Ponder the Maunder

Ponder the Maunder

5 Months after this essay was published, the British High Court ruled that the movie contained “alarmist” errors and ordered that the movie cannot be shown to British school children without also presenting a competing viewpoint. Many of those errors, as well as many others that were not argued in court, are presented in this essay. While the judge only allowed 11 errors to be argued in court, the expert that defended Al Gore’s movie admitted to 9 errors. The following day, Al Gore was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming.

Facts and Fictions of Al Gore’s

"An Inconvenient Truth"

By Kristen Byrnes

We all know Al Gore, “the ex-next President of the United States,” the man who scarcely lost his election to George Bush in 2000. Most people also know that he served as Vice President with Bill Clinton for 8 years. What you might not know about him is that his father also was a politician; he was a U.S. Representative and senator of Tennessee for 32 years. With his father’s busy life, Al Jr. was born in Washington D.C, but also spent a lot of time being raised in Carthage, Tennessee on his family’s farm. He went to college at Harvard and graduated in 1969, soon after he volunteered to go to Vietnam as a news reporter for the U.S Army. After he came back from Vietnam he attended Vanderbilt University Divinity and Law School, but won a seat in Congress before he got a degree. As for his political life, I can imagine that you know the story.

http://clinton1.nara.gov/White_House/EOP/OVP/html/Bio.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/al-gore

http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9316028

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth does indeed have some correct facts, but as he even says himself, sometimes you have to over-exaggerate to send the message to people:

Q. There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

A. I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/09/roberts/ (Interview with Grist Magazine’s David Roberts and Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth)

Al Gore said this, so how are we supposed to know fact from fiction in the global warming debate? The following paragraphs will inform the reader of the false claims, the facts, the selective facts and tactics to scare and advertise.

Throughout the film, he made inferences to his personal and political life, which has nothing to do with global warming. When he wasn’t lecturing about his personal life, he was lecturing about how global warming is man-made.

With these lectures he only considered one point of view, and did not consider the other side of the story (warming being natural), which would have made his movie a little more believable. Not only did he not look at both sides, he always assumed that every harmful phenomenon (extreme weather, rising sea levels and horrible diseases) was correlated or associated with global warming and due to “man made” emissions.

Now, lets start at the beginning of the movie, and see what has and has not been misinterpreted.

Beginning with Gore’s introduction of the film, he sounds calm, eloquent, and gloomy. His voice and tone in the introduction grabs the watchers attention. It also makes him look as if he loves nature, and that he really wants to protect his “only home.” Message: Al cares. I believed that Al cares until I learned that Al Gore’s home did not have any solar panels, windmills, geothermal system or any other “green power.” His utility bills for his home and pool house were $29,268 last year when he released his movie.

UPDATE: Almost 1 year after this essay was published, Al Gore announced to CBS 60 Minutes that he finally installed solar panels on his house.

Not too long after he presents a picture of “Earth Rise,” he claims that 18 months after this picture was taken, the modern environmental movement began. Greenpeace did open their club in 1971. But in “1892 - Sierra Club founded on May 28 with 182 charter members. John Muir elected first President. In its first conservation campaign, Club leads effort to defeat a proposed reduction in the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.”

“June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to the State of California, as an inalienable public trust. This was the first time in history that a federal government had set aside scenic lands simply to protect them and to allow for their enjoyment by all people.”

Al does not seem to consider that his generation was not the first to love and want to protect the Earth.

http://www.sierraclub.org/history/timeline.asp

http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/index.htm

http://www.ecotopia.org/ehof/timeline.html

Farther into the movie, Al explains the greenhouse gas effect. He presents a graphic that shows the sun’s rays heating the Earth’s surface resulting in infrared rays going from the Earth’s surface and back into space. His graphic suggests that some of the outgoing radiation is reflected from the top of the atmosphere and back to Earth. This idea is the basis of anthropogenic (man made) global warming theory. He fails to mention that this effect has never been measured, only calculated, and by scientists on one side of the debate. This is one of the most hotly debated issues in the global warming debate. Not only does this issue involve complicated theoretical quantum physics, but water vapor absorbs infrared radiation. As is often the case in global warming presentations, he forgets that water vapor is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas; 3 to 4 percent of the atmosphere. And this is important because at most, man-made greenhouse gases are 1/ 10,000 of Earth’s atmosphere.

With his description of greenhouse gases he presented a cartoon clip of the innocent sunrays being beaten up by the Greenhouse Gasses. But is water vapor really a bad thing?

Al also discusses the late Charles Keeling, a scientist who measured atmospheric carbon dioxide for many years. Al accurately describes how the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises and falls with the seasons and why. He shows how Dr. Keeling measured a steady rise in carbon dioxide as the years went by, a trend often called the Keeling Curve. While some people still dispute the levels of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, I do not. For many years, carbon dioxide has been measured in many places and by many means; the results are almost identical in almost every instance.

http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/PlotData.php

Next, Al gets right to business showing some of the worlds receding glaciers. According to the national Snow and Ice Data Center, most glaciers around the world are receding. But when you look at scientific studies on individual glaciers you begin to understand that temperature is not always the cause and that all of the glaciers that Al mentions have been retreating for over 100 years.

Let’s start with Al’s first example, Mt. Kilimanjaro. Al might be benefited by the knowledge that Kilimanjaro began receding in 1880 before CO2 began increasing in the atmosphere (Molg et al. 2003a). Also, local temperature records show that there have not been increasing temperatures in the last 100 years (King’uyu et al., 2000; Molg et al 2003, Hay et al., 2002). Additionally, the temperature on the mountain near the glaciers never gets above the freezing point (Georges and Kaser (2002). The glaciers on Kilimanjaro and other mountains in the area are shrinking due to a change in local precipitation. In 1880 the climate in the area changed from a very humid to a very dry climate resulting in less clouds and more direct sunlight. (Kaser et al. 2004).

Al’s second example is Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park. In this case, when you look at the pictures of receding glaciers, it is easy to say that a warming climate is causing the glacier to disappear. But like Kilimanjaro, these glaciers started melting over 100 years ago.

Grinnel Glacier, Glacier National Park. Dates and arrows show melt since 1850

Himalayas - Glaciers have been found to be

in a state of general retreat since 1850 (Mayewski & Jeschke 1979).

In this section he also claims that 40% of the worlds population gets half of their water from streams and rivers that are fed by glaciers. This is an easily confused claim. Rivers that are fed by the Himalayas get most of their run-off from the spring snowmelt. They also have many dams that ensure that water will be available during dry months.

Italian Alps -Since the end of the Little Ice Age (about 1850), the hanging

Glaciers and firn fields have retreated continuously.

http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/6/761/2006/nhess-6-761-2006.pdf

Swiss Alps - Abstract. Since the culmination of the Little Ice Age,

Alpine glaciers have been in a state of general retreat.

http://iri.columbia.edu/~amg/greene_grl_1999.pdf

Peru – The current warming that is melting the Quelccaya glacier in Peru began in 1830 according to Al Gore’s friend, Lonnie Thompson (Thompson 2006) * NOTE: The recent data from this ice core may be contaminated by rainwater that seeped into the top 20 meters of the ice.

http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/Icecore/Abstracts/thompson_pnas_2006.pdf

And the same is true for all of the glaciers he mentioned. They all started retreating at the end of the Little Ice Age. Most glaciers around the world are retreating while some are not, mainly due to changes in storm tracks. Many of the glaciers around the world slowed or reversed their retreats during the cooling period between 1944 and 1976 and began retreating again after that. Many glacier retreats have accelerated in recent years.

Al then begins a presentation about how temperatures during the last thousand years were relatively stable until the last one hundred years using a graph that looked like the one below:

The data for this graph is from a 2003 study by Al Gore’s friend, Lonnie Thompson, a well-known scientist who studies glaciers. The graph itself has the look of what is known as a “hockey stick” graph. It usually demonstrates that temperatures were stable for the last 1,000 years but suddenly rose in the last 100 years. While this particular graph is used by Al Gore to represent global temperature for the past 1,000 years, the data is only taken from 7 locations in three mountain ranges. In fairness to Al, there have been several studies by scientists who used tree rings etc. from all over the world who have come up with the same general trend.

http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/Icecore/Abstracts/Thompsonetal-climatic-change-2003.pdf

UPDATE: After this essay was published, a contributor to the blog “Climate Audit” discovered that the graph belongs to Michael Mann (MB98) and was presented in Lonnie Thompson’s study for comparison.

Now let’s look at two things that Al, and all the scientists who have provided those “hockey stick” graphs never seem to mention. First, if you go back farther than 1,000 years, there were temperature increases similar to today 2,500, 4,000, 5,200, 8,700 and 11,000 years ago. Lonnie Thompson himself in his glacier studies has identified many of these warm periods.

Second, they do not include solar activity, which is at an 11,000 year high. The graph below (Solanki 2006) shows solar activity for the past 12,000 years. In this graph you can see that there was an increase in solar activity during the same warming periods listed above.

Al’s presentation on carbon dioxide quickly falls into the biggest trap in the global warming debate. He accurately tells how scientists measure past levels of carbon dioxide from air bubbles in ancient ice from glaciers. He accurately discusses how scientists can examine isotopes of oxygen in the ice to figure out what the temperature was when the ice formed. He also uses the Vostok ice core graph to show how, over the last several hundred thousand years, temperature and carbon dioxide are closely correlated. He interprets the data, as, “when there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.” The graph below is similar to the one used by Al Gore, the blue line is temperature and green line is carbon dioxide going back 450,000 years.

What Al Gore did not mention, and what is very well known throughout the scientific community, is that higher resolution studies of the same ice cores revealed that the temperature changes came first then were followed by changes in CO2. (Mudelsee, 2001; Clark, 2003; Vakulenko et al., 2004)

During this part of the presentation Al says that when you look at the ice core that you can see the year that congress passed the clean air act. This one makes a lot of people laugh.

For instance, Eric Steig, a geochemist at the University of Washington with lots of experience in ice cores and an ardent supporter of Al Gore’s side of the debate said, “At one point Gore claims that you can see the aerosol concentrations in Antarctic ice cores change "in just two years", due to the U.S. Clean Air Act. You can't see dust and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores -- not with the naked eye -- and I'm skeptical you can definitively point to the influence of the Clean Air Act. I was left wondering whether Gore got this notion, and I hope he'll correct it in future versions of his slideshow.”

Al then shows global temperatures for the past 100 years using a graph similar to the one below. “In any given year it might look like it’s going down but the overall trend is extremely clear” I’ve added the green line, which is CO2. What Al does not show you is that most of the warming started before the CO2 increase. He also fails to mention the cool period between 1944 and 1976 does not correlate with greenhouse theory; the globe should have been warming at that time.

Now let’s stop here for just a moment and look at the graph below. We have all heard of El Nino. During El Nino years you see reports on the news about flooding in California, but El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) also has a relation to global temperatures.

The blue shaded areas on the graph show La Nina or ENSO negative conditions (cooling) and the red shows El Nino or ENSO positive conditions (warming). Notice how there is a shift of more ENSO negative conditions before 1976 and ENSO positive conditions after 1976. Remember the year 1976, because it is an important year in later parts of this essay.

According to the NOAA,“The primary explanation for the decline in hurricane frequency during El Niño years is due to the increased wind shear in the environment.”

“In El Niño years, the wind patterns are aligned in such a way that the vertical wind shear is increased over the Caribbean and Atlantic. The increased wind shear helps to prevent tropical disturbances from developing into hurricanes. In the eastern Pacific, the wind patterns are altered in such a way to reduce the wind shear in the atmosphere, contributing to more storms.”

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/hurr/enso.rxml

Using El Nino data from the NOAA and hurricane tracking information from Unisys I averaged out hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic from 1975 to 2006. I separated them by El Nino, La Nina and neutral years and found that Dr. Gray was right. During La Nina years there was an average of 9 hurricanes and 14 tropical storms with an average hurricane category 2.4. During El Nino years there was an average of 4 hurricanes and 4 tropical storms with an average hurricane category 2. During ENSO neutral years there was an average of 7 hurricanes and 14 storms and an average hurricane category 2. There were no trends that show increasing numbers of hurricanes, tropical storms or strength. The only unusual year was 2005 (ENSO neutral) where there were 15 hurricanes and 13 tropical storms.

http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/

http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml

In the next part of Al’s weather section he says that tornadoes are getting worse. Al’s claim that global warming is increasing the number of tornadoes is also misleading because new radar and satellite technology allows us to see more of them. The numbers of severe tornadoes, the ones we have been able to track, are decreasing. The graph below is from NOAA and shows the number of strong tornadoes since 1950.