The Inconvenient Truth

As the New York Times reports today, the science of global warming isn't nearly so solid and certain as Al Gore and other alarmists would have us to believe.

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Read the whole thing.

An interesting note: One of the global warming "skeptics" quoted in the Times article is Dr. Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The Times quoted Dr. Spencer from this June 2006 TCS Daily article in which he took issue with an AP reporter for giving the false impression that scientists have been virtually unanimous in endorsing Gore's film. As today's Times article plainly shows, nothing could be further from the truth. It is also a welcome sign that the mainstream press is finally beginning to pay attention to the real science of global warming, rather than the propaganda. As Dr. Spencer pointed out in a recent editorial he wrote for the New York Post, there's a lot about that science, and about climate change more generally, that we simply don't know yet.

Spencer's biography and a full archive of his TCS Daily articles are available here.