An Inconvenient Truth

As a political blogger, I contribute articles to this blog that explain why we need alternative energy. The reason why this issue is important go far beyond just having cheaper gas. This article is about the reason that is quickly becoming the 800-lb gorilla in the room: global warming. There’s no denying it, the planet is getting hotter and consensus in the scientific community is that carbon dioxide production from human activity is the cause of this warming. Alternative fuels significantly reduce carbon dioxide production and they are a key part of solving this growing climate crisis.

I recently bought the book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. The book is basically the paper version of the movie that was released in May 2006. The book and movie are based on the Keynote presentation on global warming (Keynote is the Mac version of Powerpoint) that Al Gore has given close to a thousand times. This slideshow is both fascinating and deeply terrifying as the former Vice-President takes you on “a nature walk through the Book of Revelations.”

This book and movie were just stuffed full of compelling information. For example, here’s a summary of one of most interesting parts of this movie and book.

As I mentioned earlier, the scientific community has reached a overwhelming consensus: Global warming is real. Humans are the principal cause. The consequences will be very dangerous. Said Jim Baker, the former head of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): “There is a better scientific consensus on this issue than any other…with the possible exception of Newton’s Law of Dynamics.”

In a peer-reviewed Science magazine study published by Dr. Naomi Oreskes at the University of California at San Diego, all 928 of the peer-reviewed science journal articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003 were analyzed. Dr. Oreskes and her team choose a large random sample and determined if these papers agreed on the scientific consensus on global warming.

Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 0%

Then it gets interesting:

Due to well-funded special interest groups, a very coordinated disinformation campaign is being conducted to raise doubt about the “inconvenient truth” of global warming. (Big surprise: these groups happen to receive funding from the oil and coal industry). Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ross Gelbspan wrote a book called Boiling Point and discussed this information campaign. In this book, he describes an internal memo from one of these groups that stated their goal was to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

Al Gore then proceeded to draw a compelling comparison to the reaction of the tobacco industry in the 1960s when the Surgeon General released a landmark report linking cigarette smoke to lung cancer.

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” – Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company memo from the 1960s.

Then it gets really interesting:

Similar to the study of the peer-reviewed journal articles, another study was done of the mainstream media coverage of the global warming issue. No formal citation was given for this story, but as avid news reader I have zero doubts about the study’s conclusion.

They studied articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal over 14 years (roughly 1990-2004). They took a 18% sample of the 636 articles and analyzed how they depicted the global warming issue.

Number of articles that gave equal weight to the “scientific articles” (translation: not peer-reviewed) that claim global warming isn’t due to human activity: 53%

53%!!!

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew