"An Inconvenient Truth" (second draft)

(Left: The last fragment of a glacier on Mt. Kiliminjaro, Kenya.)


I went last night with E2 to the Varsity Theater in Davis to see "An Inconvenient Truth", starring Al Gore. Young musical theater enthusiast Justin Biewer-Elstob (who starred last year as 'Conrad Birdie' in DMTC's YPT summer workshop, "Bye, Bye Birdie") was slinging sodas in the bright orange lobby of the Varsity Theater. The place was eerie: familiar, from having done so many shows there, but also weird, because of the new seats, and the many changes in decor from what we once knew.

My climatologist friend, Jerry, in San Jose, has been promoting this new movie, noting:

The map that indicates that the release of the movie is being restricted to "blue" areas -- what is the point in that? By the way, here is a favorable review from an Austin, TX paper. Here's my favorite reaction so far.

I thought it was a very good movie, but I worried, not so much about what Gore said, but by what he didn't say. People are very prone to confuse standard air pollution problems with the buildup of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, and the movie didn't help on that score. But still, far better than what one usually gets from movies!

Gore does a far better job with his PowerPoint presentations than anyone I've ever seen - a Powerpoint master! His lecturing manner is lively and interesting. Nevertheless, I was worried about the simplifications Gore had to embrace to make his lecture clear.

The best part of the movie is when Gore discusses rotting and decaying ice shelves and glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. Some of this information about breaking ice shelves on Antarctica's Ross Peninsula I had heard before, but never in such a compelling and interesting way. And some of the information, particularly on the decaying Greenland ice sheet, was genuinely new to me. The worst part of the movie was a poorly-edited fragment, discussing Pacific Islanders who've had to relocate to New Zealand because of rising sea levels. These islanders weren't really identified. Global warming victims make interesting news, but not if they remain faceless.

One of my bosses at work is a global warming skeptic. Politically, he's somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun and somewhere to the left of Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force. Once, just before a company dinner, we were vigorously discussing global warming, when the dinner bell rang, and he was forced to summarize the entire global warming skeptic position in ten seconds. His ten second complaint was that the argument on behalf of global warming was too simple: the Earth's climate engine has far too many cogs in it to expect it to respond uniformly to a single forcing agent like an increase in carbon dioxide concentration.

At first, I thought this was a strange argument. Scientists prefer simple explanations. Occam's razor maintains that the simplest argument that explains a phenomenon is often the correct one. Thus, simplicity is a virtue.

But there is a different way to look at global warming - not scientifically, but politically. Simple political explanations are appealing, because they can be easily grasped, and thus it is easier to mobilize people to carry out certain tasks. The ugly details can be left for later. Maybe the danger of simplicity isn't scientific, but political.

If I recall correctly, the first scientist who established that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation was a German named Heinz, in the late 1880's. He immediately intuited from his experiments that the Industrial Revolution would lead to a warming of the Earth. Global warming is a simple enough idea that the very first scientist in the field grasped the key point immediately. The education revolution of the 20th Century has now made scientific thought much more widely available in the past, greatly expanding the pool of people who understand, and thus heightening the political impact of efforts to stop global warming. Everyone can now join in democratic action. But what exactly are we to do?

I never was that interested in climatology - too much statistics for a simple soul like myself. Nevertheless, I remember the late 1980's, when I was a graduate student in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. There was something of an academic political campaign to bring onto the faculty an experienced scientist, one with connections to NASA, and who had considerable global climate modeling capability, but he did not have much hands-on experience. We had another fellow on the faculty who did have a lot of experimental experience with aerosol particles (also of interest in climatology), but less modeling experience. The outside guy essentially routed the inside guy, and effectively replaced him: hands-on experience no longer seemed quite as important as political glad-handing.

I sensed that, behind it all, the National Science Foundation, among others, had quietly become politicized, and that global warming was now their favored cause, with global modeling the preferred vehicle for educating the nation and the world. The turnover in college faculty, nationwide as well as in AZ, was just a small skirmish in the new campaign, which might take decades to accomplish. Climatological modelers were to be favored, even if the climate models could benefit from the work of people who could actually calibrate the models with experimental evidence. Simplicity was in! Looking forward, though, it seemed like a shrewd bet: after all, carbon dioxide was relentlessly increasing, and there was unusual consensus in the scientific community regarding the implications.

All of this might be OK, but the kinds of things we need to do to get a handle on global warming are daunting. Carbon dioxide is inexorably increasing in the atmosphere - concentrations are already 15% higher than when I was born (380 vs. 315 ppmv). We have to seriously curtail our appetites for carbon fossil fuels, but our precious lifestyles hinge on the consumption of carbon fossil fuels. We are seriously, seriously addicted to petroleum products.

Al Gore spoke of the moral imperative of doing what we must to save our home, our Earth. Gore reminds me of a Preacher, trying to persuade people who've been alcoholics as long as they've been alive, that they should give up the bottle. People have no idea what is involved.

Q.: "Mr. Preacherman, what will happen if I give up alcohol?"
A.: "Well, Timmy, first you'll get the delerium tremens, better known as the DTs. You'll go through a period of what seems like insanity, featuring hallucinations. You'll see spiders on the walls, and your head will feel like it's full of maggots."
Q.: "Can't I have a beer instead, Mr. Preacherman?"
A.: "Well, Timmy, then you'll be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution!"
Q.: "It doesn't look that way from where I sit, Mr. Preacherman!"

So, what is the point? If you are a statesman (aka a politician), maybe you'll be happy enough to settle for second-best. People do not understand that carbon dioxide is not simply a typical air pollutant that can be handled by regulation - carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere, and regulation can only slow, not stop, the process. The danger is that people will become hurt and disillusioned, because they are engaged in a campaign that will likely lose the main battle, even if there are other sucesses elsewhere.

Indeed, after seeing the movie, E2 told me "I have a friend who is buying a natural-gas powered vehicle with near-zero emissions." "Well, that's good," I said, "but natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and the vehicle will contribute to global warming." "I bet you're mistaken," she said. I wish Gore had spoken on this point. The fact that he was silent suggests there are advantages to not making the point clear.

So, if people use more fuel-efficient autos, carbon dioxide will build up more slowly in the atmosphere, although it will still build up. Nevertheless, you might still get air pollution benefits by buying the newer fuel-efficient cars, and consume petroleum products from the Middle East at a slower rate, which might help political stability - all salutary goals - but you will still lose on the global warming front. Two steps forward, one step back - nevertheless, a good day for a statesman.

Our political system does a very poor job addressing long-term problems, and politics is all about the short-term. Global warming may very well be real - I'm a convert - but I suspect we'll burn every precious drop of oil, regardless, until it is all gone. Call me a cynic, but we are a world filled with addicts. The spirit may be willing, but the flesh is very, very weak!

Al Gore stated that if the Greenland ice cap, or the West Antarctic ice sheet melted, sea level would rise 20 feet. All I could think was, "well, the basement of my house is 23 feet, 8 inches above sea level." So, I'll be all right (unless BOTH ice sheets melt, in which case I'll be screwed and have to move back to New Mexico). That's one nice thing about being a mature adult, though. By the time all hell breaks loose, I'll be dead.