Al Gore Is a Greenhouse Gasbag

Posted on February 2007   Page 4 of 7
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A few years ago, Giegengack told the Pennsylvania Gazette, the school's alumni magazine, that the environmental analysis course he's teaching today often attracts students who want to be environmental activists and carry picket signs outside the offices of the bad guys in the military-industrial complex. "But I want them to understand that these questions are enormously complex," he went on.

Yes, they are. I ask Gieg for a private tutorial based on the lectures he gives his students to make them consider the scientific complications of climate change. We sit one afternoon at a conference table near his office, his laptop open and the PowerPoint ready to go. Charts appear, one after another.

Giegengack may have a personal 50-year perspective on global warming, but the time range he prefers to consult is more on the geologists' scale. The Earth has been warming, he says, for about 20,000 years. We've only been collecting data on that trend for about 200 years. "For most of Earth history," he says, "the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has only rarely been cooler." Those cooler periods have meant things like two miles of ice piled over much of what is now North America. Nothing to be nostalgic for.

The professor hits a button on his computer, and the really long-term view appears — the past 650,000 years. In that time, the Earth's temperature has gone through regular cycles of rise and fall. The best explanation of those cycles was conceived by a Serbian amateur scientist named Milutin Milankovi´c. Very basically, Milankovi´c said this: The Earth's orbit around the sun is more or less circular, but when other planets align in certain ways and their gravitational forces tug at the Earth, the orbit stretches into a more elliptical shape. Combined with the tilt of the Earth on its axis as it spins, that greater or lesser distance from the sun, plus the consequent difference in solar radiation that reaches our planet, is responsible for long-term climate change.


NOW TO THE CRUX OF THE Al Gore argument — the idea that rising carbon dioxide levels are causing an increase in temperature.

To determine temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the distant past, scientists rely on what they call the "proxy record." There weren't thermometers. So researchers drill deep down into the Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean floor and pull up core samples, whose varying chemical elements let them gauge both the CO2 levels and the temperatures of the distant past.

Gieg clicks a button, and three charts come together. The peaks and valleys of the Milankovi´c cycles for planetary temperature align well with the ocean-floor estimates, and those match closely the records of carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature indications from ice cores. So, the professor maintains, these core samples from the polar ice and ocean floor help show that the Earth's temperature and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been in lockstep for tens of thousands of years.

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User Comments:

One comment, one correction
Posted by Doug | Oct. 24, 2007 at 5:16 PM
COMMENT:
Correction- Michael Crichton's book is skeptical of global warming, not for it. I met a man two years ago who has taught climatology at University of Virgina and now North Carolina. He is not connected with big oil or big anything. He says that there is absolutely no evidence of man's contribution to global warming. He says just follow the money to those making millions off this hoax. Good reporting. I would like to see an article detailing the incorrectness of each of Gore's points in The Inconvenient Truth for argumentative purposes with my left leaning sister and aunt.
Nonsense
Posted by Steve | Oct. 29, 2007 at 9:50 AM
COMMENT:
No scientist is making millions from Global Warming - follow the real money to the coal and oil companies. They ought to be paying a carbon tax for their pollution instead of funding skeptics. I'm no fan of Gore but the science in his film is accurate according to dozens of climate experts I've talked to.
"accurate science" endorsed by "dozens of climate experts"
Posted by Daniel | Nov. 2, 2007 at 10:17 AM
COMMENT:
I would like to see the names of twenty-four (two dozen) people who say they are climate experts and who also say that the "science" in An Inconvenient Truth is "accurate" without qualification. The "science" in that film consists ENTIRELY of two uncontested facts: (1) CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and (2) CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and global temperatures have fluctuated essentially in lockstep for at least the last 500,000 years. Ergo the changing CO2 concentrations cause the global temperature fluctuations. It is a simple application of the well-known logical truth, "post hoc, ergo propter hoc."
Global Warming
Posted by Walter | Nov. 8, 2007 at 11:54 PM
COMMENT:
Al Gore's film "An Inconvienient Truth" shows an enormous graph which statistically clearly shows temperature increasing first and then this is followed later by an increase in the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere. This proves that Al Gore is a fool and that an increase in C02 does not lead to any significant global warming. C02 at only 380 parts per million is much to small to cause any significant global warming.
air and climate
Posted by garrett | Jan. 8, 2008 at 1:36 PM
COMMENT:
i am doing a project on air and climate polution and i need to interveiw someone i was wondering if i could get anyone to give me their input on global warming air pollution and green house gases if anyone could get back to me at ggsteiger@aol.com
have any of you read the IPCC reports?
Posted by Alex | Feb. 4, 2008 at 10:55 AM
COMMENT:
first of all, "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is a logical *fallacy* not a logical truth. second of all, al gore is someone who is just bringing about awareness. he's not a scientist nor claims to be leading the research in climate change, so arguing against him is like shooting the messenger. if you're going to follow the lazy, money motivated psuedo-science of big oil cronies at least address the real challenges to it.
Okay
Posted by Fered | Feb. 26, 2008 at 6:07 PM
COMMENT:
yeah, burn!
kqiapcndms
Posted by Anonymous | Mar. 22, 2008 at 12:31 PM
COMMENT:
xinare | [url= click here ]wikexi[/url] | [link= click here ]nitepu[/link] | click here | penewu | [ click here huneci]
ushi
Posted by ushi | Mar. 11, 2009 at 5:31 PM
COMMENT:
Scientists aree supporting the government in propaganda about CO2. Whay is this being done, What for? Civil liberties were erroded by FEAR of terrorists, will the control freaks of the left be using this climate change to make people afraid adn give up thier freedoms. Never has it been known for centuries that a government has wielded dso much power over the populace as today in this uncivilised Western world. How can anyone respect scientists when they will not be truthful that ABORTION kills living humans. How can we believe governments and scientists when they plough public moneys into research on human embryos which has proved barren of positive help for humans saying stem cell research is necessary to find cures when they also neglect to fund the proven and fruitful areas of other stem cell research which are using adult stem cells and embryonis cord blood cells. Scientists and governments are corrupters of truth.
If CO2 is the problem, than it's Game OVER.....
Posted by Max | Apr. 29, 2009 at 5:29 PM
COMMENT:
I agree with Professor Giegengack, if you truly believe CO2 is the problem and that cutting Fossil Fuels emissions (Coal Power Plants!) by half in the U.S. before 2029-2050, how does that address what China AND India combined will increasingly add in the next 10 years? 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley ran a piece on the subject of Coal, and he interviewed the CEO of Duke Energy, reporting that "Clean Coal" has a solution but its cost prohibitive and Duke Energy has a "transition plan" to take place over the next 50 years to clean up coal. Then you have Global Warming experts claiming that 50 years is too late! CO2 is simply NOT enough of a challenge for our planet not to be able to handle through its own planetary natural scrubbing already in place and proven by thousands of years of science data!
 
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