> You're doing yourself a significant disservice by letting your prejudices
> overpower your good judgement.
Shawn's reaction is understandable in the sense that, rightly or wrongly[1],
Al Gore has a reputation for exaggeration and hyperbole.
I honestly didn't know much about Al Gore when he became Vice President but my
first post-election exposure was memorable. It was the vote on the tax
increase of 1993 - President Clinton's first major legislative act. Arms were
twisted and breaking in the halls of Congress. The measure passed in the House
by a single vote and the Senate tied until VP Gore broke the tie. You cannot
pass a law in the United States by a slimmer margin. Vice President Gore was
interviewed immediately afterward and declared that the tax increase was a
clear mandate. Even the interviewer (Bob Schieffer IIRC) cocked his head and
chuckled. Little did I know at the time that this would haunt Gore later when
he ran for President.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5920188/the_press_vs_al_gore
...
Whether it was the misreported assertion that he'd invented the Internet or
the ridiculously exaggerated brouhaha over his quickly corrected claim that he
and his wife, Tipper, were models for the young lovers in Erich Segal's
best-selling novel Love Story, Gore's close friends and admirers agree that
Gore has a penchant for hyperbole. But in last year's election, the press
elevated this relatively minor personality quirk into a character-defining
issue.
...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E3DD1630F931A15751C0A9669C8
B63
Arlie Schardt (Op-Ed, Feb. 16) seems irked by the fact that some news outlets
are quoting a long-forgotten memo that he sent to Al Gore in 1988, when he was
Mr. Gore's campaign press secretary. ''Your main pitfall is exaggeration,''
Mr. Schardt wrote. Mr. Schardt looks to excuse Mr. Gore's exaggerations about
himself based on the heat of the moment. But the fact that Mr. Schardt found
it necessary to write the memo, even as ''pre-emptive advice,'' belies his
contention that Mr. Gore doesn't have a problem with exaggeration.
SAM BIRNBAUM
Oceanside, N.Y., Feb. 16, 2000
This next clip is from a quite positive review of an Inconvenient Truth. There
are many comments attached and worth a read if you have an hour to kill:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=299
...
There are a few scientific errors that are important in the film. At one point
Gore claims that you can see the aerosol concentrations in Antarctic ice cores
change "in just two years", due to the U.S. Clean Air Act. You can't see dust
and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores -- not with the naked eye -- and I'm
skeptical you can definitively point to the influence of the Clean Air Act. I
was left wondering whether Gore got this notion, and I hope he'll correct it
in future versions of his slideshow. Another complaint is the juxtaposition of
an image relating to CO2 emissions and an image illustrating invasive plant
species. This is misleading; the problem of invasive species is predominantly
due to land use change and importation, not to "global warming". Still, these
are rather minor errors. It is true that the effect of reduced leaded gasoline
use in the U.S. does clearly show up in Greenland ice cores; and it is also
certainly true that climate change could exacerbate the problem of invasive
species.
Several of my colleagues complained that a more significant error is Gore's
use of the long ice core records of CO2 and temperature (from oxygen isotope
measurements) in Antarctic ice cores to illustrate the correlation between the
two. The complaint is that the correlation is somewhat misleading, because a
number of other climate forcings besides CO2 contribute to the change in
Antarctic temperature between glacial and interglacial climate. Simply
extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the temperature in 2100
A.D. somewhere upwards of 10 C warmer than present -- rather at the extreme
end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here). However,
I don't really agree with my colleagues' criticism on this point. Gore is
careful not to state what the temperature/CO2 scaling is. He is making a
qualitative point, which is entirely accurate. The fact is that it would be
difficult or impossible to explain past changes in temperature during the ice
age cycles without CO2 changes (as we have discussed here). In that sense, the
ice core CO2-temperature correlation remains an appropriate demonstration of
the influence of CO2 on climate.
For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in
Earth in the Balance. The small errors don't detract from Gore's main point,
which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional
ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate
change. This is not entirely a scientific issue -- indeed, Gore repeatedly
makes the point that it is a moral issue -- but Gore draws heavily on Pacala
and Socolow's recent work to show that the technology is there (see Science
305, p. 968 Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50
Years with Current Technologies).
I'll admit that I have been a bit of a skeptic about our ability to take any
substantive action, especially here in the U.S.
Gore's aim is to change that viewpoint, and the colleagues I saw the movie
with all seem to agree that he is successful.
In short: this film is worth seeing. It opens in early June.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Around the time that "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, I had heard someone on
the radio (Mitch Albom of "Tuesdays With Morrie" fame IIRC) who said that Gore
told him that he feels so strongly about this issue that some statements in
the film are meant to "shake people up" and that he used a bit of exaggeration
to get the point across. Even the author of the above review states that Gore
sees this as a moral issue. Unfortunately, moral issues do not always lead to
clear arguments. The "ends justify the means" can be seen in abortion clinic
bombings/Oklahoma City bombing/the 9-11 attacks/teaching (or not teaching)
evolution/the Crusades & Jihad/etc.
Deservedly or not, Al Gore does have a perception problem. The election cycle
does not help his cause either. Nevertheless, I imagine that quite a few
people shared Shawn's reaction.
Mark W.
1.) The topic of Al Gore's "Embellishment" problem is covered in a 25+ page
Harvard paper.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Case_Studies/1679_0.
pdf#search=%22al%20gore%20hyperbole%22 or
http://tinyurl.com/n2bd6
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