An Inconvenient Truth, the new movie starring former Vice President Al Gore, is shocking, alarming, upsetting and, to some, incredulous. The world is warming at an unnatural rate due to humans’ love affairs with and dependency on fossil fuels, concludes the film.
On the silver screen, images of melting shelf ice in Greenland and crumbling Patagonian glaciers warn of rising sea levels worldwide and catastrophic global flooding. According to the movie’s Web site, climatecrisis.net, Antarctica could be ice-free by 2050.
Gore states that due to increasing temperatures, spring will continue to arrive earlier and fall appear later, while seasonal heat waves, drought and wild fires will occur more frequently. Gore cited the doubling of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the last 30 years as evidence of the intensification of natural disasters.
The changing climate also has implications for animals and their habitats, Gore continued. At least 279 plants and animals have moved closer to the poles, and more than one million species could be extinct worldwide by 2050, states the Web site.
Gore dominates the screen with a looming presence, armed with scientific evidence to support his claim that humans are behind this disastrous trend. But who are the real-world scientists studying climate change and what do they think of Gore’s claims?
Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are home to some of the leading scientists in climate change. In 1961, Scripps scientist Charles Keeling proved that carbon dioxide levels were increasing in the atmosphere and causing a “greenhouse effect.”
The La Jolla Village News spoke with three such scientists to hear their opinions on the matter.
All applauded Gore for condensing complicated scientific matter into concise, accurate explanations, albeit too simplified for their liking.
“There are only a couple of flaws ” things that I would explain in a little bit more of a complicated way ” but those are details,” said Scripps scientist Alexander Gershunov, whose expertise is climate variability and prediction. “Basically, it comes off as a very objective account of what’s actually happening in the climate.”
Gershunov cautioned that the connection between climate change and hurricanes is not as strong as the global temperature’s correlation to anthropogenic, or human-induced, climate change.
Scripps graduate student Neil Gordon emphasized that it’s not accurate to claim that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, though humans are creating a climate in which hurricanes can potentially be stronger and more frequent. Gordon has studied at Scripps for the past five years and is exploring how cloud properties might change with surface warming.
UCSD professor Naomi Oreskes believes that the more important storyline is the ignorance of the public, not the claims of the film. Oreskes teaches the history of earth and environmental science.
“If this is coming as a surprise to people, that’s almost the biggest story here. That’s a really, really big problem,” Oreskes said. “Nothing in that movie should be a surprise to any educated person, and the fact that it is is really telling.”
While Europe moves forward on the issue, America remains in a bubble of denial, Oreskes said.
Policy-makers do not have the political will to act on global warming since it is not a pressing issue for constituents, for which the media is partly to blame, she continued.
While the scientific community confirmed that anthropogenic climate change was a fact ten years ago, the media continues to give equal weight to fringe dissenters, Oreskes said. She also pointed to deliberate attempts by stakeholders in the fossil fuel industry to confuse the issue.
In an effort to clarify the consensus of the scientific community, Oreskes published an essay in 2004 entitled “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” which states:
“The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)”¦ In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that earth’s climate is being affected by human activities: ‘Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations’ [p. 21 in (4)].”
Gershunov said he doesn’t expect scientists to find a clear voice in the media, but he believes that Mother Nature will speak for herself.
“The only frustration that scientists can generally feel about this is that in this country, specifically, nothing is really done to mitigate or prepare for the kind of changes that we think are very probable and are occurring and we think will continue to intensify,” Gershunov said.
While the scientific community concurs that humans are warming the earth, there is disagreement over future predictions, Oreskes said.
“The $64,000 question is how bad is this going to get?” Oreskes said. “And that’s very difficult and there is definitely a spectrum of opinion in the scientific community about that ” about how bad it’s going to get and how fast it’s going to get bad.”
In order to investigate this question, Climateprediction.net began running climate models over an extremely wide range of probable parameters. British scientists, colleagues of Oreskes, built the climate model with factual information about the climate, information that lacks certainty and theories devoid of any scientific data to predict the extreme to mild effects of global warming.
The model predicts what will happen when carbon dioxide levels double from their pre-industrial levels of 230 parts per million to 560 parts per million, which is expected to occur. Currently, carbon dioxide levels hover at approximately 380 parts per million. The levels are based on gas found in ice cores.
At the extreme, the model shows that doubling the levels could increase the world’s temperature by 12 degrees centigrade, which would be disastrous and unlikely, Oreskes said. At the low end, temperature could increase by two to five degrees, a “fairly bad” result, she continued.
“When Gore focuses on that, to some extent he is focusing on the worst-case scenario but, at the same time, people need to know about the worst-case scenario,” Oreskes said.
The longer the world waits to address the problem, the more difficult it will be to remedy, she said ” melting ice caps can’t be reversed; it’s not as easy as cleaning up the Hudson River.
While scientists are considered information brokers and not policy makers, Oreskes offered her own personal opinion on the matter: People should refute the idea that it’s either the economy or the environment; the economy will change and jobs will appear in new sectors.
While the government bears the largest responsibility for pursuing alternative forms of energy, individuals can also make small, significant changes, such as switching to compact fluorescent bulbs.
“It’s kind of staggering that we’re running our economy on the fuels of the 19th century when we don’t have to,” Oreskes said.
Gordon referenced NASA scientist James Hanson, who urges that major changes to the country’s fuel consumption need to be made in the next decade.
“Ten years is kind of an artificial timeline, but he’s stressing that we really need to change our fuel consumption soon,” Gordon said.
While Scripps’ scientists spoke in unison, Oreskes and Gore are not without their critics. MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen refuted much of Gore’s claims and one of Oreskes’ studies in a July 2 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Don’t Believe the Hype.” And Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg accused Gore of being a scaremonger with his own inconvenient truths in an op-ed that ran April 20. Meanwhile, New York Times commentator Gregg Easterbrook declared that he was switching sides from a skeptic to a convert regarding the reality of global warming in a May 24 op-ed. Easterbrook is a fellow at the Brookings Institute.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been at the forefront of oceanic studies since it was established in 1903 and, more recently, a leader in climate studies. Scientists focus on natural climate variability, climate prediction, past climate status and reconstructing climate before observations were available.