The Falsehoods Behind Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth

Rose Jane V. Cuerquis March 7, 2013 THX2

Al Gores book and movie , both entitled An Inconvenient Truth, are bombarded with complains mainly about false and misleading claims about the science of global warming and related issues. Below are some of the contradictions I observed and researched about:
At least 25% of the documentary was focused on Gore and his life. Its normal for a speaker to establish a brief biographical context for the subsequent discussion. Al Gore did this in a very prominent manner all throughout the documentary but most or even most of it are not directly connected to the main issue- global warming. Reliance on worst-case scenarios The problem is that Gore too hold of worst-case scenarios and presented them as facts--sometimes omitting important qualifiers. He also consistently discussed the most negative impacts, and even minimized the possibility of positive change.

 Conceptual Errors Gore's explanation of several topics, such the greenhouse effect, the relationship of carbon dioxide and global temperature, decline in Arctic Ocean pack ice, structure of the Greenland ice sheet, and ozone depletion, contained errors and misconceptions. He delivered his explanations on these topics dramatically and some were not yet scientifically proven.

Misleading claims about the obligation of the United States Gore compared the population and fuel economy standards of US to other countries and with his gathered data, he stated that the United States is particularly to be blamed for causing global warming on Earth.

 Gore deviated from the real focus of the film: Earth In order to make the message direct and the impact long-lasting, Gore should have shown the audience how majestic the beauty of our Earth is. Instead of doing such, he resorted to charts and graphs which will eventually lose their meaning at the end of the film. If youre going to try and convince anyone that we need to change our ways to save the Earth, shouldnt you spend some time clearly establishing whats at stake? There was a neglect in educating people what they can do to change the current environmental trends. Gore spent most of the time sharing his life story, depicting those trends and spreading the negative effects of these drastic environmental changes. However, at the last part of the film, he only spent 5 minutes telling people ways on how to save the Earth. It was even done in a hasty manner.

 Exaggerations about sea level rise Gore claims that potential melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctic will force the "evacuation" of millions of people to escape sea level rise of 6 meters. This flatly contradicts even the worst-case scenarios described by the scientific community. Most research indicates that such melting, even if it could occur, would take 1,000 to 5,000 years; the minimum timescale described by any researcher for such melting is still centuries.

Misleading claims about effects of climate change

Gore claims that the emergence of new diseases is related to global warming, but most of the diseases he lists have little or no relationship to climate. He also claims global warming is causing a "significant" number of polar bear drownings, based on a report of four drowned polar bears; however, other researchers report the polar bear population is generally unchanged. Melting of glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro and in Glacier National Park are cited as consequences of global warming, but in both cases these glaciers have been melting since the 1800s, when the Earth emerged from a period of global cooling.