Al Gore Is a Greenhouse Gasbag

Of course, that was long before anybody was burning fossil fuels. So Giegengack tells his students they might want to consider that "natural" climatic temperature cycles control carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around. That's the crux of his argument with Gore's view of global warming — he says carbon dioxide doesn't control global temperature, and certainly not in a direct, linear way.

Gieg has lots more slides to show. He points out that within his lifetime, there was a three-decade period of unusually low temperatures that culminated in the popular consciousness with the awful winter of 1976-77. Back then, scientists started sounding the alarm about a new ice age.

Of course, it's long been thought that the world would end either in fire or in ice. These days, the scientists are shouting fire. And in all his years around environmental issues, Giegengack has never heard so much shouting. "I don't think we're going to have a rational discussion of this question in the present environment," he says. "The scientists are mad because they think nobody in Washington is listening to them. So it's all either apocalyptic disaster or conflict of interest. If you suggest that we're not going to hell in a handbasket because the rate of global warming is low compared to so many other environmental issues that we're enduring, then you're accused of being in the employ of the oil companies and you're labeled a Republican."

Giegengack says things started to get this way around 1988. There was a horrifically hot summer season that year, and drought led to seemingly apocalyptic fires in Yellowstone National Park. Something in those fires was galvanizing. Al Gore, who made his first run for president in 1988, published his first environmental jeremiad, Earth in the Balance, a few years later. Around the same time, the newly formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was making noise, and governments met first in Rio de Janeiro and then in Japan to forge agreements on "targets" for carbon emission cutbacks. The resulting Kyoto Protocol has been ratified by most of the countries on Earth — none of which are doing very well at actually meeting the target cutbacks — but very notably not by the United States.


"WOW," SAYS GIEG AS Al Gore struts onto the stage of The Oprah Winfrey Show. "He looks like he's had Botox or something."

It's afternoon in America, and Oprah is offering her millions of viewers a class with Dr. Gore that the producers are calling Global Warming 101. I've asked Gieg to watch it with me.

The show turns out to be pretty much a synopsis of An Inconvenient Truth, with Gore clicking through his hyper-produced PowerPoint program and Oprah exclaiming "Wow! Wow!" with dramatic concern. To dramatize the melting of the floating ice cap at the North Pole, Gore has inserted an animated clip of a polar bear swimming desperately to a tiny ice floe that isn't strong enough to hold him. Global warming is drowning helpless bears. Oprah thinks it's the coolest and saddest thing in Gore's whole movie. Gieg starts shouting:

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