On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth accurate?". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.
An Inconvenient Truth is an award-winning documentary-style film that was released in September 2006, featuring the former U.S. Vice-president Al Gore. All about climate change, it was loved by many but vociferously loathed by some.
The film did contain a few errors, but that's not surprising given it was about climate science but created by a well-meaning politician. In reality, the reaction to it in certain quarters did a great deal to expose the simplistic mindset of the climate science denier. In their world, any error, however small, invalidates our entire understanding of how the planet works. It's like saying that because a single doctor misdiagnoses a condition, medicine should be abolished in its entirety.
Where were the errors? The most widely-circulated one involved snow and ice on Africa's highest mountain, Kilimanjaro (5,895 metres). At that height, even by the Equator, the temperatures around the summit rarely go above freezing. The error was in the claim that climate change had caused the shrinking of Kilimanjaro's ice-cap.
Comparing Kilimanjaro today to when the first explorers scaled it over 100 years ago shows that glacial retreat has certainly removed its ice-sheets by some 90%. The ice has however sublimed - gone from solid to vapour - something that often happens in the very dry cold air that is typical of the local high-altitude climate there. In the rainy seasons that occur there twice a year, snow does fall, sometimes copiously, but the sublimation process is in overall charge at present.
But that's a minor error when one considers all of the vast numbers of retreating mountain glaciers in the mid-latitudes and the huge meltwater torrents gushing from their ends. That those glaciers are retreating due to the warming climate is widely accepted by those who study them.
Other errors concerned timing of future changes, giving an impression of imminent chaos. But does that matter? Not really. If you know the oceans are going to rise by several metres, whether that takes 50, 100 or 200 years is something of a distraction. We know from the deglaciation after the last ice-age that under some circumstances, sea level can rise by around four metres per century. So we have a feel for what's possible if warming continues unchecked. Even if the seas rise by a tenth of that figure by 2100, it's still seriously bad news.
In other words, we're storing up massive problems for our children, grandchildren and their descendents. To ignore that because a politician once annoyed you is to casually write off their futures. Is that the best we can do?
Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "at a glance" section. Read a more technical version via the link below!
In case you'd like to explore more of our recently updated rebuttals, here are the links to all of them:
| Myths with link to rebuttal | Short URLs |
| Ice age predicted in the 1970s | sks.to/1970s |
| It hasn't warmed since 1998 | sks.to/1998 |
| Antarctica is gaining ice | sks.to/antarctica |
| CRU emails suggest conspiracy | sks.to/climategate |
| What evidence is there for the hockey stick | sks.to/hockey |
| CO2 lags temperature | sks.to/lag |
| Climate's changed before | sks.to/past |
| It's the sun | sks.to/sun |
| Temperature records are unreliable | sks.to/temp |
| The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics | sks.to/thermo |
| We're heading into an ice age | sks.to/iceage |
| Positives and negatives of global warming | sks.to/impacts |
| Global cooling - Is global warming still happening? | sks.to/cooling |
| How reliable are climate models? | sks.to/model |
| Can animals and plants adapt to global warming? | sks.to/species |
| What's the link between cosmic rays and climate change? | sks.to/cosmic |
| Is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth accurate? | sks.to/gore |
Posted by John Mason on Tuesday, 20 June, 2023
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