And The Oscar For Best Fictional Documentary…
By Mitch Berg
Climatologist Patrick Michaels on the inconvenient facts :
The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.
Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.
Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.”
I’ll wait for the book.
But the movie’s got a good shot at the Oscar on pure Bush-bashing points alone.
February 26th, 2007 at 6:54 am
If Jeb Bush ran the voting, that movie about Barney the White House dog would have won.
Suck on it, wingnuts!
February 26th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Too bad none of these scientists visited the Minnesota Science Museum so they could correct their displays.
The Museum claims that North Dakota was one huge swamp roamed by dinosaurs and Minnesota pretty much a giant lake and that it was warm enough to support sub-tropical plants and cold-blooded creatures year round. Dinosaur skeletons in Dickinson and limestone everywhere in Minnesota support that history.
Which leads us to conclude that our current climate is actually a deviation from the historical norm.
Global Warming? Oh yeah, that’s what happened after the comet killed the dinosaurs and created the ice age – we’re still warming up from that disaster, getting back to normal levels. SUVs have nothing to do with it. Sorry, Al.