The Island of Doubt

I really didn't set out to keep writing about Al Gore. I mean, he's a good guy, and all. But there are more important things to worry about in the battle between science and superstition. Nevertheless the most active post on the ScienceBlogs at the moment is one in which PZ Myers decries Gore's alleged belief in creationism and suggests that this is undermining the famous climate change slide show. In reality, Gore is not a creationist and PZ seems to have swallowed an apocryphal report to the contrary.

I'm one of Gore's army of 1,000 slide show presenters. I've shown the offending slide, in which the phrase "Rise of Humans" on a graph of human population growth (near the vertex at 160,000 years ago) fades out to be replaced by "Adam and Eve." As anyone who's attended one of my presentations, and likely any of the other 6,000 similar events across the country and abroad would know, this is simply a joke.

During our training, Gore explicitly suggested the device will provide some needed humor in what is mostly a rather dark presentation. And he was right. It does exactly that.

A lesson on the need to adapt (or, "frame," if you will) the slide show for specific audiences was also included in the training. Indeed, I sat at a table with a women whose intention it was to give the show exclusively to church audiences. Good luck with that, I said. But nowhere does or did Gore suggest that the science should be ignored to suit those who won't accept the real time scales involved. The ice-core data go back 650,000 years, according to the presentation, and there's no easy way around what is a crucial part of the scientific back story.

Besides, the old mitochondrial Eve theory (problematic at best, I know) would trace the progenitor female of Homo sapiens to a location in Africa some 200,000 years ago, so I suppose you could even put the joking reference to Adam and Eve in a scientific context. I don't, (again, mitochrondial Eve is a bit on the dodgy side) but you could.

Now, like PZ, I have little patience for religiosity and it would nice if Gore didn't feel compelled to admit to his faith in public as often as he does. Of course, he's from Tennessee, and he knows he audiences, so I give him a bit of slack. I was also troubled at the training session's reception, at which Gore referred to us trainees, in what could be charitably described as a Freudian slip, as his "calvary" instead of "cavalry," not once but twice. But hey, maybe he had a long day. Yeah, that was it, now that I think about it.... he had been traveling...

Anyway, it's a joke. Yes, Gore is a man of faith, one who believes that everything was set in motion by a god figure. And no, he does not hide it. But he's not a creationist. He knows how old the Earth is.

If anyone else has any questions about Gore's presentation, and can't get an answer from the man himself, please feel free to ask me: jamesh (at) cyamid (dot) net.