MAGIC         PORK

I’ll state up front that I haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about global warming featuring Al Gore. Perhaps I should, but maybe I’ll wait until it’s in the dollar theater. I’ve seen the trailer and I’ve read reviews about it so I have a good idea of what it’s asserting.

First off, while we’re on the subject of that trailer. It actually has the gall to state “If you love your planet… If you love your children… You have to see this film.” So there you have it folks. If you have kids and you don’t see it, you must not love them. Shame on you.

Now I’m not saying that global warming is all a crock. If a lot of scientists in the world support that theory then I’m not going to sit here and just say “well it sounds fishy to me”. Well I take that back. I am going to say it sounds fishy to me, but I’m willing to concede that just because something sounds fishy to me doesn’t mean it’s not true. I haven’t studied all the evidence that they have.

But what gets me angry is how global warming has become common knowledge. If you doubt global warming then you must be a moron or some right-winger in bed with the oil companies. After all, every scientist in the world believes in global warming, right? That’s what the film would have you believe.

Let’s talk about what we mean first. When we say “global warming” do we mean…

• The Earth’s temperature is increasing.
• The Earth’s temperature is increasing because of man-made actions.
• The Earth’s temperature is increasing because of man-made actions and IT’s GOING TO KILL US ALL IF WE DON’T ACT RIGHT NOW!!!

Few scientists contest that the Earth’s temperature is increasing. So in that sense, maybe you could say there’s a consensus that global warming is occurring. But environmentalists take that consensus and project it to mean one of the other two definitions above, for which there may be a great deal of support, but not a consensus.

Wikipedia has a list of scientists opposing global warming consensus. For example, there’s Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at some little liberal arts college called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s also an article in Wikipedia all about the global warming controversy that better explains it than I could here.

So back to An Inconvenient Truth. The trailer shows computer projections of what will happen if the ice caps melt. We’ve all been told about cities flooding and such. My generation basically grew up being told that. We’ll all be living on rafts drinking our own filtrated urine. (Yes, I just made a Waterworld reference.) But they don’t just say cities will be flooded and leave it at that. No, their computer projections can tell us exactly what parts of the coastal cities will be underwater. Yeah right. Makes for scary visuals but I don’t buy for a second that your programs can accurately predict what exactly New York City will look like after an increase in temperature melts the ice caps. I bet even the programmers who wrote that software are rolling their eyes at that.

But you know the part of the trailer that absolutely pissed me off? When they talk about Hurricane Katrina and how recently we’ve had all these bad hurricanes, and it’s because of global warming. That’s when I lost any hope that the movie would be a rational look at the issue of global warming. Recent hurricanes, tsunamis, etc have NOTHING to do with global warming. That’s 100% BS.

You can’t look at one or two years of data and make a claim as to a trend. Take a look at these historic statistics and tell me if you can see a trend. I can’t. Even if 2005 had some astronomical number of hurricanes (which it didn’t, according to the data I could find online. 15 hurricanes vs. 12 in 1969, 7 “major” hurricanes vs. 8 in 1950.) that still wouldn’t indicate jack. It wouldn’t mean it’s because of global warming.

Roger Ebert bought An Inconvenient Truth hook, line, and sinker. Luckily Richard Roeper was a little more level-headed. He also gave it thumbs up also but he had this to say (after Ebert got done reviewing the movie):

I agree with you. I don’t think there’s any dispute or debate. Global warming is real. I think there can be some debate about the causes and about Gore’s dire predictions and if this was a true documentary, it would have been nice to see a little balance here. I mean this is, this is a very well done, slickly packaged campaign commercial about global warming starring Al Gore. As such it’s very effective and very successful. I think it can create a debate and discussion and we can go from there.

The expression on Ebert’s face looked honestly stunned to be hearing Roeper at all questioning the film’s assertions about global warming. He was probably especially stunned because Roeper is well known to be a liberal. After some back-and-forth with Ebert where Ebert basically said no respected scientists debate global warming, Roeper said:

It’s whether or not it’s human behavior that’s causing all of this, it’s whether or not Gore’s predictions for the next 10 to 50 years.. there is some debate about that and the film doesn’t address that.

You can listen to their full conversation here.

So I guess I’m just saying see the movie if you want to, but realize that things aren’t as incontrovertible as they say and there still is some debate on the subject.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 1:50 am and is filed under movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.