Did Al Gore really deserve that Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”? The Left says yes — only the ideologically disabled or intellectually dishonest deny that the four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse (drought, disease, sea rise, and hurricanes) will soon devastate our fair planet. Reporter William Broad in the New York Times today, however, says not so fast — a backlash is brewing among REAL scientists who are getting sick and tired of bed-wetting hysteria surrounding climate change.
The gist of their concern is this: while most (but not all) scientists are willing to accept that industrial emissions are an important driver in the planetary warming we’ve experienced since the late 1970s, they aren’t anywhere near so eager to embrace politically inspired warnings from non-scientists about how “the end is near.” Al Gore, according to many of the scientists interviewed by William Broad, is too shrill and too apocalyptic given the scientific evidence.
Case in point: Al Gore warns in his documentary that sea levels will rise over 20 feet if warming continues. Yeah, well maybe in a thousand years or so if trends continue indefinitely, but the former Vice President leaves that little bit of perspective out of the movie. What might happen during our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren? A sea rise of 23 inches, max, according to the new report just out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s hardly going to flood Manhattan, but acknowledging that would spoil the wonderful special effects visuals offered in the slideshow, now wouldn’t it?
Gore’s scientific advisors, friends, and admirers defend the documentary and the book that followed by conceding that he may be a bit dodgy here and there, but that he gets the big picture right. That’s ridiculous. The fact that the planet is warming and that industrial emissions might well have something to do with it is not what this debate is ultimately about. This debate is whether we should or should not care. And if the former, how much should we be willing to sacrifice to do something about it?
To say that Al Gore is to some extent out to lunch on the “should we care” argument but relatively sound on the question about whether we’re warming the planet (at least, if we measure these things by that most holy of metrics, the “scientific consensus” as defined by the IPCC) is akin to saying that the fellow proclaiming that a wrathful God is about to incinerate the planet is contributing to social welfare by usefully pointing out to the unbelievers that there is a God. That bit about God being particularly angry or plotting to destroy the world — Well, that’s a bunch of nonsense, but hey, he got the big picture right.
One of the scientists interviewed in the article — Roger Pielke, Jr. — wrote an essay recently for our own Regulation magazine pointing out that science is inevitably corrupted when politicians decide to effectively delegate policymaking power to those who wear white frocks. So if you want to know why scientists aid and abet this kind of thing, go there.
