Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently addressed a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon in Asheville. He also discussed his “Skeptical Tour of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth” with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.) You can watch Lewis’ Asheville presentation at http://jlf.streamhammer.com/speakers/marlolewis.mp4.
Kokai: It’s won praise from environmentalists, new attention for former Vice President Al Gore, even an Academy Award — but just how true is An Inconvenient Truth? What’s wrong with this movie?
Lewis: This movie is a one-sided presentation of global warming science, climate economics, and climate policy. It’s — as far as the science part — it’s all gloom and doom. “We’re all going to die.” And there’s really no scientific basis for that kind of alarmism. Global warming is happening. Human beings are contributing to it, but the rate of warming is constant. It’s modest. You can reasonably expect only a warming in the 21st century at the low end of the range projected by the United Nations panel. The alleged impacts of global warming are just blown way out of proportion in the movie.
For example, Al Gore tries to blame Hurricane Katrina on global warming, which is sheer demagoguery. At most, global warming might be increasing the average wind speed of hurricanes by a few percent, but Hurricane Katrina was not even a Category Five storm when it hit New Orleans. It wasn’t because of any extra “oomph” that global warming might have given Katrina that so many people died and so many billions of dollars in property was destroyed. It was because the federal government basically failed, over several decades, to build adequate flood defenses for New Orleans — and also, because of various federal policies, people are now living in areas where they wouldn’t live otherwise if they only had private insurance to set them right if natural disasters occur.
And the worst exaggeration was the prediction of 20 feet of sea level rise. Al Gore is very careful how he puts this, so he doesn’t quite exactly say that it’s going to happen in our lifetimes. But he says, “These millions of people would be forced out of their homes. These would be evacuated. These would be displaced,” which all suggests something that’s going to happen over a fairly short period of time, whereas the real science says we’re going to see maybe 1 1/3 inches of sea level rise from the Greenland ice sheet in the 21st century. You can’t get 10 feet, which is what he says might happen. And similarly, with the west Antarctic ice sheet, where he foresees another 10 feet happening in the 21st century, there’s just no indication of that. I mean, the west Antarctic ice sheet has contracted over the last 8,000 years and very likely will continue to do so over the next 5, 6, 7,000 years.
Kokai: You made a recent presentation to a John Locke Foundation headliner event in Asheville, and in that presentation, you called An Inconvenient Truth — here’s a quote — “a computer-enhanced lawyer’s brief for climate alarmism and energy rationing.” So why is it a problem that Al Gore would decide to choose one side and not just create an objective film?
Lewis: Al Gore does not present himself as an advocate for a single viewpoint. He presents himself as Mr. Science, okay, and also as Mr. Morality — and when you do that, when you present yourself as a spokesman for science and morality, then you have an obligation to be balanced. But, so, what he’s doing is … it’s a standard political trick: You present yourself as though you’re above politics, as though you’re really not speaking as a politician, in order, then, to give your political advocacy more weight than it deserves based on the merits of your science or your morals. And so that’s the trick that he pulls off in An Inconvenient Truth. It’s really not that difficult to see through it, and yet so many people in the media have been hoodwinked by it.
Kokai: For those in the audience who have seen the film, what should they keep in mind about its accuracy?
Lewis: One of the things that they should keep in mind is that there is no strong emerging consensus that global warming is making hurricanes stronger or more frequent. This is a debate that’s been going on, but the World Meteorological Organization recently met, in November 2006, 120 of these experts, and their consensus statement is there is no consensus at this time. Another thing that people should keep in mind is that the picture, the photograph, and the diagram of moulins that Al Gore shows in the film — these are the vertical water tunnels that form at the surface of the Greenland ice sheet and burrow down to the bedrock — look a lot scarier than they really are. Al Gore makes it appear that these tunnels, these water tunnels, are disintegrating the ice sheet even as we speak, and putting it in danger of breaking apart and falling into the sea in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of our children. And the very science study that he takes the photograph from, and the diagram from, talks about an acceleration of glacial flow, annual glacial flow — because glaciers are rivers of ice, they’re not static objects — from let’s say, 100 meters a year all the way up to 105 meters a year, so we’re talking about a structure that is thousands of kilometers long, and there is no way that you get from an extra five meters to something that’s 500 kilometers across sliding into the sea. It’s just, that’s just pure science fiction. So that’s another thing.
There are also just complete misstatements of fact that he makes. One that I didn’t even talk about today is a wonderful example. There was a hurricane that hit Brazil in the year 2004 called Hurricane Catarina, not to be confused with Katrina. He blames that on global warming, but if you just go to the NASA Web site, you will find articles about Catarina. What you find is that the sea temperature was cooler than normal when the hurricane formed, and that the air was the coldest it had been in 25 years, and that was the reason this hurricane formed. The air was so cold that, even though the sea was cooler than normal, the difference between the sea temperature and the air temperature was enough to cause a heat flux from the sea to the air, which is what starts hurricanes going. So unless Al Gore wants us to believe that global warming chilled the sea and made the air even colder, there’s no way you can blame this hurricane on global warming.
Kokai: It’s not just An Inconvenient Truth. The newspapers, television, and major news magazines also have many stories about problems linked to global warming. Where could people find good information, if they’re looking for it, about this topic?
Lewis: There are several sources that I would encourage people to look at. One is World Climate Report, and you can find it at www.worldclimatereport.com. Another is the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the Web site is www.co2science.org. I would also highly recommend Bjorn Lomborg’s recent testimony before Congress. Go to www.house.gov, look up Committees, then the Energy & Commerce Committee, and he testified the same day that Al Gore did, and I think it’s a very valuable corrective to Al Gore. And then, if I may be so modest, people can look at my own commentary on Al Gore’s film. It’s called “Al Gore’s Science,” and it’s available at www.cei.org.