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hink back to that time when you were a small child, when night would fall, and unfounded fears would creep forward from the corners and recesses of your still-overactive imagination.  As you tried and tried to fall asleep – all too often an exercise in futility – you would glimpse monsters and bogeymen in the shadows, unseen to all others.  So you would lie there, afraid to peer out beyond the covers over your eyes, but more afraid to suffer the consequences of not looking, and the angst would build deep within you.

            This is no doubt a recognizable scenario to many, especially to those, like myself, who were children not so long ago.  But it recently came to my attention that today’s youth are haunted at night by a new monster that lurks in the shadows – global warming. According to GMTV (which is, to my understanding, a British equivalent of morning programs like NBC’s Today), a February survey of more than 1,000 children aged 7 to 11 revealed that half of those children were “anxious” about global warming, and that global warming worries even caused them to sleep less at night.  What’s more, the children experiencing such anxiety were convinced that the planet’s current warming trend is anthropogenic – that is to say, created by humans – and fingered their parents and politicians as the main culprits.

            I’ve no idea of the accuracy or scientific/sociological merit of this study, but it was nonetheless of interest to me because I consider myself something of an environmental skeptic.  Admitting this in today’s political climate is usually an expedient way to get people to stop listening to you, so allow me to qualify my skepticism.

            The earth, as indicated by no less reputable a source than NASA, is currently experiencing a warming trend, and many have rushed to declare that this warming is the result of increased human output of carbon dioxide (or CO₂), mainly through industrial activity.  While I am no physical scientist, I have dabbled enough in the social sciences to know that scientific results can be skewed if some variables are ignored; and for me, the tendency to focus only on CO₂ when discussing climate change simply ignores too many variables – solar activity, non-CO₂ greenhouse gasses, surface temperatures, and cloud formation, among others.  Additionally, increased human CO₂ output fails to explain pre-industrial periods of warming, nor can it account for the current warming trend that is reported to be occurring on Mars (unless, of course, the various NASA rovers that have been sent there were produced by Hummer).  Perhaps, then, I should rebrand my skepticism as a kind of undying curiosity – a stubborn unwillingness to accept a single answer when asking a complex question.

            With this in mind, I remembered the children.  If there are so many unanswered questions regarding earth’s climate, so much we don’t know, how is it that a great many contemporary youth could be haunted at night by fears of a coming climate crisis?  For that matter, why do so many adults fear the very same bogeyman?

            A possible answer to this weighty question might be found within the media.  While predictions of dire consequences brought on by anthropogenic climate change have been present in the news media for some time – and why shouldn’t they be, given the kinds of ratings disaster stories bring in? – the media landscape might have recently become even more favorable towards focusing exclusively on CO₂ as the cause of global warming.  The vehicle for this potential intensification of current media behavior is An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore’s film that warns of the dangers of future climate change, and blames the current warming trend on increased human CO₂ emissions.

            From its release, An Inconvenient Truth seemed to draw rave reviews almost universally.  Rotten Tomatoes, a popular website that compiles a wide variety of movie reviews, rates it in the low to mid 90s – an “A” by most standards.  As inconceivable as it may seem, given that the film is essentially a videotaped slideshow presentation (and I’ve sat through enough PowerPoint presentations to know that it is hardly the most captivating format), Gore’s picture was a critical darling.

            In February, An Inconvenient Truth won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.  Although I was aware that Gore’s central message was one that was at odds with my own opinions about global warming, since it focused on one climate variable at the expense of many others, I decided to give the movie a rent all the same to see what the hype was all about.  On a cold day in March, I drove to the video rental outlet in a snowstorm (irony of ironies), and watched the film later that evening.

            For the most part, I can easily see why An Inconvenient Truth was the recipient of so much critical praise.  Much of Gore’s presentation focuses on what he claims will be the disastrous effects of warmer temperatures.  He asserts that warmer oceans will result in stronger hurricanes (thereby, retroactively blaming global warming for Hurricane Katrina).  Simulations are shown that feature New York, Miami, and San Francisco flooding due to raised seas levels.  Finally, and perhaps most emotionally resonant of all, he presents an animation of a polar bear struggling in vain to find a piece of ice to sit upon, presumably because global warming has melted away its existing icy home.  Just as the news media chases ratings by appealing to viewers’ tastes for disaster stories, Gore has given movie audiences a similar story of catastrophe and doom.  These appeals to the audience’s fears and emotions are no doubt what allowed An Inconvenient Truth to resonate so effectively in the hearts and minds of most, and what secured it the Oscar.

            But Gore is selling not just a story, but one that he says is grounded in fact.  I do not profess to say whether or not An Inconvenient Truth’s dire predications for the future will come to pass, for I am no soothsayer or necromancer.  An indication of the accuracy of Gore’s claims, however, might be found in a March 13^th New York Times article.  The article states that a number of scientists view Gore’s central arguments as “exaggerated and erroneous.”  Given the Times’ reputation as a publication that leans left, this complaint against Gore’s inconvenient mistruths stands out from those that consistently emanate from capitalists, industrialists, and other such groups on the economic right.

            The alleged outcomes of global warming put forth by Gore, then, are both captivating to audiences and potentially inaccurate and hyperbolical.  But what of his assertions regarding the causes of global warming?  He addresses this early on in the film, and limits his explanation for the most part to a single key phrase: “When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.”   This phrase is accompanied by a graph that certainly shows some sort of relationship between atmospheric CO₂ levels and temperature, and Gore deems the CO₂/temperature relationship “very complicated,” but the actual relationship is apparently not the one he preaches.  According to The Great Global Warming Swindle, a British television program that claims the current warming trend on earth is caused mainly by increased solar activity and a resulting loss of cloud cover, increases and decreases in atmospheric CO₂ levels follow increases and decreases in temperature by several centuries.  I am by no means a climate scientist, but I do know that causes are generally supposed to precede effects and not vice versa.  Thus, the widely held belief that current global warming is caused or otherwise brought on by an increase in human CO₂ output would appear to be an empirically unfounded one.

            So, if An Inconvenient Truth is a presentation of exaggerated outcomes, as the New York Times asserts, and if it, as The Great Global Warming Swindle claims, has misunderstood the very CO₂/temperature relationship by which it blames humans for global warming, then what positive social purpose could it possibly serve?  I answer this by referring to my earlier definition of my skepticism as an unwillingness to accept easy or oversimplified answers in the face of difficult questions.  An Inconvenient Truth can teach us through its omission.  It can remind us that in any important debate, there are a thousand little inconvenient truths – dissenting voices, alternative theories, conflicting variables – and if those truths are ignored, the end result, however emotionally gripping or well produced, may be overstated and erroneous.

            If we are to ever truly understand our climate, we must all become a little bit skeptical.  By this I do not mean that we should always ignore conventional wisdom, but rather that we should never ignore its opposite.  We must be undyingly curious.  We must never stop asking questions, and we must never stop trying to prove and disprove.  This, in the end, is the real path to Truth.  So to the children lying awake at night, paralyzed by fear, I say this: There is no monster waiting in the shadows, there are only questions waiting to be answered and problems waiting to be solved.     ~