Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore book/movie re Global Warming

He really irritates me - scenes like him looking off in the distance in the tobacco-drying area, thinking about his sister who died from lung cancer, and the fact that his family only stopped growing tobacco after her death, like they didn't believe that myth about smoking and lung cancer until then, just makes me nuts. Anyhow...

Someone raised the issue in a phone call today about the accuracy of his most impressive graph, where he goes up in the little elevator to show the recent trend. They said there was no scale. This is the "HockeyStick" graph.

• here are a couple rants about it, but neither is clear in its conclusion.

  • this piece has some detailed critique: Viewers can't tell from the film whether temperature increases follow or precede rises in CO2. If they precede, then Gore's entire thesis is disproved. In fact, the historical record shows temperature increases often have preceded increases in CO2.... The temperature record Gore uses is the so-called "HockeyStick" graph produced by Dr. Michael Mann, now at Pennsylvania State University. Mann's methodology has been attacked in peer-reviewed journals, forcing him to issue a partial withdrawal of his findings. Other, more accurate, reconstructions of the historic temperature record show substantially more variation in the past, revealing that today's temperatures are not unprecedented.

• I have the book at home, I'll see if I can find the graph and its source.

On that same phone call, someone said that they thought the most convincing bits were the then/now pictures of various places that used to have ice.

• this piece questions the meaning of those photos . Scientists know temperatures at the top of Kilimanjaro have been falling, not rising, and the disappearing snow is due to changes in land use at the bottom of the mountain, causing drier air to rise up the mountain's side.