An Inconvenient Truth in Hindsight

by Joel VanDixhorn | Some perspective necessary when listening to Al Gore for two hours.

It seems that every generation of college students adopts a signature cause, unifying millions of individuals around the country.  In the 1960s, campuses were awash with Vietnam protests and anti-war rhetoric.  The 1980s witnessed the ideological clash between communism and capitalism.  The 21st century has given rise to the global warming awareness campaign, which has garnered immense political and social support.  Nothing has done more to advance awareness of global warming and galvanize wannabe environmentalists than Al Gore’s backup career and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  For his efforts, Gore received critical acclaim from film reviewers, a Nobel Peace Prize, and the adoration of hippies everywhere.  Now that some time has passed though, An Inconvenient Truth has been subjected to a much more thorough vetting and the results are not all positive for  Gore.  Everyone agrees that some level of warming has occurred but beyond that the surrounding issues are, or at least should be, up for debate.

President Bush’s refusal to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification is one of the first reasons most environmentalists give when explaining their distaste for the President, and received plenty of criticism from An Inconvenient Truth.  However, such a simplistic criticism displays an inadequate understanding of Bush’s critique of Kyoto.  The protocol heaps unrealistic expectations on developed countries and does not require developing nations to reduce emissions.  This means that China, soon to surpass the United States as the greatest producer greenhouse gas emissions, bears no responsibility under the protocol.  Also, the economic impact of meeting the expectations laid out by Kyoto would be dramatic.  Numerous industries would be forced to incur billions of dollars in costs while deviating from efficient modes of production.  Domestic business resistance coupled the simple reality that humans are going to consume more and more energy as populations increase make meeting targets highly unlikely.  For example, all but two European nations say they will not meet emission targets.  All these issues combine to make Kyoto an unproductive and manipulative agreement.  Even Al Gore himself held this view during his vice presidency.  In a speech on Kyoto he said, “[w]e will not submit this for ratification until there’s meaningful participation by key developing nations.”  Despite the same platform, Bush has been heavily criticized. 

Of all the charts and graphs featured in An Inconvenient Truth, the “hockey stick graph” was the most damning. With Gore needing to stand on a lift to show the extent that CO2 levels have deviated from “natural” levels, it was hard not be led to the conclusion that human activity absolutely caused temperature increases. However, Gore’s version of the graph was doctored to the point that it left out two well-known climate phenomenon; the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age.  The “hockey stick graph” did not even appear in the most recent UN report on climate change.  Even more important to Gore’s case is the issue of causality. An Inconvenient Truth asserts that CO2 increases precede temperature increases but now scientists believe the opposite to be true.  This finding should diminish individual’s willingness to support An Inconvenient Truth but environmentalist ardor has not lessened.

Perhaps one reason so many college students have jumped on the global warming bandwagon is because of the seemingly overwhelming agreement among scientists regarding issues of climate change. After all, few students have the knowledge or experience to render their own judgment on complicated scientific issues so listening to a clear majority seems logical. An Inconvenient Truth often references the number of scientists that have signed off on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.  However, some important details about the workings of the IPCC are left out of the movie. In reality, the report is an agglomeration of short literature reviews by thousands of scientists. Each scientist does not see the other reviews so the only part he or she explicitly agrees with is the section he or she authored.  There is no review process by which every article is read by every other scientist.  Also, the summary of the IPCC report is published before the document itself. Imagine reading the thesis of an IR research paper before any of the supporting research and analysis yet accepting the arguments in the summary. Along with issues of timing, the summary contains many political biases since participating governments must approve the wording of the summary. 

Other factual discrepancies exist within An Inconvenient Truth but Gore’s mischaracterization of global warming as a moral issue is especially glaring.  The term eco-terrorist is tossed about lightly and used to smear anyone who might disagree with Gore’s conclusions.  But solving global warming, like just about any issue facing humanity, taps into the matter of prioritization.  As Kyoto has demonstrated, cutting emissions has proved to be extremely expensive and has yielded mixed results.  However, there is human suffering that can be alleviated right now and at a predictable rate.  For example, according to Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, “if we spent our money on HIV-AIDS we could do $40 on the dollar worth of good but if we spent it on Kyoto we can only do 30 cents.”

Ultimately, An Inconvenient Truth should be viewed as an integral part of the global warming debate, not a tool to end discussion.

Mr. VanDixhorn is a junior majoring in Political Science and Economics.

Comments

[Zach Baum]

Being someone who believes in the effects of global warming and the need for our attention to be called towards it, I agree with this article, especially the last point saying that An Inconvenient truth should facilitate debate not end it. The only big suggestion I have regarding its writing is that if the last point was included earlier in the article it would be much stronger. By not including it until the end I believe you may loose many of the readers who you most wish to target: those who disagree with you.

[Joel V]

Zach,

That might be true. Hopefully I didn't lose too many readers. In case it wasn't clear in my article I want people to recognize that the global warming debate and all of its periphery issues are hardly a shut case. I myself have no idea what's up with the climate and would like to see academics debating this honestly, not have a politician give me a science lesson.

[Carl Lundgren]

Perhaps Gore didn't include a representation of the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age because he did enough research to learn that they're largely myths. Changes in weather patterns over a short period of time (geologically speaking) don't say anything about overall climate change. Even if they were true, the huge spike in CO2 levels in the past hundred years certainly don't have any other explanation than human activity. Gore still has plenty of other things for which to be criticized. This is not one of them.