An inconvenient Truth: A retrospect
(First of two parts)
"Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."
Losing US presidentiable Al Gore, plainspoken and passionate, said this in the film An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), in an effort to convince people that global warming is an immediate, dire, and still fixable problem. Well-paced and galvanizing, the movie suggests he's finally found his calling, beyond political backrooms and official chambers, in the bright light of a cause that moves him. It also insinuates one thing: Change or the Earth dies!
Perhaps I am one of those few couch potatoes who have watched this 140-minute, Gore-starred "documentary" for 15 times already. Most of which I did in my physics classes in Ateneo de Iloilo for the last two years. I have to admit. In my first watch, I felt so convinced, so certain.
For whatever it is worth, I feel so intrigued with the popular film. All the more that it became a requirement in my PhD Philosophy class at West Visayas State University. At an instant, I thought what more can I say? Everything is said by Gore and believed by millions. I myself thought there was nothing to argue about it anymore.
But I was wrong.
Gore has gone unchallenged for too long and I told myself it might make sense if I will assume a Devil's Advocate position this time. And so, after three weeks of research and while peppered with scientific skepticism, I later realized that some of the AIT claims may not be indisputable after all.
In my observation, the only facts and studies considered in the AIT are those convenient to Gore's scare-them-green agenda. And in many instances, Gore distorts the evidence he cites.
For convenience sake, I have listed down the different debatable (if not one sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or wrong) claims raised by the AIT:
One-sided statements
AIT never acknowledges the indispensable role of fossil fuels in alleviating hunger and poverty, extending human life spans, and democratizing consumer goods, literacy, leisure, and personal mobility.
It never acknowledges the environmental, health, and economic benefits of climatic warmth.
It neglects to mention the circumstances that make it reasonable rather than blameworthy for the US to be the biggest CO2 emitter: the world's largest economy, abundant fossil energy resources, markets integrated across continental distances, and the world's most mobile population.
AIT never addresses the obvious criticism that the Kyoto Protocol is all economic pain for no environmental gain and that regulations stringent enough to measurably cool the planet would be a "cure" worse than the alleged disease.
Misleading statements
AIT implies that, throughout the past 650,000 years, changes in CO2levels preceded and largely caused changes in global temperature, whereas the causality mostly runs the other way: CO2changes followed global temperature changes by hundreds to thousands of years.
It ignores the societal factors that typically overwhelm climatic factors in determining people's risk of damage or death from hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires, and disease.
It erroneously implies that a study, which found that none of 928 science articles (actually abstracts) denied a CO2-global warming link, shows that Gore's apocalyptic view of global warming is the "consensus" view among scientists.
It reports that 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused Bush of distorting science, without mentioning that the scientists acted as members of a 527 political group set up to promote the Kerry for President Campaign. (To be continued Monday)