And for the other side:

www.opinionjournal.com/extra/

What makes me saddest is that the world's poor suffer at the hands of privileged, white environmentalists who for some reason want humans to be responsible for global warming so they can justify having pretty back yards.

Apologies Rob for not critiquing your critique and just using this as a blatent soapbox, but no one else has brought up the movie yet.

However...

"Why do we get shots at Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. without any reflection, any taking of responsibility for his own political life? If he's looking to convert mainstream America to his cause, he runs the risk of looking like a partisan hack, which is unfortunate."

That's because he -is- a partisan hack, who's whiney that he's not in the spotlight anymore.

And don't get me wrong - my views on environmentalism are varied, and I agree with you on Washington's inability to separate themselves from the corporate bosom that leads to dehumanization and localized environmental tragedy (mainly because the EPA can't effectively do its job on the scale that it operates). But man, I'd sure like to hear something other than hype someday.

Apropos:

July 15th to 17th - G8 Summit St.Petersburg, Russia

int.ruimc.mutualaid.org/

July 15th - July 15th 2006 - Direct Action for Climate Justice

July 15, 2006 - International Day of Direct Action
against Climate Change and the G8

Rise Up Against G8 Policies,
Target Fossil Fuel Industries
in Your Community or Bioregion!

rtc.revolt.org/node/123

=====

I can not find any solidarity events in the local calendars [NH].

I'm not saying there's not a dangerous climate problem; maybe there is maybe there isn't.
But the institution Gore thinks should help "solve" the problem is our Federal Government, and guess who also happens to be the nation's number one polluter?

www.adti.net/environment/bndunlop_kasten_1000.html

The henhouse is not going to get safer from climate change if we give the fox more power over it.

I am not sure that there's a point to Sen. Kasten's article, other than, "Al Gore is a hypocrite for wanting environmental action on global warming but failing to take action against the federal government for its pollution during his tenure as Vice President." Fair enough—Al Gore probably is hypocritical in many respects on the environment. However, Kasten's later remark,

It isn't a nit-picking question, and it isn't a personal attack – instead it goes to policy and the future,

implies that the main point of this article is something more than a partisan attack on Gore.
But suggesting policy changes is not the main point of the article, and Kasten's comment to the contrary stands as an afterthought thrown in at the end to justify another worthless demonstration of partisanship.

On your point,

But the institution Gore thinks should help "solve" the problem is our Federal Government, and guess who also happens to be the nation's number one polluter? The henhouse is not going to get safer from climate change if we give the fox more power over it.

I don't see why being the largest polluter means that the federal government can't help solve the climate change problem.

I don't doubt yours and Sen. Kasten's point that the federal government emits more pollution than any other organization, but like Sen. Kasten writes, the federal government produces more pollution than any other organization because the US federal government is one of the largest, if not the largest organization in the world. Even if the federal government used the latest environmentally friendly technologies and put severe limits on its consumption, it's possible that the federal government would continue to be the largest polluter simply by virtue of its size.

However, I can see nothing about the nature of the federal government that implies that it cannot reduce its own consumption and thereby help the climate change problem. Kasten's article at least affirms this point. If it were not the case that the federal government could reduce its own consumption, then Kasten could not criticize Gore for failing to make changes during the tenure of the Clinton administration that would reduce the federal government's contribution to the climate change problem.

More importantly to your point, I agree that we can't naively trust the government to solve the problem. But that the federal government produces the most pollution of any organization doesn't imply that the federal government cannot be used to positively impact the current pollution and climate change problems. The fox and the henhouse analogy implies that there is something about the nature of the government, its "species", that prevents it helping solve the problem. The government is big, and it pollutes in a big way, but lacking your ideological opposition to "Big Government" I don't see the government's capacity to help or not help with the climate change problem as necessarily linked to the government's role as the number one polluter.

WTF, Sen. Kasten?

Thanks Rob

I got from the movie an inkling, finally, of why Gore isn't running for Pres or agitating within the system: I got the sense he plainly doesn't believe in it anymore. And I do mean SYSTEM: the whole panoply of human organization. It's all failed him: his Pres bid defeat, his sisters death from tobacco (the family business), his son's near death by auto accident..all these injuries seem to have added up to a deeply felt nihilism.

Now THAT's an inconvenient truth...his message is hamstrung by his own lack of faith in humanity.

So yeah, I agree his message lacks vision. But it's not due to simple political cowardice (IMO). He really IS running blind, propelled mostly by a sense of duty. If that's not righteous nothing is.

Films have to focus on a few simple, effective messages to spread to their audience. If they try for anything more ambitious then they end up looking like a rambling mess. I, myself, am more of a fan of well researched books and essays. They can explain quite a bit more, and in vivid detail, but who reads anymore? A book is probably NOT the best way for Al Gore to get his message across to a large audience.

The real importance of this film does not lie in Gore's bogus solutions that rely on consumer choice to fix the world's problems (As if America's rampant consumerism was so benevolent). What this film does do effectively is to establish global warming as an established scientific fact. Gore does this with tons of charts, graphs, maps, and a Futurama clip. Futurama's articulate comedy on the subject aside, the scientific evidence is overwhelming.

What makes this film important is not Gore's sordid history, or his inability to expose corruption, or his reluctance to denounce Clinton's lack of concern for the environment. What this film does do is give the public some cold, hard, rational, scientifically indisputable facts. Facts, mind you, that have been carefully hid from the public. Facts that people need to know.

Now, why should Al Gore address the hypocritical nature of his lecture? Wouldn't that make him look bad? He's Al Gore, and you're listening to him talk, and that's good enough damn it!

So my conclusion is similar to yours: If you are skeptical about global warming because the mainstream media confuses non-peer reviewed studies as science then you need to see this film. As for the solution to global warming? Perhaps a better film will be made addressing that subject.

Global Warming Destroys Wine Industry

Global Warming spells disaster for much of the multibillion-dollar wine industry. What next? Food Security at risk.

Areas suitable for growing premium wine grapes could be reduced by 50 percent - and possibly as much as 81 percent - by the end of this century, according to a study Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper indicates increasing weather problems for grapes in such areas as California's Napa and Sonoma valleys.

The main problem: An increase in the frequency of extremely hot days, according to Noah Diffenbaugh of the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University.

Grapes used in premium wines need a consistent climate. When temperatures top about 95 degrees they have problems maintaining photosynthesis and the sugars in the grapes can break down, Diffenbaugh said in a telephone interview.

"The lion's share of the industry is in California, so it's a huge concern from a wine quality standpoint."
-James A. Kennedy, professor at Oregon State University

"We have very long-term studies of how this biological system (of vineyards) responds to climate," said Diffenbaugh, and that gives the researchers confidence in their projection. Diffenbaugh is a co-author of the paper.

Scientists and environmental experts have become increasingly alarmed in recent years by accumulating gasses such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels.

A panel of climate scientists convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported last month that the Earth is heating up and "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." The scientists said average global surface temperatures rose by about 1 degree in the 20th century. While that may not sound like much, many blame it for melting glaciers, weather changes - perhaps even more hurricanes - and threats of spreading diseases.

James A. Kennedy, a professor of food science and technology at Oregon State University, said he was shocked by the report on the potential effects on wine grapes.

"We're definitely, in the wine industry, starting to be concerned about global warming," said Kennedy, who was not part of the research team.

"The lion's share of the industry is in California, so it's a huge concern from a wine quality standpoint," he said. For people in the industry "this paper is going to be a bit of a shocker."

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
ru.indymedia.org/newswire/display/15305/index.php

The people will revolt---conservative and liberal alike.

Great article, also reprtined in the Anderson Valley Advertiser of Boonville, CA. See comments on this piece at pieceofmind.wordpress.com/2006/10/06/al-gores-vision/

Northern hemisphere

The Little Ice Age brought bitterly cold winters to many parts of the world, but is most thoroughly documented in Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and depth, hence the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. The winter of 1794/95 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island's harbors to shipping.

The severe winters affected human life in ways large and small. The population of Iceland fell by half, but this was perhaps also due to fluorosis caused by the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783.[4] The Viking colonies in Greenland died out (in the 15th century) because they could no longer grow enough food there. In North America, American Indians formed leagues in response to food shortages.[5]

"In many years, snowfall was much heavier than recorded before or since, and the snow lay on the ground for many months longer than it does today."[6] Many springs and summers were outstandingly cold and wet, although there was great variability between years and groups of years. Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of death and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315-1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper). Viticulture entirely disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused massive flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent losses of large tracts of land from the Danish, German, and Dutch coasts.[6]

The extent of mountain glaciers had been mapped by the late 19th century. In both the north and the south temperate zones of our planet, snowlines (the boundaries separating zones of net accumulation from those of net ablation) were about 100 m lower than they were in 1975.[7] In Glacier National Park, the last episode of glacier advance came in the late 18th and early 19th century.[8] In Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, large temperature excursions during the Little Ice Age (~1400–1900 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (~800–1300 AD) possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.[9]

In Ethiopia and Mauritania[citation needed], permanent snow was reported on mountain peaks at levels where it does not occur today. Timbuktu, an important city on the trans-Saharan caravan route, was flooded at least 13 times by the Niger River; there are no records of similar flooding before or since. In China, warm weather crops, such as oranges, were abandoned in Jiangxi Province, where they had been grown for centuries. In North America, the early European settlers also reported exceptionally severe winters. For example, in 1607-1608 ice persisted on Lake Superior until June.[6]

Antonio Stradivari, the famous violin maker, produced his instruments during the LIA. It has been proposed that the colder climate caused the wood used in his violins to be denser than in warmer periods, contributing to the tone of Stradivari's instruments.[10]

The Little Ice Age by anthropology professor Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara, tells of the plight of European peasants during the 1300 to 1850 chill: famines, hypothermia, bread riots, and the rise of despotic leaders brutalizing an increasingly dispirited peasantry. In the late 17th century, writes Fagan, agriculture had dropped off so dramatically that "Alpine villagers lived on bread made from ground nutshells mixed with barley and oat flour." Finland lost perhaps a third of its population to starvation and disease.[11]

[edit] Depictions of winter in European painting
February, from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, ca.1410
February, from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, ca.1410

Burroughs (Weather, 1981) analyses the depiction of winter in paintings. He notes that this occurred almost entirely from 1565 to 1665, and was associated with the climatic decline from 1550 onwards. He claims (quite wrongly[12]) that before this there were almost no depictions of winter in art, and hypotheses that the unusually harsh winter of 1565 inspired great artists to depict highly original images, and the decline in such paintings was a combination of the "theme" having been fully explored, and mild winters interrupting the flow of painting.

The famous winter paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (e.g. Hunters in the Snow) all appear to have been painted in 1565. Snow also dominates many village-scapes by the Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who lived from 1564 to 1638. Burroughs states that Pieter Brueghel the Younger "slavishly copied his father's designs. The derivative nature of so much of this work makes it difficult to draw any definite conclusions about the influence of the winters between 1570 and 1600...".

Dutch painting of the theme appears to begin with Avercamp after the winter of 1608. There is then an interruption of the theme between 1627 and 1640, with a sudden return thereafter; this hints at a milder interlude in the 1630s. The 1640s to the 1660s cover the major period of Dutch winter painting, which fits with the known proportion of cold winters then. The final decline in winter painting, around 1660, does not coincide with an amelioration of the climate; Burroughs therefore cautions against trying to read too much into artistic output, since fashion plays a part. He notes that winter painting recurs around the 1780s and 1810s, which again marked a colder period.
The Reverend Robert WalkerSkating on Duddingston Loch attributed to Henry Raeburn, 1790's
The Reverend Robert Walker
Skating on Duddingston Loch attributed to Henry Raeburn, 1790's

Scottish painting and contemporary records demonstrate that curling and skating were formerly popular outdoor winter sports,[13] but it is now seldom possible to curl outdoors in Scotland due to unreliable conditions. The revival of interest in painting such scenes as Raeburn's Skating Minister may owe as much to the romantic movement, which favoured depictions of dramatic landscapes, as to any meaningful observation on climate.

[edit] Southern hemisphere

An ocean sediment core from the eastern Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula shows centennial events that the authors link to the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period.[14] The authors note "other unexplained climatic events comparable in duration and amplitude to the LIA and MWP events also appear." The LIA is easily distinguished in the Quelccaya Ice Cap (Peruvian Andes, South America).[15]

The Siple Dome (SD) has a climate event with an onset time that is coincident with that of the LIA in the North Atlantic based on a correlation with the GISP2 record. This event is the most dramatic climate event seen in the SD Holocene glaciochemical record.[16] The Siple Dome ice core also contained its highest rate of melt layers (up to 8%) between 1550 and 1700, most likely due to warm summers during the LIA.[17]

Law Dome ice cores show lower levels of CO2 mixing ratios during 1550-1800 AD, probably as a result of colder global climate.[18]

Sediment cores (Gebra-1 and Gebra-2) in Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula, have neoglacial indicators by diatom and sea-ice taxa variations during the period of the LIA.[19]

In 1836, snow fell in the city centre of Sydney, Australia, the only time since European settlement in 1788 that this has occurred.

Tropical Pacific coral records indicate the most frequent, intense El Niño-Southern Oscillation activity occurred in the mid-17th century, during the Little Ice Age.[20]

[edit] Climate patterns

In the North Atlantic, sediments accumulated since the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago show regular increases in the amount of coarse sediment grains deposited from icebergs melting in the now open ocean, indicating a series of 1-2°C (2-4°F) cooling events recurring every 1,500 years or so. The most recent of these cooling events was the Little Ice Age. These same cooling events are detected in sediments accumulating off Africa, but the cooling events appear to be larger, ranging between 3-8°C (6-14°F).[21]

[edit] Causes

Scientists have identified two causes of the Little Ice Age from outside the ocean/atmosphere/land systems: decreased solar activity and increased volcanic activity. Research is ongoing on more ambiguous influences such as internal variability of the climate system, and anthropogenic influence (Ruddiman). Ruddiman has speculated that depopulation of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East during the Black Death, with the resulting decrease in agricultural output and reforestation taking up more carbon from the atmosphere, may have prolonged the Little Ice Age. Ruddiman further speculates that massive depopulation in the Americas after the European contact in the early 1500s had similar effects. [22]

One of the difficulties in identifying the causes of the Little Ice Age is the lack of consensus on what constitutes "normal" climate. While some scholars regard the LIA as an unusual period caused by a combination of global and regional changes, other scientists see glaciation as the norm for Earth and the Medieval Warm Period (as well as the Holocene interglacial period) as the anomalies requiring explanation.[11]

Attribution of recent climate change is the effort to scientifically ascertain mechanisms responsible for relatively recent changes observed in the Earth's climate. The effort has focused on changes observed during the period of instrumental temperature record, when records are most reliable; particularly on the last 50 years, when human activity has grown fastest and observations of the upper atmosphere have become available. The dominant mechanisms to which recent climate change has been attributed all result from human activity. They are:[1]

* increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases
* global changes to land surface, such as deforestation
* increasing atmospheric concentrations of aerosols.

Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report have concluded that:

* "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."[2]
* "From new estimates of the combined anthropogenic forcing due to greenhouse gases, aerosols, and land surface changes, it is extremely likely that human activities have exerted a substantial net warming influence on climate since 1750."[1]
* "It is virtually certain that anthropogenic aerosols produce a net negative radiative forcing (cooling influence) with a greater magnitude in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere.[1]

The panel, which represents consensus in the scientific community, defines "very likely," "extremely likely," and "virtually certain" as indicating probabilities greater than 90%, 95%, and 99%, respectively.[1]