One Sided
AIT (An Inconvenient Truth):
• Never acknowledges the environmental, health, and economic benefits of climatic warmth and the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content.
• Never acknowledges the major role of natural variability in shrinking the Snows of Kilimanjaro and other mountain glaciers.
• Neglects to mention the circumstances that make it reasonable rather than blameworthy for America to be the biggest CO2 emitter: the world’s largest economy, high per capita incomes, abundant fossil energy resources, markets integrated across continental distances, the world’s most mobile population.
• Impugns the motives of so-called global warming skeptics but never acknowledges the special-interest motivations of those whose research grants, direct mail income, industrial policy privileges, regulatory power, prosecutorial plunder, or political careers depend on keeping the public in a state of fear about
global warming.
• Never addresses the obvious criticism that the Kyoto Protocol is all economic pain for no environmental gain.
Misleading
AIT:
• Implies that, throughout the past 650,000 years, changes in CO2 levels preceded and largely caused changes in global temperature, whereas the causality mostly runs the other way: CO2 changes followed global temperature changes by hundreds to thousands of years.
• 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.
• 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.
• Reports that 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused Bush of distorting science, without mentioning that the scientists acted as members of a 527 group set up to promote the Kerry for President Campaign.
Exaggerated
AIT:
• Hypes the importance and exaggerates the certainty of the alleged link between global warming and the frequency and severity of tropical storms.
• Claims polar bears “have been drowning in significant numbers,” based on a report that found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year, following an abrupt storm.
• Links global warming to toxic algae blooms in the Baltic Sea that can be entirely explained by record-high phosphorus levels, record-low nitrogen-to-phosphorus levels, and local meteorological conditions.
• Portrays the collapse in 2002 of the Larson-B ice shelf—a formation the “size of Rhode Island”—as harbinger of doom. For perspective, the Larson-B was 180th the size of Texas and 1/246th the size of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).
• Presents a graph suggesting that China’s new fuel economy standards are almost 30% more stringent than the current U.S. standards. In fact, the Chinese standards are only about 5% more stringent.
Speculative
AIT:
• Blames global warming for the record-breaking 37-inch downpour in Mumbai, India, in July 2005, even there has been no trend in Mumbai rainfall for the month of July in 45 years.
• Blames global warming for recent floods in China’s Sichuan and Shandong provinces, even though far more damaging floods struck those areas in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Blames global warming for the disappearance of Lake Chad, a disaster stemming from a combination of regional climate variability and societal factors such as population increase and overgrazing.
• Warns that a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels to 560 ppm will so acidify seawater that all optimal areas for coral reef construction will disappear by 2050—implausible because coral calcification rates have increased as ocean temperatures and CO2 levels have risen, and today’s main reef builders evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO2 levels hovered above 1,000 ppm for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 ppm for several million years.
• Warns of “significant and alarming structural changes” in the submarine base of the WAIS, but does not tell us what those changes are or why they are “significant and alarming.” The melting and retreat of the WAIS “grounding line” has been going on since the early Holocene. At the rate of retreat observed in the late 1990s, the WAIS should disappear in about 7,000 years.
• Warns that half the Greenland Ice Sheet could “slide” into the sea, even though the ice sheet sits in a bowl-like depression surrounded by mountains that restrict glacial outflow to the sea.
Wrong
AIT:
• Claims glaciologist Lonnie Thompson’s reconstruction of climate history proves the Medieval Warm Period was “tiny” compared to the warming observed in recent decades. It doesn’t. Four of Thompson’s six ice cores indicate the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than any recent decade.
• Claims the rate of global warming is accelerating, whereas the rate has been remarkably constant for the past 30 years—roughly 0.17°C/decade.
• Attributes Europe’s killer heat wave of 2003 to global warming—it was due to an atmospheric circulation anomaly.
• Claims that 2004 set an all-time record for the number of tornadoes in the United States. Tornado frequency has not increased; rather, the detection of smaller tornadoes has increased. If we consider the tornadoes that have been detectable for many decades (F-3 or greater), there is actually a downward trend since 1950.
• Blames global warming for a “mass extinction crisis” that is not, in fact, occurring.
In light of these and other distortions, AIT is ill-suited to serve as a guide to climate science and climate policy for the American people.
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