Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 5/1/08 Section: Books and Arts

An Inconvenient Truth, Paramount Pictures [Click to enlarge]

When I walked into the small movie theater to see Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, I kindly asked the cashier if he would let me see the film while paying for the other movie they were showing. If I was refusing to pay for Gore's film on principle, I was not going to flaunt principle by lying. Having said that-and, alas, having paid for a different film-I must admit that it would not have been the end of the world had I actually paid for "An Inconvenient Truth." Al Gore, as it turns out, is not Michael Moore; he is rather a seasoned, intelligent speaker and one who does not waste time on partisan tirades. Though his life stories were irrelevant to the debate-his 6-year-old son being hit by a car and his sister dying of smoking were meant to appeal to emotions and were not even obscurely connected to global warming-his piece was generally replete with facts and information.

Gore addresses two general points that one needs to examine: the scientific evidence regarding global warming, and the economic effects of redressing the supposed problem. Now, Gore makes it very clear that there is a consensus among the scientific community. He claims that among "scientific, peer-reviewed" articles, zero percent dissent from "the consensus" that global warming is a manmade disaster waiting to befall us. One wonders if a scientific, peer-reviewed article could assert that global warming is indeed happening, yet contend that it is natural, or perhaps even that despite the warming, there is no need for alarm. The fact of the matter is that there has been dissent among the scientific community.

Gore intends to scare his audience into believing that it is only a matter of time before Greenland and Antarctica melt away before our eyes, disappear from the map, and succeed in raising the sea level by a good 20 feet (bye-bye Bangladesh, Florida, Holland, millions of people, etc., etc., etc.). The untold story, as articulated by climate scientist Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, is that Antarctica has actually been gaining ice. Suspiciously, Gore never mentions this fact in his film. A 2005 study published by Science (Gore and his staff must not read this particular journal) found that the East Antarctic ice sheet, the largest on the planet, gained 45 billion tons of ice each year between 1992 and 2003. Furthermore, Al Gore himself argues that warmer ocean waters lead to more moisture and more precipitation. While he chooses to equate this information with bigger, badder storms (read: Katrina), he neglects to mention that more precipitation means more snow in the Antarctic. In his film, he myopically chooses to focus on the melting of the Antarctic Peninsula and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. "While we cannot be absolutely certain that [the] accumulation outweighed ice loss," Michaels says, "we have reason to believe that it did." Apparently, there is more to the story than Gore reveals.

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