A Democratic friend invited me to see Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Since I’m generally a fan of science fiction, I agreed to go.
The good: It was entertaining to watch, for the most part. There were perhaps a few too many shots of Al Gore looking pensive, but he was actually funny at times. And there are some spectacular views of nature. The movie also contains some interesting scientific explanations, and it wasn’t quite as partisan as I anticipated.
The bad: It’s still very partisan, and Gore himself chooses to ignore inconvenient truths that would weaken his message.
Gore disdains the idea that our current warming could have anything to do with natural temperature cycles. He blames human emissions for global warming without ever acknowledging that other factors may also be at work.
Just to be clear, I do believe that there has been some global warming. I also believe that humans are probably responsible for some portion of that warming, although scientists do not yet understand all the factors involved.
For example, a study published earlier this year reported that living plants emit almost a third of the methane released each year. (Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.) Before this study, scientists didn’t know that living plants released methane:
“Until now all the textbooks have said that biogenic methane can only be produced in the absence of oxygen,” Dr Keppler said. “For that simple reason, nobody looked closely at this.”
(As my dad often remarked when coming across cases like this: Scientists used to think… but we now know….)
Another example has to do with the melting of polar ice. The movie shows some dramatic footage of collapsing ice shelves near the poles and retreating glaciers. But Gore ignores the fact that there is evidence of global warming on Mars, which is causing the Martian polar ice caps to retreat. Since humans aren’t causing the warming on Mars, isn’t it at least possible there’s some other mechanism at work causing significant warming on both Earth and Mars?
But mentioning such things would be inconvenient for Al Gore’s purpose.
And what is that purpose?
To me, it seems the purpose is to preach to the choir. Democrats will love the movie, because it makes a point of tweaking Reagan and both Bushes. But for the most part Democrats are already convinced that global warming is bad and it’s humanity’s fault. The movie’s partisan nature will generally just annoy the half of the country that’s been voting Republican, so it is unlikely to convince people to change their minds about global warming.
The movie did not change my mind about global warming. But it did get me to talk about it. So maybe that’s a tiny victory for Al Gore.