The “holy shit” that came with watching An Inconvenient Truth did wear off a little when it started to actually feel a little cold today. At least we got near freezing and had some chance of snow in the forecast.
That aside, I’m trying to figure out just how biased Gore is in his portrayal of the climate crisis. I don’t think there’s any questioning that everyone should do more in terms of energy conservation — easy things like switching to compact fluorescent bulbs, turning off lights and gadgets, insulating our dwellings, buying and using energy-efficient appliances, driving less, and so on. That’s just making an effort to be respectful of the earth, and there’s no good reason not to do these things.
But, will the oceans rise enough to drown parts of Manhattan, Florida, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world by 2100? Will hurricanes like Katrina become more common? These are questions that Gore makes look very likely, but I have to say that the links appear not to be completely solid. Not right now, anyway.
I’ve looked at junkscience.com, which is named fairly, though not for the reasons its author has chosen. Steven Milloy has a lot on the site that deals with global warming (he calls it debunking), and I’m sure there’s some truth there, but I just can’t trust someone whose site has a tight relationship with a tobacco company. The effects of the sun burning hotter over the past 100 years are something I’ll be interested to see elsewhere; there’s a whole lot of other stuff on there, but I don’t want to link to the site directly.
Skeptic Magazine seemed like a better bet, and I turned up a more apparently reliable source: Ronald Bailey from Reason Magazine. He reviews the movie pretty level-headedly. He is skeptical of the conclusions of the movie, but agrees that much of the science is correct. I’m interested in dealing with the problem in a way that’s not crazy and overzealous, and the information he presents seems good to look at.
So far, the only people I’ve read disputing that global warming as something important to look at seem sort of nuts.
Yeah, it seems senseless to dismiss it. Even if it turns out that people like Gore are off-base, I can't imagine anything bad coming from monitoring humanity's impact on the environment. This is not an easy thing to figure out, but we should at least try.
Posted by Joe at January 9, 2007 10:46 PMHey- did you see this New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/science/earth/16gree.html?8dpc=&_r=1&pagewanted=all .
Not only are inhabited islands disappearing, but new islands in the arctic are appearing, in areas once covered by frozen ice. Now that's both exciting and scary.
Posted by allgood2 at January 16, 2007 4:04 PM
I can't say how long it would take the ocean to rise enough to claim Florida or Bangladesh; but the first inhabited island was claimed around Christmas, displacing some 10,000 residents of the former Lohachara Island. Personally, that's been my tenth or twelfth 'holy shit' weather moment within the last 5 years or so.
I mean, scientist were predicting that the first non-habitated islands would disappear ten years from now—and we're talking about basically sandy knolls; but the expectations for any inhabited islands, were really end of my life time, maybe my children's (nieces and nephews really). Maybe our contribution to global warming is debatable, but I always find it humorous (as in borderline ridiculous), when people dismiss global warming outright.
Posted by allgood2 at January 9, 2007 9:30 PM