[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 45 (Thursday, March 15, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E556-E557]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       ``AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH''

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. ED WHITFIELD

                              of kentucky

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 15, 2007

  Mr. WHITFIELD. Madam Speaker, I rise to bring attention to the House 
an article published in the New York Times regarding former Vice 
President Al Gore's documentary, ``An Inconvenient Truth.'' As this 
documentary continues to shape the discussion on the controversial 
issue of global warming, I would like to highlight the following 
article, which identifies the inconsistencies of the film.

                [From the New York Times, Mar. 13, 2007]

             From a Rapt Audience, a Call To Cool the Hype

                         (By William J. Broad)

       Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film 
     on global warming, ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' which won an 
     Academy Award for best documentary. So do many 
     environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many 
     scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of 
     climate change.
       But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, 
     articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film 
     and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists 
     argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are exaggerated 
     and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call 
     his alarmism.
       ``I don't want to pick on Al Gore,'' Don J. Easterbrook, an 
     emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington 
     University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of 
     the Geological Society of America. ``But there are a lot of 
     inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to 
     temper that with real data.''
       Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his 
     work made ``the most important and salient points'' about 
     climate change, if not ``some nuances and distinctions'' 
     scientists might want. ``The degree of scientific consensus 
     on global warming has never been stronger,'' he said, adding, 
     ``I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay 
     language that I understand.''
       Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily 
     on the authority of science in ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' 
     which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and 
     claims.
       Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative 
     groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but 
     also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who 
     told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few 
     see natural variation as more central to global warming than 
     heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in 
     the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat 
     but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics 
     and zealots.
       Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and 
     Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, 
     said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration.
       While praising Mr. Gore for ``getting the message out,'' 
     Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were 
     ``overselling our certainty about knowing the future.''
       Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate 
     change, or the idea that the human production of heat-
     trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe's 
     recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone 
     beyond the scientific evidence.
       ``He's a very polarizing figure in the science community,'' 
     said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a 
     colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. 
     ``Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the 
     person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.''
       ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' directed by Davis Guggenheim, 
     was released last May and took in more than $46 million, 
     making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The 
     companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, 
     reaching No.1 on the New York Times list.
       Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice 
     sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and 
     people die en masse. ``Unless we act boldly,'' he wrote, 
     ``our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.''
       He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who 
     commend his popularizations and call his science basically 
     sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American 
     Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star 
     from thousands of attendees.
       ``He has credibility in this community,'' said Tim Killeen, 
     the group's president and director of the National Center for 
     Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. 
     ``There's no question he's read a lot and is able to respond 
     in a very effective way.''
       Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as 
     reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an 
     environmental scientist, director of NASA's Goddard Institute 
     for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, ``Al 
     does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the 
     trees,'' adding that Mr. Gore often did so ``better than 
     scientists.''
       Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president's work 
     may hold ``imperfections'' and ``technical flaws.'' He 
     pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights 
     the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research 
     suggesting that global warming will cause both storm 
     frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic 
     season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted 
     (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.
       ``We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane 
     story than he is,'' Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. ``On the 
     other hand,'' Dr. Hansen said, ``he has the bottom line 
     right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat 
     of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the 
     potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.''
       In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as 
     fundamentally accurate. ``Of course,'' he said, ``there will 
     always be questions around the edges of the science, and we 
     have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask 
     and to challenge and to answer those questions.''
       He said ``not every single adviser'' agreed with him on 
     every point, ``but we do agree on the fundamentals''--that 
     warming is real and caused by humans.
       Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among 
     scientists against his work. ``I have received a great deal 
     of positive feedback,'' he said. ``I have also received 
     comments about items that should be changed, and I have 
     updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.'' 
     He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

[[Page E557]]

       He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the 
     dangers of global warming, ``I think that I'm finally getting 
     a little better at it.''
       While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal 
     skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. 
     Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts 
     Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy 
     of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire 
     climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street 
     Journal of ``shrill alarmism.''
       Some of Mr. Gore's centrist detractors point to a report 
     last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 
     a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel 
     went further than ever before in saying that humans were the 
     main cause of the globe's warming since 1950, part of Mr. 
     Gore's message that few scientists dispute. But it also 
     portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.
       It estimated that the world's seas in this century would 
     rise a maximum of 23 inches--down from earlier estimates. Mr. 
     Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up 
     to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other 
     heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, 
     implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.
       Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in 
     Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said 
     in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had 
     refrained from scaremongering. ``Climate change is a real and 
     serious problem'' that calls for careful analysis and sound 
     policy, Dr. Lomborg said. ``The cacophony of screaming,'' he 
     added, ``does not help.''
       So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed 
     to contradict Mr. Gore's portrayal of recent temperatures as 
     the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, 
     current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail 
     end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.
       Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, 
     Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore's film did ``indeed 
     do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.'' 
     But the June report, he added, shows ``that all we really 
     know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 
     400 years.''
       Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore's claim that the 
     energy industry ran a ``disinformation campaign'' that 
     produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, 
     was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans 
     were the main culprits.
       But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who 
     runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet 
     newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, 
     challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of 
     pointed disagreement.
       ``Hardly a week goes by,'' Dr. Peiser said, ``without a new 
     research paper that questions part or even some basics of 
     climate change theory,'' including some reports that offer 
     alternatives to human activity for global warming.
       Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, 
     and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.
       ``Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the 
     phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of 
     environmental change on our planet,'' Robert M. Carter, a 
     marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said 
     in a September blog. ``Nor does he present any evidence that 
     climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its 
     historical pattern of constant change.''
       In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the 
     geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed 
     Mr. Gore's claim that ``our civilization has never 
     experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to 
     this'' threatened change.
       Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He 
     flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 
     15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the 
     medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to ``20 
     times greater than the warming in the past century.''
       Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore's assertion that 
     scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had 
     corrupted. ``I've never been paid a nickel by an oil 
     company,'' Dr. Easterbrook told the group. ``And I'm not a 
     Republican.''
       Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul 
     Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming's effects and 
     director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the 
     Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his 
     portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.
       ``For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against 
     the unsubstantiated claims,'' Dr. Reiter wrote in The 
     International Herald Tribune. ``We have done the studies and 
     challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the 
     facts.''
       Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and 
     international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on 
     the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed 
     on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had 
     raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished 
     himself for integrity.
       ``On balance, he did quite well--a credible and 
     entertaining job on a difficult subject,'' Dr. Oppenheimer 
     said. ``For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake 
     him over the coals, you're going to find people who disagree. 
     But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.''

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