An Inconvenient Lie

The following will appear in the Ft. Wayne News-Sentinal next week in response to letter published from a High School scinece teacher touting Al Gore's movie. And people wonder why we chose to send young Lex to a Catholic school.

An Inconvenient Lie

It’s a bit odd that an article would appear on this page in support of Al Gore’s error laden movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” It’s Odd in part because the movie was so thoroughly debunked months ago (do a web search using “An Inconvenient Lie” as search criteria). Odder yet because the article touting the overreaching frenzied flick was penned by a High School science teacher relying on, among other things, anecdotal evidence from her visit to Glacier National Park.

I once visited San Francisco in the summer and nearly froze at Coit Tower. However, I didn’t use my visit as a scientific method for concluding that were headed toward another ice age - although I do recall a know-it-all public schoolteacher in the early 70s telling us that we were.

In fact in 1976 author Lowell Ponte in his book “The Cooling” confidently predicted, "It is a cold fact: the global cooling presents humandkind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenege we have had to deal with for ten thousand years" foreward (page xvi). The emphasis belongs to the hysterical author. The book, for obvious reasons, is no longer in print.

The writer of the doom and gloom editorial would have us believe that anyone who dare disagree with Mr. Gore is doing so for “either political or personal and economic gain.” She writes this, no doubt, with a straight face forgetting Al Gore was a Democrat, congressman, senator, vice president and presidential candidate and stands to make millions off of the movie and book. There can’t be any political or economic agenda in all of that now can there.

And if you like, or don’t like this version of Al Gore, go back to 1976 when he was running around as a pro-life, pro-business Democrat from Tenessee’s fourth district, dumping those deeply held beliefes only when they became an inconveient impediment to higher office.

But hey, I’m not a scientist. I don’t even foist my personal experiences off as science experiments, but here is just one of hundreds of opinions about Al Gore’s movie from the science community.

Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, on Gore's film as quoted in the Canadian Free Press, June 12, 2006:

"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.

"The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Then there’s the bogus “there are more and more powerful hurricanes due to global warming” argument. Max Mayfield director of the National Hurricane Center said this on CBS’s Face Nation last year:

“Bob, hurricanes, and especially major hurricanes, are cyclical…We had a lot of major hurricanes in the fifties and sixties, not nearly as many in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, and then in 1995, they really picked up again…So, I think that this activity that we're in can be explained without invoking global warming…”

So if you’re headed to Northrop High School in the fall, go ahead and plan for a full school year. The Earth is unlikely to turn into a cinder under your feet before the spring graduation. Oh yeah, bring a backpack load of skepticism to your “science” class.