Speed Gibson

Through the magic of Comcast and DVR, I saw Al Gore do much of his slide show on the Oprah show. In a word, this was scripted, right down to the concerned looks Oprah kept offering.

Actually, Oprah did give a critic a little over a minute, specifically Marlo Lewis, a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, self-described as "a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government." Here's what he said:

"An Inconvenient Truth" makes it seem as if we can reasonable expect twenty feet of sea level rise in our lifetime, or at least the lifetimes of our children, inundating the coastal cities of the world, [and] most of Florida. This is sheer science fiction. There is not a single scientific study that provides evidence that this is happening or likely to happen.

Mr. Gore warns that half the Greenland ice sheet could break off, slide into the sea or melt. In fact, if you look at the actual loss of ice in Greenland and what it translates into in sea level rise, it's about one inch over a century.

Several studies show that the entire continent of Antarctica is actually gaining ice mass. That's an inconvenient fact that is nowhere mentioned in the film.

Al Gore wants to scare us green. He wants us to be very frightened of global warming. The warming that we've seen over the last thirty years is constant and modest, and in all likelihood will give us a modest amount of warming in the next century. And therefore it's nothing to be afraid of.

And Mr. Gore's response?

Well, first of all, Greenland and Antarctica are wild cards, and Greenland particularly is being destabilized.

But let me make this point. This is kind of a new phenomena where we have organizations [like this one] that gets most of its funding from large sources of pollution. And what they crank out are so-called studies that are designed to make people think, hey there's no problem, just let us keep on putting as much pollution up there as we want. Don't make us be responsible.

But what about the expert opinions? Look at this study, Oprah.

A graphic appears:

Number of scientific studies dealing with "climate change" published in scientific journals during the previous ten years: 928

Number disagreeing with the global consensus that greenhouse gas pollution has caused most of the warming of the last 50 years: 0

Continuing ...

Gore: The University of California, this is a solid study, they reviewed every peer-reviewed expert journal article on global warming for the previous ten years.

Oprah: But this last guy, he was an expert, too.

Gore: Well, if you think about the peer-reviewed experts who are actually specialists in the field, this is a review of every one of their articles for the previous ten years, a big sample of ten percent. None of them disagreed with the main consensus. There are some aspects of this issue where there is a continuing debate around the edges, but the central consensus is as strong as it ever gets in science.

That last statement is total nonsense, of course. In fact, his whole rebuttal after he gets done shooting the messenger isn't much better. How curious that after firmly portraying the eve of destruction facing Greenland and Antarctica, now they're "wild cards" that are "destabilizing" - whatever that means.

Here's what I think is the most telling fact of all. If there's all this scientific support, why does this movement get or need a second class intellect like Al Gore leading it? I'm sorry if I'm blunt, but over the years Mr. Gore has shown himself short on facts and incapable of critical thinking in almost all the areas he projects competence. Gore is a good presenter and debater, however, as Ross Perot found out. That's what a specious theory must have, a seeming learned, even a bit garrulous apostle. It also must play out in a political arena, where truth and merit are not exactly the coins of the realm.