Al Gore's Global Warming Hype

The New York Times has, uncharacteristically, published a piece that is critical (if very cautiously) of Al Gore's Global Warming Ministry. 

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

There are four general claims about global warming that are key to understanding its importance and that are subject to scientific analysis, as opposed to political interpretation. 

1. The global climate, over all, is gradually warming.
2. Human activity is a significant cause of that warming.
3. Global warming will be bad, on balance, for humanity.
4. Policy can significantly mitigate the degree of global warming in the short term.

I have stated the claims in order of certitude.  Number 1 is pretty certain.  I don't know of any reputable scientist who doubts that we are indeed in a warming trend.  Number 2 is less so, but now it looks like a pretty sure proposition.  Some reputable scientist do question this, but most accept it. 

Number 3, by contrast, is very much up in the air.  Climate change is bound to be bad for some people and bad for others.  Some regions will get less rain, others a lot more.  Growing seasons will be longer for many regions, with warmer nights and less evaporation.  You'd have to be a farmer to find bad news in that. 

As for Number 4, there is no way on God's green Earth that we are going to arrest global warming in the near term.  The best science says that the world will continue warming even if we halted green house emissions at their current levels.  But the nations subject to the Kyoto protocols aren't doing that, let alone China and India. 

It is with Number 3 that puts Gore's in the worst light. 

Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

What Gore is doing is not science.  Its science fiction.  It is all well and good to look for ways to bring greenhouse emissions under control, and to manipulate the global climate in so far as we can.  But in the meantime, our money is best spent preparing for the effects of global warming.  For a fraction of what the Kyoto treaty would have cost us, we could give most of the world's people safe drinking water.  That would be money well spent.