Al Gore at Hamilton College April 29, 2007
Posted by Greg Jerome in Economics, Environment, Global Warming, Politics.trackback
I was fortunate enough to see Al Gore deliver his presentation, “An Inconvenient Truth” at Hamilton College on Thursday night. I had neither seen the movie nor read the book, making this a very powerful first experience with with Mr. Gore’s message.
The presentation is almost entirely devoted to convincing you that global warming is real and humans are causing it. Point by point Gore analyzes graphs, charts, and photographs to make his point clear and left little doubt in my mind that something is going very wrong. The graphs of human population growth, species extinction, and carbon emissions related to temperature all make it very clear that we are changing the planet in a profound way and we must stop now.
Perhaps most importantly is this point the OD reported:
Of more than 920 peer-reviewed articles on climate change analyzed during a 10-year period, not one questioned whether global warming was a reality, Gore said.
This is something we can not miss. Global warming is not controversial, it is a fact upon which all serious scientist agree. People who publicly debate Global Warming are often operating in the same capacity as doctors the tobacco lobby paid to tell us that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. There is no question this is happening. We must each do what we can to stop it.
Hearing this message live and in person with over 2000 other people was a powerful experience. Hearing the urgency in Gore’s voice and the passion he has for this issue makes me want to do more. We all need to do more.
Not only are they using some of the same tactics — in some cases they are the same people who were paid by tobacco companies to spread doubt about the link between cigarette smoking and cancer.
And it has been a successful campaign. They’ve managed to convince a lot of people — especially in the blogosphere — that climate science is wrong, and somehow these people feel qualified to contradict the scientific community. Don’t be surprised if “delusionists” show up at your blog to claim that Gore was wrong, the vast majority of climate scientists are wrong, and it’s a liberal conspiracy to destroy our economic prosperity.
If the issue interests you, and you’d like a more scientific perspective, there’s a blog run by climate scientists called RealClimate.