Via Guns, Germs, & Steeled, I just noticed that Steven Hawyard of the American Enterprise Instiute and Pacific Research Institute has released a rather tacky parody movie of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I just watched it; you can do so here.
In general, Hayward is trying to position himself as a moderate, someone who accepts some human caused global warming but who isn't an alarmist like Al Gore and those wacky environmentalists. There's just one problem with this stance: Hayward was aiming straight at the scientific consensus as recently as two years ago:
What do we actually know? The earth's temperature has risen about 1 degree Celsius over the last 100 years. That's where the agreement ends and the arguments begin....Some of the increase may be man-made, but much of it may be a natural warming trend stemming from the "little ice age" between the 14th and 19th centuries. Some scientists believe the warming may have more to do with deforestation and other land-use trends than greenhouse gases. There is no consensus on this point.
The reference is Steven F. Hayward, "Cooled Down - The global-warming hype is running out of (greenhouse?) gas, as it very much deserves," National Review, January 31, 2005.
Now, like so many other "skeptics", Hayward has supposedly shifted towards accepting the central global warming consensus. But he's still opportunistically fighting over the science around the margins: Is Antarctica warming or cooling? How much sea level rise are we going to get? Do the models get clouds right?
In short, he has repositioned politically but is still engaging in the same basic tactic--constantly trigger the "scientific uncertainty" frame. Pick, pick, and pick at the information. It's the same, tired game.
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For an interesting take on Hayward, see this article Dave Roberts and I wrote about him at grist.
I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, but I understand it does contain some scenarios that are well out of the scientific consensus on AGW. If it does, surely it should be criticized for that.
So who is going to criticize it? I haven't seen the scientific mainstream do so. I think that's very short-sighted; getting a popular consensus on AGW will be hurt, not helped, by crying wolf. True deniers can point at Gore's inconsistencies and his exaggerations and use them to discredit the entire body of work behind AGW. So if Hayward and people like him don't criticize exaggerations, who will?
Just today on scienceblogs there is a post claiming that experimental results support a plausible scenario for complete summer melting of the Arctic by 2020. The blogger's argument is that if you increase the rate of ice loss by a factor of 5 from its currently measured rate, starting tomorrow, all the ice will melt by 2020. No other scienceblogger has called him on it.
Gerard, you're probably referring to Stoat. No one has called him on it because a) he's an experienced sea ice modeler working for the British Antarctic Survey, i.e. is a scientist well-qualified to comment on this aspect of the science, b) he's referring to new research published by some other very well-qualified sea ice experts, and c) as Frank Zappa famously observed, weasels may rip your flesh.
Regarding AIT, while not perfect it has been very well-received in the scientific community. See e.g. the Real Climate commentary here and here, and Jim Hansen's review here. From the latter:
"The story is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable to the public, a public that is less and less drawn to science."
"By telling the story of climate change with striking clarity in both his book and movie, Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides. He will be attacked, but the public will have the information needed to distinguish our long-term well-being from short-term special interests."
The one saving grace of right wingers is that they have no talent for or comprehension of how to make a film. Of any sort. There were a bunch of anti-Michael Moore films made that nobody wanted to watch. Casey Luskin made his little unwatchable amateur video attacking my film. And this piece of tedium falls into the same class. If they ever figure out how to make a proper film they could actually be dangerous. But that's about as probable as a banana republic making an atomic bomb.
Although actually, I have to admit the cartoon of all the penguins snoring as Gore gives his lecture was pretty damn funny and effective. They did show a spark of life with that one.
Gerard, you're probably referring to Stoat.
No, actually, I'm not. Stoat covered the recent report totally without spin. I have no reason to doubt the recent Arctic Sea Ice data, and I'm assuming until I hear otherwise it's fine. The data seem to run pretty close to the most extreme fringe of the currently accepted models (i.e. those that predict the most rapid melting). Those models predict near-total summer Arctic sea ice disappearance around 2050 or a little later. And in fact, if you do a linear or quadratic fit to the experimental data (and the data do look pretty darn linear), you get near-total melting around 2050. IMO, this is a reasonable convergence of experiment and modelling, and a sign that we ought to consider that the more extreme models need to be given a little more weight.
That's plenty serious. First of all, given the sheer inertia built into both atmospheric CO2 and politics, it may well mean summer Arctic sea ice is in fact doomed. We don't have very long to do anything, and whatever we do now may not be enough to save the Arctic. People need to get up and say - these aren't models! These are hard data! The data are on a darn good straight line, and the straight line intersects the axis before the end of this century, and at that point the Arctic is free of sea ice in the summer, and that's a heck of a problem. Not as big of a problem as the ice caps melting, but a very significant shot across the bows.
Now why would you want to dilute that message by fudging the results to make them look more serious?
Gerard, maybe you need to be more clear about what you think the paper did wrong. I don't where that factor of five comes from, but I think it's pretty clear that all the authors did was project a worst case based on recent observed trends. Obviously the major assumption is that the accelerated rates of loss seen in the last five to ten years will continue to accelerate. Note that the first person (that I'm aware of, anyway) to have discussed the potential of such a rapid collapse was Wieslaw Maslowski (not a co-author of this paper) starting maybe two years ago. Maslowski is the U.S. Navy's sea ice expert.
The May 2006 version of Maslowski's presentation can be found here .
His prediction, such as it is, is 'if this trend persists for another 10 years (and it has through 2005) the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer. ' The trend he refers to is a 1997 - 2002 trend. Due to the 'if', I don't know whether the quoted text is best viewed as a prediction, or as a hypothetical intended to highlight the potential seriousness of the trend. The point that the volume of Arctic sea ice is strongly influenced by the influx of relatively warm water from the Atlantic is perhaps more interesting than the simple extension of the 1997 - 2002 trend line.