Did Al get the science right?

The usual oil industry flacks and dogmatic skeptics have surfaced to denounce Al Gore's global warming movie. But climate scientists say that, basically, he got it right.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Al Gore, Politics, News, Global Warming, Katharine Mieszkowski

Competitive Enterprise Institute

A still from "Al Gore: An Inconvenient Story"

June 10, 2006 | To the tune of the Allman Brothers Band's "Ramblin Man," Al Gore's face rides a cartoon airplane across a map of the United States. As he zips from coast to coast in a Web video clip titled "Al Gore: An Inconvenient Story," a ticker at the bottom of the screen displays his rapidly rising CO2 emissions next to the comparatively modest emissions of everyday folk. The climate-change Paul Revere's steed is an airplane, powered by fossil fuels. The implication: Gore's sure spewing a lot of carbon dioxide as he travels the land spreading the word about global warming.

Produced by the industry flacks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funded in part by Exxon-Mobil, the clip dismisses Gore as a hypocrite, leading a carbon-intensive lifestyle while scolding us plebes that we should strive to reduce our own carbon footprints. Of course, nowhere does this oil-industry-funded propaganda mention that Gore used carbon offsets to mitigate the global warming impact of his travel for "An Inconvenient Truth," that Gore pledged to make the documentary carbon-neutral.

The Web clip is just one bit of the skeptic zaniness that has greeted the release of Gore's film. On Fox News, another Exxon-Mobil-funded pundit, Sterling Burnett, compared watching "An Inconvenient Truth" to learn about global warming to watching Joseph Goebbels' Nazi propaganda to learn about Nazi Germany. Over at the New York Post, a reviewer baldly asserted that "there is widespread disagreement about whether humans are causing global warming," a false statement that even oilman-in-chief President Bush doesn't accept anymore. Meanwhile, the College Republican National Committee encouraged skeptical students to throw global warming beach parties. Global warming? Break out the bikinis!

Ideological blowback or no, "An Inconvenient Truth" is drowning plenty of competition at the box office. Last weekend, playing at only 77 theaters around the country, it was the ninth most popular film, and took in more money per screen than any other film showing, with many screenings in liberal cities like San Francisco and Boston sold out. The film opens more widely this weekend.

Yet global warming skeptics continue to infiltrate media outlets as mainstream and reputable as PBS'"The NewsHour" with Jim Lehrer, which failed to acknowledge the industry ties of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, while giving the group a free pass to call Gore's film "alarmist." One of the most widely read critiques of the science in the film has come from longtime climate-change skeptic Robert C. Balling Jr., a professor of climatology at Arizona State University, who has received more than $400,000 from the coal and oil industries, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. On the industry-backed Web site Tech Central Station, Balling posted a purported fact-check of the film titled "Inconvenient Truths Indeed," which charges that the movie is "not the most accurate depiction of the state of global warming science," casting doubts on its claims about melting glaciers and intensifying hurricanes. The article has made the rounds of the right-wing blogosphere as a takedown of Gore, and the Philadelphia Daily News published it as an Op-Ed without any acknowledgement of Balling's well-documented ties to industry.

Balling's critique inspired this dismissive reaction from one climate scientist: "Some people believe the earth is flat, too." That's Eric Steig, an isotope geochemist at the University of Washington, who is one of the co-founders of the Real Climate Web site, where working climate scientists provide commentary and context about the news in their now-hot field. Steig e-mailed his reaction from Greenland, where he's conducting field research on the ice. He'd posted his own largely favorable review of "An Inconvenient Truth" on the Real Climate site before he left.

Judd Legum, research director at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, has rebutted each of Balling's claims on the Think Progress Web site. For instance, some of the most dramatic images in the film show the rapid retreat of glaciers all over the world, including the melting snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Balling contends the snowpack retreat on Kilimanjaro is caused by declining atmospheric moisture, which has been going on for more than 100 years, not global warming. Legum counters that scientists have shown that the Kilimanjaro glacier previously survived a 300-year drought and its retreat cannot be fully accounted for by changes in atmospheric moisture, especially the shrinking that has occurred in recent decades. Besides, focusing on that one example overshadows the larger point that glaciers all over the world are disappearing.

Steig confirmed the facts in Legum's rebuttal. "All those points are accurate," he wrote in an e-mail. "Some of them could probably have been stronger; that is, Balling is even more wrong that Legum indicates."

Next page: Scientists admire the film but have a few bones to pick with it