An Inconvenient Science Fiction?
While *Al Gore* "won an Oscar last night for his 2006 documentary, _Inconvenient Truth_,":http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyid=2007-02-26T135859Z_01_N25248809_RTRUKOC_0_US-OSCARS-GORE.xml&src=rss&rpc=22 the debate on the validity of his film (and the severity of the global warming issue in general) continues. *Patrick J. Michaels*, writing for the _National Review_, "weighed in on the documentary last week":http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI4NTc0YWMzNTA3ZjRmYmJiMDRjNmI5MGEwZTFhM2E, calling the film a "riveting work of science fiction." The crux of Michaels' complaint lays with corroborating support, or--more precisely--the lack thereof. Citing recent *United Nations'* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents, the science of Gore's lauded work is called into severe question. bq.According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.
"Was" is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed. Calling out flaws in both Kyoto, current proposals within Congress, and *President Bush's* recent pushes for alternative, ethanol fuels; Michaels goes on to say: bq. Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob. Overall this just leaves me further confused on the science of global warming, and I can't say I've read anything as of late from a level-headed, well-respected scientist that seems to be telling us like it is. Granted, I don't stay up all hours of the night looking for such articles and I don't doubt their existence. Yet with such a politically charged issue as global-warming, its hard to cut through all the noise.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 at 1:43pm. It has been filed under News, Science, Thoughts, Quotes, Joshua.
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