What a strange couple of days for Al Gore: get chastised by a British court one day; win the Nobel Peace Prize for the same material, the next.
At any rate, I was intrigued when I saw a little news item to this effect on some webpage or other I was browsing today. I was struck by the overwrought tone of some of the article titles, which barely evaded the accusation that Gore lied in
An Inconvenient Truth. But having reviewed a few articles on the matter, I've learned that the court took issue with alleged "errors" in the film. Hardly the outing of bald-faced lies that some of the headlines suggest. Furthermore,
the nine "errors" the court lists, are less errors of fact, than they are errors of interpretation.
- They don't deny the validity of the rising sea level, only the timeline.
- I wondered about that myself. My understanding was that there have been instances of island communities evacuating after tsunamis, but they tend to return home after the water subsides.
- "...very unlikely" doesn't mean "isn't going to happen." While over emphasizing "The Day After Tomorrow" doomsday scenario is a bit much, failing to explain and understand the delicate balance of the "conveyor" would be negligent.
- So...then...Gore needs to refresh his Excel graph-making skills. Okay. Though seriously, whenever anyone uses graphs and statistics, care must be taken to use them appropriately. Conservative pundits would do well to remember the lapse in judgment of two of their own with the remarkably twisted book, "The Bell Curve."
- Of course it's going to be difficult to assert the MAIN causes. Ecological systems are rather complex after all. But I find it curious that the court DOESN'T challenge the film's argument about the correlative between human industrial activity and rapid changes in the climate. Correlation may not be PRIMARY, but it's something.
- see #5, with the added bit: environmental degradation undoubtedly has local roots, but given the interconnectedness of the larger ecological (and social) system, global activities have local impacts as well.
- Duh. But when I saw the film, I detected a more nuanced argument: that the type of devastation inflicted by Katrina will become the norm with unchecked global warming. So then, Katrina is an example of the rapidly developing worse case scenario.
- Scientific studies take a LONG time to complete (given the rigors of the scientific method), therefore, if the court will only rely on STUDIES, rather than, say the preliminary research data, then they sit a rather high bar for recent phenomena. Oh and the court's claim that the four polar bears drowned because of a storm illustrates the same limited analysis that they accuse the film of making. The storm COMBINED with the intense melting of the ice pack contributed to the polar bears' deaths.
- see #5.
So...yeah... the British High Court has chosen to chastise the film's interpretations of the data, as well as question the isolatable factors of the data. But what the court cannot and does not take issue with are the facts.
Fact: climate change is happening.
Fact: climate change has dramatic effects on societies and ecosystems.
Fact: human activity coincides with the dramatic ecological changes that have been documented.
Debatable: why is climate change happening?
Debatable: how much of the social and ecological stresses are due to climate change, and how much to other factors?
Debatable: how much does human activity contribute to the ecological changes?
To my mind, the first debatable question is first a scientific question, then a moral question, then a policy question. Unfortunately, the more vocal & litigious skeptics gloss over the science, confuse morality with religious fundamentalism and go ape-shit over policy.
The second question is a brilliant red herring. Given the incredible complexity & scale of the
global ecosystem, no one will EVER be able to give more than rough estimates and theories. We might discern what all the factors are, but actually deducing the "recipe" for social and ecological stress... good luck.
The third question is both a simple one and an impossible one. Simple in that the adage, "if you make a mess, clean it up," is the solution.
For too long, humans have assumed that when we throw something "away," it disappears.... or ceases to be our problem. We are narcissists to the worse degree and assume that someone else, or the planet itself, will deal with the messes we make. Industrial smoke stacks spewing black, particulate-laden smoke into a once pristine sky...is a mess. Even if that mess doesn't raise the global temperature by a degree and precipitate the melting of a polar bear's den. It's a mess in it's own backyard. It's a mess that the industrialist made and the consumer chose to ignore in his/her material narcissism (i.e.
I want what I want, when I want it). It's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.
Whatever "errors"
An Inconvenient Truth may have made, its drive to call all of us to clean up our own messes is one fact that it definitely got right.
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