An Inconvenient Truth

The website is pretty disappointing. What would have been great would have been a downloadable version of the Powerpoint presentation that the movie is so famously about.But see the movie already. It's hard for me to believe that it isn't out where you live, but assuming that's true, grab a bittorrent client of your choice and start downloading this torrent file. You should have the movie in somewhere between a night and a week. (Look up the Wiki entry on "bittorrent" if you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. It's a distrubuted download file protocol commonly used for enormous files, like movies.)Gore cites his sources during the film, but of course it's hard to go back and check up on them if you weren't taking notes or something. It would be better if he had provided some kind of bibliography, or better yet, a copy of the Powerpoint.I wish you'd make more of an effort to see the movie. I remain genuinely interested in your opinion of his case, not simply your sweeping generalization that "Gore is a liar so his movie is probably a lie." That's the criticism I'd expect from a right-wing talk show host, not from somebody with a stated enthusiasm for science. And it's not at all clear that you're not simply rejecting as "sober" any conclusion, no matter how well-supported, that involves serious consequences. If you feel that's an appropriate means of reasoning - that predicitions of severe consequences can be dismissed simply because the consequences are presented as severe - nobody could make a case that could convince you.I went in skeptical. I came out convinced. But hey, what do I know?Anyway, see the movie. It's sort of ridiculous for you to participate in threads about it until you do.

Did so little? What do you mean?Edited by AdminNosy, : Hellp Crash out with a new title for his post

Feel free to retitle my post in whatever way you would find most descriptive.

You should check independant cinema. Around here it never played in any of the chain cinemas, but a local arthouse theatre showed it for two weeks. This would be copyright infringement. I apologize if that's an issue for you.You need to download the linked file - not open it in a web browser - and open it using a bittorrent client. Yeah, the main file is probably hosted at a porn site. Welcome to the seedy underbelly of the internet. I don't know if it's great, but it is famous. That's what Gore's been doing all this time, I guess, going around with this PP file showing it to people. Every slide as a citation for its data but I wasn't taking notes. But I recognized the citations as being from what I understood to be the authorities in the field.I don't have the expertise to defend his conclusions. They were sufficient to convince me, but what is that worth? And you don't have the experience with the movie to attack his conclusions, either, it seems like. Not to mention that you don't really even know what his conclusions are, only how laypersons like myself have approximated them.I do hope it's something you're able to go see. I don't know what you're referring to, here.

I guess I'd like you to explain how the administration I remember as the most evironmentally-conscious one in my lifetime somehow represents the one that did "so little."What legislation did Clinton veto? What specific policies were reccommended but ignored? I mean, "so little" compared to who? Reagan? The Bushes?

I remember the whole federal government shutting down because Clinton couldn't get Congress to agree on a budget without cutting a bunch of environmental funding, among other things.I don't know. Compared to who had come before, I thought Clinton did as good as could be expected on environmental issues, particularly in the face of an antagonistic Congress.

That the people who watch it aren't climatologists?On the other hand, here is the opinion of some real climatologists who actually saw the movie, which I think makes them considerably more qualified to comment than you are:

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Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler for NASA, was pleased the film didn't say: "You're all going to die, woo-hoo." Schmidt, who stressed that his views are his own, not NASA's, says the movie plays it relatively safe by saying, "These are the things that have happened so far. These are the things that are likely to happen should we continue on the trajectory we're on, and these are the moral consequences of it."

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Scientists express surprise that Gore could present the science in an accurate way without putting everyone in the audience to sleep. "Such an amount of relatively hard science could have been extremely dull, and I've been to a lot of presentations on similar stuff that were very dull," says Schmidt. "Where there was solid science, he presented it solidly without going into nuts and bolts, and where there were issues that are still a matter of some debate, he was careful not to go down definitively on one side or the other."

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Lonnie Thompson, a professor at Ohio University, whose work on retreating glaciers from the Andes to Kilimanjaro and Tibet is featured in the film, was happy with the result. "It's so hard given the breadth of this topic to be factually correct, and make sure you don't lose your audience," he says. "As scientists, we publish our papers in Science and Nature, but very few people read those. Here's another way to get this message out. To me, it's an excellent overview for an introductory class at a university. What are the issues and what are the possible consequences of not doing anything about those changes? To me, it has tremendous value. It will reach people that scientists will never reach." John Wallace, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, agreed. "I think that he's gone to great lengths to make the science comprehensible to the layman," he says. "Given the fact that this was a film intended to bring the message to the lay public, I think it was excellent."

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Now, to be fair, other scientists echo Holmes' concerns:

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David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences, also at the University of Washington, thinks the science in the film is well represented, yet worries about one of the most dramatic moments in the film. "There is only one place in the film I struggled," he says. "It makes a powerful theatrical point, but it leaves open the criticism that you're stretching the truth."

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Gore notes the relationship between CO2 and temperature, as revealed in ice cores. He then shows a graph correlating the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere with temperature over hundreds of thousands of years. The lines closely follow each other up and down. Literally for millenniums, the amount of CO2 has hovered between 200 and 300 parts per million. But since the industrial revolution, when humans started pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere with all our machines, it's risen to the current amount of 380 parts per million. Economists and climate scientists believe it will continue to rise as dramatically over the course of this century. To demonstrate the skyrocketing increase, Gore rides a mechanical lift to rise as high as the CO2 is likely to go. While the temperature line does not jump up that high in the film, the audience is left to assume -- with horror -- that it will follow.

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Scientists predict the jump in temperatures will be serious, but more modest than the graph implies. "The graph shows CO2 going through the roof, and the thing is the temperature doesn't follow that line with the same amount of jump," says Battisti. "The good thinking person who knew nothing about the science would come away with the wrong interpretation. The world Gore paints in the future is an appropriate representation of the science. It's just that graph that is misleading."

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"Gore is correct to link temperature and CO2 in ice core records," concurs Steig. "That's very sound science. But he is incorrect to imply that you can take the one curve and use it to predict where the other curve will go in the future. It ain't so simple."

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Yet while objecting to the way the graph is presented, Battisti agrees with the qualitative point that temperatures are rising, and will continue to do so thanks to human-induced global warming, which is a serious problem. "Wherever you live, this is a huge change, and it dwarfs anything that we've seen in the last 150 years, or the last 1,000, or the last 10,000 years. If you want to see a change that big, you have to go back to the Ice Ages."

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The scene that has inspired the most charges that the film is alarmist is the depiction of what would happen if sea level rose 20 feet, with the World Trade Center Memorial site underwater, and landscapes where millions of people live, from Shanghai to San Francisco, swamped. Audiences might be left with the impression that the deluge is just around the corner, lapping at our feet.

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Schmidt says a 20-foot rise in sea level is not unrealistic in the long run -- the very long run. "The 20 feet number comes from an analog with the last time the planet was a degree warmer than it is now -- 120,000 years ago. Sea levels were about 20 feet higher. Where did that water come from? Half from Greenland, and half from Antarctica." How long would it take for that rise to happen again? "Maybe 1,000 years," says Schmidt. "There's some uncertainty about how quickly that could happen, but Gore was very careful not to say this is something that is going to happen tomorrow."

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from No webpage found at provided URL: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,427655,00.htmlThat's a pretty compelling point, I think. I'm not saying that Holmes is entirely wrong - obviously real scientists share his concerns - but even those scientists who took issue with the way some of the science was presented felt the movie was largely evenhanded, fair, and accurately represented the climate data. So, you had a bad manager, therefore Gore was an idiot?Can you understand why I don't see that as a significant impeachment of Gore's credibility on this issue? Moreover - what does Gore's credibility even have to do with it? He cites all his sources; there's no place in the movie where you have to take his word for anything.The opinion of climate scientists who have chosen to review the movie is that, predominantly, they believe that while small factual errors may have crept into the movie, they don't detract from the fundamental accuracy of Gore's presentation, and that Inconvinient Truth represents an almost perfect representation of the scientific consensus on the issue, one that neither invokes "visions of the apocalypse" nor downplays the seriousness of the issue with false balance, but instead presents the likely consequences in a factual and calm manner, even though those consequences may be severe.Which was exactly my experience, and why Holmes' criticisms of a movie he hasn't seen bear absolutely no similiarity to the movie I actually saw. I mean, writing this off as "Manbearpig" is just ridiculous, and it's the act of someone absolutely committed to avoiding any indication that his ideology might be wrong. I told you that he did.

Uh-huh. Did Gore come down to your little shop and tell you that himself?No?Maybe you just had a dumbass manager?

Not "people", leaders. Multiple specific public figures directly appointed by Bush forming a pattern of scienctific conclusions ignored because they didn't jive with the conservative Christian line.In your case? One unnamed, anonymous manager of an unnamed, anonymous organization with unspecified ties to the government, who was not, I gather, directly appointed by Gore to fudge the data. Just some asshole who took it upon himself to do that.Can you understand why I don't see these two situations as symmetric? In Bush's case, there's a repeating pattern from the top of science manipulated for politics. In your case, one middle manager who did it for one issue, at the bottom. You know, the funny thing was - I was pretty sure that Gore actually did give a timeframe for the projections in his movie. I don't remember what timeframe it was, though. Mentioned by who? I'm not impressed by assertions of anonymous corraboration. Most of us saw it months ago, and didn't take notes. You're simply not going to get an accurate picture of what was presented in the movie unless you see it yourself. I'm sorry if you can't seem to figure out a way to do that.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

The guys at the top, sure. The director of the FDA. Bush's chief science advisor. That snot-nosed kid they appointed as communications director of NASA.In most cases, direct Bush appointments into positions at the top. In your case? Who the hell knows? You've given nothing at all! Just anonymous assertions that Gore was as bad as Bush. Fables about some unspecified manager of unspecified appointment fudging data for unspecified reasons. Conspiracy theories don't become you.Nonetheless, you need to understand that your desire for anonymity means your example is all but useless. You're going to have to weigh your desire not to name names against the need for specifics to determine the credibility of your assertions.It's a sticky wicket, make no mistake. I'm sure you're in quite a bind about it. But you don't get to have your cake and eat it, too, in this case. If you find yourself unable or unwilling to provide any of the sort of specifics that would allow us to judge the credibility of your example, then you simply cannot have any expectation that we'll find your example credible. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Take your word for it? So what? So, if an "ID person" says "I hate cancer", we're all supposed to come out in favor of cancer? Can you see how what you're doing looks exactly like all those conservatives who demonized Michael Moore without even seeing his movie? You've never supported your arguments with a journal article behind a subscription wall? Gave print references for material? Used, as a reference, materials that weren't avaliable on the web? Look, sometimes the materials that support an argument aren't easily avaliable over the internet. It's a fact of life. Is it a forum rule somewhere that every single subject we talk about has to have a source easily avaliable on the web? I understand the utility of having one's sources be easily avaliable - at the least, it prevents your opponent from having an excuse to dismiss your source.But the subject of this thread is a specific film. You refuse to see it, even after having been pointed to specific means to do so. (If there's no distribution rights for the film held in your country, it probably isn't illegal for you to download it from the internet. I'm not a lawyer, of course. If there are distribution rights held, then somebody's probably distributing it, aren't they?) Or what regular science does with its results. Pay for play is nothing new here, Holmes. Like you, I agree that it's probably anathema to the spirit of open scientific collaboration, but let's not act like the subscription fees to the legitimate scientific journals aren't far, far more than what it costs to go buy a copy of "Pandas and People" or whatever.

Thanks for providing an article that completely undercuts your point and supports mine.

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''The principal difference stems from the Bush administration's near-obsession with information control,'' Ruch says. ''Under Clinton, it was like the old Will Rogers joke, 'I'm a member of no organized party; I'm a Democrat.' Under Bush, control has been centralized to an extent that's almost unheard-of. And that control has migrated down the chain of command and manifested itself in the form of political interference.''

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But that's exactly my point, isn't it? That, under Bush, the distortion is the product of a top-down dictum to do exactly that.Under Clinton? Merely the inevitable result of disorganized government and people acting on their own without oversight.Honestly, Holmes, do you think we can't see what's going on? This is nothing but the disgruntled grousing of a former employee. Your boss was an idiot, got it. Therefore you're convinced that everyone above him is an idiot, too.

I'm asking you to substantiate the mission, not simply assert it. If you refuse to do that you need to understand that none of us are going to take that assertion very seriously. No, you haven't. See that reply. Well, I don't take your word for it. You don't have any word, as far as I'm concerned. I don't view you as an honest person. Ah, right. Your vaunted "paleoclimate background." You haven't said, as I recall, specifically what that background is, or what you did, exactly, besides watching your manager order people to fudge data and turn out the lights when they all left. I guess we can conclude that you were the janitor, then? Why would it be? I mean I guess it's troubling if, like you, one is a person who couldn't possibly countenance the possibility that they might actually not know everything.Me? I've actually handed out enough reading assignments of my own, to people who didn't even know enough about the subject to effectively communicate their questions or understand the replies, so I can understand the tactic employed in my direction. I can hardly answer the challenges of a book I haven't read. No, I'm telling you that the topic of this thread is Al Gore's movie, which you might have noticed considering that the title of the thread is the title of the movie, and so his movie is the source material. Well, sometime after the 12 of October, when it officially opens in the Netherlands, we'll expect your review. Who? What? What money? A lot of places I've seen the movie are showing it for free, or at cost. And it's not like his presentation doesn't draw from public sources.But that's a very interesting question. You might ask that of Nature, or of Climate Dynamics, or anybody else. If science is so important, how dare they charge to be able to read it? This is the data I remember getting from it, in part.

I didn't see those quotes. "For the past five years" in an article written in 2005 would still refer only to the Bush administration. The assertion that it had actually begun before even that was nothing but your own assertion.And this?

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Such interference, Ruch admits, is unavoidable in a system as vast as the federal government, in which scientific work swims in the same pool as political interests, but, he maintains, it has never occurred so frequently. During the Clinton administration, PEER's Washington office received three ''intakes'' -- complaints of interference with environmental work -- per day. That number, Ruch says, is now up to five, and the professional status of the complainants has risen markedly.

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This is just a polite way of saying "under Clinton, the people who complained about interference were just cranks; under Bush, the people who are complaining are actual professional scientists." Again I don't see how that substantiates a massive campaign from Al Gore to suborn science to a political agenda.And this?

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Is the Bush administration truly a worse science offender than its predecessors? According to Daniel Sarewitz of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, the degree of abuse is difficult to quantify, since the very notion of ''misuse'' of science is ideologically freighted. In 2003, for instance, the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy institute affiliated with Stanford University, published ''Politicizing Science,'' a book that outlined instances in which policy makers had manipulated science for their own political ends, nearly always in the name of increased regulation. ''The two sides simply bring to the table different ideas of what science is and how it should be used in regulating policy,'' Sarewitz observes.

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Nothing more than journalistic fake balance. "Oh, it's impossible to say who is the worse offender, because it's too hard to judge what counts, so we'll say that they're equal offenders." Fox News-style reporting, in other words. "Clinton did something like it, once, so Bush isn't any worse." Suprised to see you fall for that, I guess.Honestly it's amazing how you can read an article about scientists who think that the Bush Administration has the worst record in regard to honesty in science issues, and try to tease out the most tenuous hints that maybe, once, Clinton and Gore did something bad once, what, we cannot say, but they did, believe me...It's ridiculous. There's nothing in this article that supports your position. I don't know, Holmes. Not all of us have the financial freedom to take that kind of a stand. Holmes, I apologize. It was arrogant of me to pretend like I know what happened in your life. No matter what I guess, I'd almost certainly be wrong; and I certainly won't believe you when you tell me what did happen. I'll attempt to content myself from this point on with the simple recognition that your reported life experiences, absent all corroborating detail, are all but irrelevant to the conversation at hand.

He's distorting you, probably on purpose. Like he does everybody else.He doesn't have any other way to argue, usually.Does that make it any clearer?

That's what they're saying. Can't you read? What do you think "the professional status of the complainants has risen markedly" means? It doesn't take the Amazing Carnak to puzzle out the meaning, there. The people who complained under the Clinton administration weren't professionals protesting interference in legitimate research or investigation; they were largely unqualified people who were abusing the complaint procedure.It's right there, Holmes. For someone who complained so much about "how words can say something that isn't explicit" in another thread, you're being remarkably dense in this one. What things? Complaints? Yes, complaints were made. By people the article comes right out and says had a lot less professional qualification to complain than the people who tend to be complaining, now.Cranks, in other words. Trolls. Whatever term you choose for people who complain not because they have a complaint but because they're maliciously abusing the system. How much clearer does the article have to be, Holmes? Who? There's nobody named "Lundtz" in the article. Sure. It's a perfect example of how unreasonable you tend to be.