Kyle Smith: Gore's Hot Air - Flaky Flick Suffers from Truth Decay

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He implies that no reputable scientists dispute anything he says - basically, that the ice caps are melting and people on the 50th floor of the Empire State Building had better learn to swim. But there is wide disagreement about whether humans are causing global warming (climate change preceded the invention of the Escalade) and about whether we should be worried about the trends. Look carefully at Gore's charts and you'll see that the worst horrors take place in the future of his imagination.

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Gore claims, with pie-chart-in-the-sky dreaminess, that unspecified measures can reduce emissions to 1970 levels. He assesses the tradeoff between the economy and the environment with the kind of buffoonery you'd expect in a Marxist comic book, displaying a cartoon of a scale with Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other. "OK, on one side we have gold bars," he says. "Mmm, mmm, don't they look good!"

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People are skeptical about global warming because it builds up to the same chorus as every other lefty hymn: more taxes, more hypocritical scolding (the film is the brainchild of Larry David's wife, Laurie, part of the community of people who drive a Prius to the private plane) and especially more America-bashing.

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Gore is a dangerous evangelist for whom all roads lead to his sole, holy revelation. Remember how his son was injured in a car accident, the story he told at the 1992 convention? He's still telling it, and what was once touching has become exploitative. This time, the accident's meaning is that he wondered whether the Earth would still be there for his son. (Never mind that earlier in the film, he dates his eco-awakening to his Harvard years).

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Dear Kyle Smith,

I felt compelled to respond to your recent review of, "An Inconvenient
Truth."

In a review of peer-reviewed scientific literature--the only place that
matters--the consensus is overwhelming. In a recent review of about a
thousand climate science abstracts not a single paper was found to take
the position given by the paid shills from the oil/coal industry that we
see on the nightly news. Not one.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

You said:
"Global warming hasn't noticed that we got the lead out of our gasoline
or that Stage One smog days in Los Angeles fell from 121 in 1977 to zero
in 2004. All regulations and taxes to date have done nothing. Does this
hint that pollution isn't the cause?"

To answer your question, "Yes." Particulate matter in the atmosphere
has been responsible for *reducing* the effects of global warming. Had
the particulate matter not been there, increasing cloud albedo and
reducing the amount of solar energy reaching terra firma, global warming
would likely be worse than it is. This is fairly new science which has
been substantiated by research in three different disciplines, all of
which produce similar results. There are still questions as to how much
this changes the models, but the existence of the effect is not in doubt.

By the way, in case you don't get it, particulate pollution is not the
same thing as greenhouse gases. Not all pollution is the same. Not all
pollution has the same effect.

It's true that no self-respecting climate scientist would deny global
warming is occurring. It's also true that no self-respecting climate
scientist would deny that man's activities is exacerbating the effect.
The only people denying the science are either not climate scientists or
are getting paid to issue the denials.

Instead of standing with your fingers in your ear screeching, "Is not!
Is not!" I suggest that you take a stroll through the peer-reviewed
literature and find out what this global warming thing is all about.
That's the *only* way to come to a decision about its validity.


Sincerely,