It’s Getting Hot in Here!

Always politician and sometimes climatologist, Al Gore got a call to “cool the hype” on Global Warming in the NY times today. To be fair, the article really just reports on scientists who are perturbed by Al Gore's tendency to gloss over the science whenever it's inconvenient to him. Having done a fair amount of research on the issue myself, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t have the temerity to claim absolute knowledge on the issue, but I do believe it’s fair to say that Mr. Gore is, at a minimum, an alarmist if not an outright propagandist.

For those unfamiliar with the film, An Inconvenient Truth (you can buy it on DVD but it’s not legally available for download or anything), the gist is that man-made CO2 emissions are the cause of a rising global warming trend seen over the past three decades and is going to cause catastrophic climate changes unless we take drastic and immediate action to stop it.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, put together a slideshow presentation that tries to debunk much of Al Gore’s movie. I encourage you to digest both presentations and then draw your own conclusions. (Their presentation is available for download).

With that said, let me lay out the postulations of global warming, as I see them.

1. The earth is experiencing a warming trend, having increased in temperature by about 1oF over the last 100 yrs or so.
2. The driving force behind this warming trend is the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which are at levels and are rising at a rate that has not been seen on the planet in 800,000 yrs.
3. The increased levels of CO2 are directly attributable to man’s influence due to the burning of fossil fuels in past century.
4. Failure to stabilize and/or reduce CO2 emissions to halt CO2 atmospheric concentrations will result in an unabated rise in global temperatures. These higher temperatures will eventually result in catastrophic climate change.

Read the article. Look at the presentations—both of them. If you’re so inspired, do what I did and go look at some of the studies that both presentations reference. Decide for yourself.