Detailed Comments on An Inconvenient Truth

Foreword by the blog moderator:

One of the things that often happens once your blog and effort is well known is that people start sending you things to look at and/or do. That’s the case here. There has been much discussion web-wide over AIT and potential inaccuracies in the presentation by Gore, but I have not taken on the subject here in any detail since I have my http://www.surfacestations.org/ USHCN weather station census requiring a good portion of my time. Nonetheless, when I was offered this review, it seemed to be quite comprehensive in scope, and done by a person who worked in aeronautic systems engineering, a very detail oriented job that combines many disciplines.  He had a thirty-three year career at Boeing, beginning as a software engineer in data reduction and flight simulation and retiring as the Chief Engineer of the Electronic Systems Division.

While AIT has been reviewed by many, I thought this review had some interesting points. Therefore, as a catalyst for discussion, here is Bob’s review of AIT with no editing nor commentary on my part.

UPDATE 10/5/07 A few commenters pointed out that there was a mistake that needed correcting. Mr. Edleman requested I repost his newly edited version that corrects a mistake in attribution of the institution Dr. Phil Jones is tenured at. Some additional format changes were made for readability by Mr. Edelman.

by Bob Edelman

October 3, 2007

My sister viewed Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and was disturbed enough to ask my opinion. In her words, “if the story is mostly true, we’d better stop the ideological wrangling and get busy salvaging what we can”. After some prodding I reluctantly rented the DVD and prepared the following comments in response. My conclusion is that the movie is mostly misleading and, yes, we’d better stop the ideological wrangling and consider the facts.

Comments on An Inconvenient Truth

Most of my comments pertain to the climatology science presented in the movie although I do include a discussion of charges made by NASA’s James Hansen that his scientific findings have been suppressed. I also discuss the issue of scientific consensus. I gave a pass to most of the trivial errors although I couldn’t help pointing out some that jumped out at me. Please forgive the nit-picking. A few words about the general circulation models (GCMs) used to predict climate change. Al Gore didn’t explicitly discuss the models that he used or the accuracy of his predictions so I don’t discuss them in my comments. Yet whenever he discusses future climate he necessarily is either guessing or relying on someone’s GCM. Given that no model has ever been validated I believe that the state-of-the-art still has a long way to go before climatologists can make predictions good enough to drive policy. One glaring hole in climate models is adequate modeling of precipitation systems. They are not modeled well because they are not understood. Yet precipitation systems are extremely important to moderating climate. A recently published study of tropical precipitation systems by Dr. Roy Spencer supports the existence of a strong negative feedback to temperature increases rather then the assumed positive feedback now modeled in GCMs. Once such systems are understood and modeled properly we may find why the earth’s climate is not as fragile as some would have us believe. After all, the earth once had an atmosphere consisting of mostly greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor) and nitrogen, yet life and the climate evolved. The following comments are organized in the same chronology as the film. I suggest that you view An Inconvenient Truth on DVD and follow along since it is difficult to insert Gore’s slides into my comments. The most significant comments are in bold.