An Inconvenient Truth 1033
There's a movie teaser line that you may have seen recently, that goes like this: "What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" The answer is "I'd try." The teaser's actually for another movie, but that's the story that's told in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth": it starts with a man who, after talking with scientists and senators, can't get anyone to listen to what he thinks is the most important thing in the world. It comes out on DVD today.
The scariest horror film of 2006 was a documentary.
The first thing everyone wants to know, or at least to argue about, is whether Al Gore has his facts straight. The short answer is yes, he does. There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.
And the main point is scary, and almost too big to think about or talk about. The earth is warming, because of us. Sometime in the next hundred years, our environment is going to change in big ways. We can't predict it with much accuracy yet, but the best estimates we have are that it's going to be -- measured in lives and dollars -- really bad.
In a way this film isn't really about that story. It's about a man telling that story -- someone who, after suffering a bit of a setback, asked himself, well, what can I do now? What's important to me? How do I want to spend my time?
What's important is a question a lot of nerds may be familiar with. We like to talk about important things. But how do you respond when you try to say something serious and the cool kids laugh at you? What do you do, when you put yourself out there, try to engage people's minds, and instead they make fun of your clothes?
The good news for anyone who's had a prom invitation rejected is that people can come back from worse disasters. His presidential bid didn't go so well in 2000. Gore had given talks on global warming before; after he was forcibly retired from public service, he took a Powerbook and Keynote on the road, sharpening and expanding his slideshow talk in airports and hotels.
Half of the film is that talk, and it's an engrossing talk. There are charts and diagrams and footnoted stats (and a Futurama clip) and it's about as fun as numbers and chemicals get. Turns out Al Gore has a sly sense of humor (but not a nasty one -- the film's only two political nudges are pretty gentle). Unless you're a climate scientist you'll probably learn something too.
But the other half, interwoven with the lectures, is a man picking up the pieces and rediscovering something important in his life, a message that he has to tell. That succeeds as a film.
And Gore's lecture succeeded too. Somehow, I'm not sure how, this documentary changed the way Americans look at global warming. In early 2006, global warming was still seen as one of those things that may be true or may not. Pundits were fairly evenly divided and both positions were routinely heard. It's now late 2006 and the debate has moved from "is global warming happening?" to "it's happening, we've caused it, and what if anything should we do about it?"
Most of the warming-deniers left are the real extremists out in Rush Limbaugh territory. We're not yet all the way to a serious, scientifically-informed debate, but somehow, overnight, this film pulled most of the fence-sitters over to where the scientists were years ago.
As for actually fixing global warming, it will take a miracle. Maybe two miracles. I think in the next few decades we're going to need to start an Apollo moonshot-type miracle of technology and engineering to beat back the greenhouse effect. Nanorobots. Reflective dust in the stratosphere. Giant mirrors at the Lagrange point. Bioengineered plankton to sink carbon or change the oceans' albedo. Something. That's just a guess.
But meanwhile, though we hope someone can build us an airbag before we crash the car into the tree, that doesn't absolve us from stepping on the brakes. Right now, we need a change in attitude, in our community and our politics, to start slowing the damage we're doing every day to our grandchildren's Earth -- to buy them time, and give them more options. The only way that happens is when the governments of industrialized and developing nations decide this is a priority.
And the only way that happens is for people everywhere to stop listening to the cool kids and, once again, pay attention to the nerds.
Scientific consensus not quite there yet... (Score:2, Informative)
"I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands has fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific." -- Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, N.Z.
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"We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry, if applied properly." -- Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics and geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden.
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"Gore is completely wrong here -- malaria has been documented at an altitude of 2,500 metres -- Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1,500 metres. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the "30 so-called new diseases" Gore references are attributable to global warming, none." -- Dr. Paul Reiter, professor, Institut Pasteur, unit of insects and infectious diseases, Paris, comments on Gore's belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes.
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"Our information is that seven of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world's estimated total) are either stable or increasing..... Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has." -- Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager, wildlife research section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut.
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"Mr. Gore suggests that the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner." -- Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax.
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"The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling.... Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all." -- Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, Calif.
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"Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than one degree C since 1950. And the area of sea ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years." -- Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia.
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"From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic." -- Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.
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"The MPB (mountain pine beetle) is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand." -- Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, B.C., comments on Gore's belief that the mountain pine beetle is an "invasive exotic species" that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost.
Re:Did Al Gore buy advertising on this site? (Score:4, Informative)
I have no idea whether Al Gore or anyone affiliated with the film bought advertising on this site. The content/editorial side and the advertising side are kept separate on Slashdot as well or better than any other news website out there.
And it already is filed under both politics and science (check the icons near the top of the story). Both are clearly applicable.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Informative)
Incorrect.
I would suggest you actually watch the movie.
Re:The scientific debate has ended? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a bibliography of 1970s era scientific papers about climate change [wmconnolley.org.uk].
>We may or may not have a role in the warming.
If it's possible to put as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we have and *not* get a climate effect, that would be one of the most astonishing scientific results in history.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:5, Informative)
And the Clinton administration. Kyoto protocol was passed on December 12, 1997. Clinton never submitted it to the Senate for ratification.
Bush has problems with China and India (two of the top polluters) being exempt. This is not a Republican issue, although I encourage you to yell at Reid and Pelosi to pass it.
Relavant wikipedia section:
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Informative)
That's completely false. Stop repeating Rush Limbaugh's lies.
An article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scientific consensus not quite there yet... (Score:2, Informative)
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"From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic." -- Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.
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How old are these quotes?
Up here in Canada we're very concerned (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/11/08/enviro
Either your sources are inaccurate or woefully out of date.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:3, Informative)
Next look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body [wikipedia.org]
Basicly heat radiates as the cube of the temperature change in kelven so going from 60 degrees f (288.7 in kelvin) to 65 degrees f (291.48 in kelvin) = (290.37 ^ 4) / (288.7 ^ 4) = 1.039 or 3.9% more incoming energy. Or ~3.9% increase in insulation.
Now increasing CO2 will provide more insulation and drive up the temperature. The question is only complex when you try to find how important CO2 is. Afterall painting roads black also increases the temperature.
PS: Venus hotter than Mercury even though it get's ~1/4 the heat from the sun.
Note: The pressure of Venus' atmosphere at the surface is 90 atmospheres and it is composed mostly of carbon dioxide.
Re:Proof is for mathematicians (Score:5, Informative)
Nice, you just illustrated the GPs point.
You *can't* prove a scientific hypothesis! All you can do is provide more and more evidence to back it up. Even General Relativity isn't "proven" in the scientific sense, and as far as theories goes, it's as rigorously tested as they get.
So, the question is, at what point will there be enough evidence to convince you? Personally, I think the answer is "never", because you have your beliefs and you're unwilling to deviate from them.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:3, Informative)
"But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
He did *not* say that he "invented the internet". He said that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." That he did. [wikipedia.org]
17,000+ Scientists who aren't part of consensus (Score:2, Informative)
No, there isn't a consensus among scientists. The above link is a petition signed by 17,000+ scientists who believe: There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
747 "efficient?" Ha! (Score:4, Informative)
You have it exactly backwards. Commercial aviation is the least fuel-efficient way to move people. Maybe you meant to say jumbo jets in particular are more fuel-efficient than other jet aircraft? You might be correct in that case, assuming that the jumbo jet is always completely filled with passengers, which of course is not true.
A 747 burns 3300 gallons of fuel per hour and cruises at 490 knots. Neglecting to consider takeoff and landing, that means that over a 5 hour flight, the plane will have burned 16,500 gallons of fuel and traveled 2450 nautical miles (2821 statute miles). Assuming the plane is completely booked and is carrying 524 passengers (actual seating capacity varies by model and airline), then each passenger is responsible for 31.5 gallons of fuel.
A Cadillac Escalade gets 20 miles per gallon in highway driving. Filled to capacity (as our 747 was. Fair is fair, after all), it seats 8 people. Traveling the same distance (2821 miles) at 20 miles per gallon, this "gas-guzzling SUV" will suck down 141 gallons of premium. Each passenger is responsible for 17.6 gallons of fuel.
The 747, operating under ideal conditions, is barely half as "efficient" as the much-maligned, gas-guzzling Cadillac Escalade. And you want to hold it up as the pinnacle of efficiency? Better check your numbers. Be glad I didn't bring up busses or trains.
And I didn't even go into the fact that the 747 is spewing its exhaust directly into the thin, upper atmosophere, where it can do the most damage.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:3, Informative)
777:
Gallons used to travel 3000 miles (cross country): ~20,000
Average number of passengers for cross country trip: 400
Gallons per traveler: 50
Car:
Highway MPG: 30
# of gallons to travel 3000 miles: 100
Average # of travelers: 2
Gallons per traveler: 50
So as long as there are more than 2 people in a car or a 2 passenger car achieves greater than 30 miles per gallon on the highway, the car is more efficient, right? Of course, not many people would want to take a car cross country over a plane
That being said, Boeing is certainly far more cognizant of the need for fuel efficient airplanes than Airbus (particularly with your pending introduction of the Dreamliner). That's why I specifically singled out Airbus.
One graph tells the whole story... (Score:3, Informative)
In a nutshell:
The natural cycle timeline here (per Gore's graph) is very long - these are the last few ice ages we're looking at, with data derived from artic ice cores etc.
The inevitable conclusion is that global temperature follows CO2 level and CO2 level is already way above normal due to industrialization. The vertical/horizontal axis here are about in correct ration (showing how far above the normal range the CO2 level is).
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/8480/globalwarmin gua0.jpg [imageshack.us]
Fuel difference, too... (Score:2, Informative)
Escalade is more efficient than 747 (Score:2, Informative)
HowStuffWorks fudged their math a bit. Their numbers actually work out to 76 miles per gallon per person, not 100 as they claimed. If you take the speed they use (550 mph), that's actually a mile every 6.55 seconds, not every 5 seconds. Burning 3600 gallons/hour, that's 6.55 gallons per mile, or 0.0131 gallons per person per mile (they claimed 0.01), or 76 miles per gallon per person. However, you concede that it ranged between 69.8 and 100, so that's fine.
My problem is that both you and HowStuffWorks insist on comparing a full airplane with an almost-empty roadgoing vehicle. The Cadillac Escalade, as I said, gets 20 mpg highway, or 0.05 gallons per mile. Split among 8 passengers, that's 0.00625 gallons per person per mile, or 160 miles per person per gallon, which is still well above HowStuffWorks' optimistic calculation of 100 miles per person per gallon for the 747.
I'm not denying that flying isn't faster. I'm saying that there is absolutely no way you can manipulate the math to try and portray it as anything better than what it is. And "what it is" is the absolutely least-fuel-efficient way to travel that is possible.
Re:can you ignore a whole city? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gore is out to lunch (Score:5, Informative)
Pity that 'think tank' is funded mostly by oil companies isn't it?
"Competitive Enterprise Institute has received $2,005,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998."
source:
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php
Re:I'm REALLY Serial! (Score:5, Informative)
Anything more I can help out with?
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have any idea of how much fuel is used by family farms? I do. Tractors, combines, farm trucks , irrigation wells: all use a lot of fuel. A good percentage of farming expenses come from fuel costs so anything that inflates fuel costs would tend to drive more family farmers out of the business and leave it to the big conglomerates who get savings on the scale of their operations.
Re:Serious harm to the economy (Score:2, Informative)
Crop failures, water shortages, regional refugee crises, loss of biodiversity... all those things would also harm our economy.
Ironically, Bush has implemented almost all of the protocols via the EPA (or at least as much as is reasonable) without having actually signed the document.
He has also drastically pushed alternative fuel and fuel saving tax credits to the point that hybrids are becoming a common sight on the roads and folks get tax credit for replacing inefficient heaters/windows/doors and adding insulation.
I would not, however, expect anyone to notice. The news is too busy pushing that Ken Lay met with Cheney during this planning than actually reading the report or reporting on how it is changing society.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:2, Informative)
0 of 928 scientific studies suggest a cetain political solution to the problem. The Kyoto protocal has some terrible flaws:
1. It doesn't allow nuclear power to be used as a substitute for greenhouse gas emitting power - meaning we can't meet the Kyoto protocal by adopting nuclear power like France has done. Therefore, nuclear power, the single most promising substitute for fossile fuels, is handicapped by Kyoto.
2. It doesn't allow for forest conservation and replanting to be used as a method of reducing greenhouse gasses to keet the Kyoto protocal... The United States, because of it's massive amount of uninhabited land, is in a perfect position to reduce CO2 by planting and conserving carbon sinks.
3. The Kyoto protocal places no limits on the "developing world", which means that instead of an overall decrease in world CO2 emissions, what will happen is that all CO2 producing industries will move to India, China, Indonesia, and places without an Kyoto obligations where the lax enviornmental laws mean they will produce EVEN MORE EMISSIONS AND POLLUTION!!! So while U.S. emissions may go down, they will go up by orders of magnitude somewhere else, and the jobs will follow emissions!
4. The Kyoto protocal doesn't provide any penalties for breaking the Kyoto protocal. Which means that countries that "fully adopted" the Kyoto protocal like Canada, are much farther away from meeting their obligations than countries like the U.S. who rejected the protocal. Kyoto provides an economy incentive to break Kyoto - As countries that follow Kyoto will be economicly handicapped while countries that violate Kyoto will gain advantage.
The Kyoto protocal is utterly retarded, and will cause CO2 emissions to rise instead of decline. And most of Al Gore's uber-government totalitarian solutions won't work to stop CO2 emissions any more than the uber-government War On Drugs has done anything to stop the drug trade (it actually increases the drug trade because by limiting supply it drives up price - The U.S. government is the OPEC of the illegal drug trade!).
There is absolutly no consensus on what political solutions will help solve global warming. But the solutions that are being presented by so-called enviornmentalists have nothing to do with solving global warming - the "solutions" predate knowledge of global warming, and are the same solutions that were presented 50 years ago as being the solution to creating a "workers paradise". There is a totalitarian agenda that is exploiting the consensus on global warming to make us think that there is a consensus on pro-totalitarianism as well!
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results (Score:4, Informative)
Petrol is quite expensive here at the moment (the price per litre has gone up by more than 50% in the last couple of years) - it's been a big issue in the media/public consciousness. Petrol is also taxed fairly heavily here, but that was also true before the price sky rocketed.
Since petrol has become so expensive the price of food doesn't appear to have dramatically increased (in fact, the general inflation rate is more or less unchanged) - but people are tending to buy smaller cars. The most popular cars in Australia used to be 6 cylinder family sedans with 3.8 to 4 litre engines. There seems to be a trend at the moment towards smaller cars with lower fuel consumption.
Now, I don't have hard data on this - I'm talking on the basis of various conversations I've had and what I can observe of the public mindset - but I believe there is a trend in this direction. In short, it's too simplistic to say that a major increase in petrol prices wil lead to massive inflation - it's not actually that simple.
Re:I'm REALLY Serial! (Score:3, Informative)
Please. (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temp
Insightful my ass. How about incorrect.
Re:Fuel difference, too... (Score:3, Informative)
I would have thought so myself, but since I don't know everything I checked. He appears to be right, according to this Jet-A does contain lead to raise its flash point:
http://encyclopedia.quickseek.com/index.php/Jet_f