almost all the remedies Gore himself calls for. Ottawa has already introduced tax breaks for public transit. Now we have rebates for fuel-efficient cars with new standards on the way. There will be carbon sequestering, a new technology fund and a ban on incandescent bulbs. Baird's plan is also notable for its focus on reducing air pollution, which arguably has a bigger negative impact on Canadians today than global warming ever will. Taken as a whole, the plan represents an effective compromise between economic sanity and environmental necessity.
Gore's fascinating reinvention of himself from earnest but boring politician to environmental crusader is a notable achievement. If he has made himself rich in the process, we applaud that as well. But during this transformation, Gore appears to have forgotten the art of realistic policy-making, and he has ceased to tell his audience the whole truth.
When will we ever do enough for the tree huggers? No matter what we do, will ever be enough for Al Gore. What Gives? When will these people ever be happy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
If you want to read an in depth analysis of IPCC's latest report:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/
The one thing the report does not spend much consideration on the potential rapid changes in ice flow, mostly because no scientists know how to correctly model this. Quite often a dirty, empirical extrapolation method was used or else it was assumed to remain constant for the next 100 years, which would lose ALOT of accuracy if ice flow changes are not linearly proportional to global temperature (which seems very likely).
The millenia required for the 7 meter rise that MacLean's mentions does not take into account the very real possibility that ice flow from Antarctica and Greenland could be increasing at an ever increasing rate. If so, this 7 meter rise would be GREATLY accelerated.
It always seems to be about What Ifs.
The fact of the matter is, if we are going to all get on board with this we need the actual truth. For me, being against the global warming thing, it is a case of the situation is too big to even be believable. It has been blown up, and blown out of proportion by Gore, and Suzuki.
I'll give you credit Brad, the things we have discussed are far more realistic to me then what i hear in the Media from Al Gore. At least you present decent facts that aren't so exaggerated.
But the point still remains, if this issue is going to become a main focus, and not just for political jargon, it needs to be presented more like you do it, and less like Gore does.
See facts don't really matter. It's no different from the 70's global cooling scare. What happened to that? It's just another scientific band wagon for tree huggers to hop onto.
Jonathan
It has to be about What Ifs because we are talking about the future. We have no way to properly determine what will happen, so we have to deal in terms of what may happen if other events take place.
Seriously, if you want to learn the truth about global warming I suggest pouring through all of the many peer reviewed scientific journals out there that deal with this issue fully and in depth, with no political or media agenda. Just scientists exploring various aspects of the issue and making recommendations and hypothesis' based on their observations. It's not an exciting or easy read, it requires lots of time, patience and further research, but that's how you reach the truth. Unfortunately, in our society, nobody has time for anything, so the media is left with providing us with short snippets of information that will always leave way for questions from skeptics that have usually already been addressed by the scientific community.
As for global cooling, despite what some "documentaries" want us to believe, it's really quite irrelevant to the discussion of global warming. Global cooling was an idea presented to the media by a small group of scientists that was quickly discarded as further scientific research went into the subject and was found that this period was an anamoly with defined causes (aerosols and changes in orbit). We must be careful not to confuse pop cultural fads with accepted scientific theory. As for global warming, scientific confidence in this event is growing more and more as further research is being done.
One question:
If it is supposed to be about what ifs, then why does Gore think he can accurately predict the future?
Scientists can accurately predict things like what would happen if the ocean levels rose 7 meters. Scientists can accurately predict how high the oceans would rise if the large ice shelfs in Antarctica or Greenland broke off. When I watched Al Gore's movie, these were the things he was saying we could accurately predict. What we can't accurately predict is when/if those ice shelves will break off, when/if we pass the point of no return in regards to the ice caps melting and just how fast those ice flows will melt as temperatures continue to increase. What Gore's movie depicts is one of the worst case scenarios and it shouldn't be disregarded because there is enough scientific evidence telling us this worse case scenario is one that could realistically happen.
Post a Comment