[xoxoxoBruce]

An Inconvenient Truth, a feature film from Al Gore promoting the idea that the global warming we're creating, will ruin everything....as in Earth.

Pat Bednard is an ex-Chrysler engineer, that has been a columnist and now editor, at Car & Driver magazine for 20 years. These credentials would qualify him as bias, to my mind. But, that said, he makes an interesting case against Al Gores position.

First he sums up what "An Inconvenient Truth" is...

Gore’s “inconvenient truth” is that — there’s no tactful way to say this — we gas-guzzling, SUV-flaunting, comfort-addicted humans, wallowing in our own self-indulgences, have screwed up the planet. We’ve hauled prodigious quantities of fossil fuels out of the ground where they belong, combusted them to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the sky where it shouldn’t be, and now we’re going to burn for our sins.

I'd accept that as a fair summary.
Next he describes the problem.......

The long absence of farm-belt glaciers confirms an inconvenient truth that Gore chooses to ignore. The warming of our planet started thousands of years before SUVs began adding their spew to the greenhouse. Indeed, the whole greenhouse theory of global warming goes wobbly if you just change one small assumption.
Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.
“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

Then he describes the mechanism that's affected......

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.
Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

OK, that sounds like he has a handle on how it works.
Now the meat of his disagreement with Gore.......

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.
They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it’s a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, by the way, is described by one source as “the most renowned climatologist in all the world.”
When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

OK, a little high profile name dropping....... or making good on a promise to mention some obscure Prof, in exchange for the interview?
Anyway, Bednard wraps it up with.......

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.
In deciding that it couldn’t reduce water vapor, Kyoto really decided that it couldn’t reduce global warning. But that’s an inconvenient truth that wouldn’t make much of a movie.

Well that's pretty clear, but is it right.
I welcome anyone to poke holes in the argument.



PS- I checked on Richard S. Lindzen.
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences At MIT. Former Professor at Harvard and University of Chicago.
Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, and AGU's Macelwane Medal. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and a Fellow of the AAAS1. He is a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60, Harvard University)

A PFD entitled "Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 2 May 2001", is excellent reading. It outlines the interaction between science, public perception, funding and politics very well. It concludes......

The question of where do we go from here is an obvious and important one. From my provincial
perspective, an important priority should be given to figuring out how to support and encourage science (and basic science underlying climate in particular) while removing incentives to promote alarmism. The benefits of leaving future generations a better understanding of nature would far outweigh the benefits (if any) of ill thought out attempts to regulate nature in the absence of such understanding. With respect to any policy, the advice given in the 1992 report of the NRC, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, remains relevant: carry out only those 8 actions which can be justified independently of any putative anthropogenic global warming.
Here, I would urge that even such actions not be identified with climate unless they can be shown to significantly impact the radiative forcing of climate. On neither ground – independent justification or climatic relevance – is Kyoto appropriate.

Well, damn, that's kick in the head.