35 Inconvenient Truths

According to climatecrisis.com,

An Inconvenient Truth is a passionate and inspirational look at former Vice President Al Gore's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. In this intimate portrait of Gore and his "travelling global warming show," Gore comes across as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and intent on alerting citizens to this "planetary emergency" before it's too late.

What what about the myths and misconceptions surrounding An Inconvenient Truth itself? In October 2007 the High Court in London had identified nine “errors” Twenty-six additional errors were later found.

Error 1: Sea level "rising 6 m"

... The IPCC says sea-level increases up to 7 m (23 ft) above today’s levels have happened naturally in the past climate, and would only be likely to happen again after several millennia. In the next 100 years, according to calculations based on figures in the IPCC’s 2007 report, these two ice sheets between them will add a little over 6 cm (2.5 inches) to sea level, not 6 m ...

ERROR 2 Pacific islands "drowning"

...dynamiting of reefs or over-extraction of fresh water by local populations has caused damage...There have been no mass evacuations of populations of islanders as suggested by Gore, though some residents of Tuvalu have asked to be moved to New Zealand, even though the tide-gauges maintained until recently by the National Tidal Facility of Australia show a mean annual sea-level rise over the past half-century equivalent to the thickness of a human hair.

ERROR 3 Thermohaline circulation "stopping"

Gore says “global warming” may shut down the thermohaline circulation in the oceans, which he calls the “ocean conveyor,” plunging Europe into an ice age. It will not. A paper published in 2006 says: “Analyses of ocean observations and model simulations suggest that changes in the thermohaline circulation during the last century are likely the result of natural multidecadal climate variability. Indications of a sustained thermohaline circulation weakening are not seen during the last few decades. Instead, a strengthening since the 1980s is observed.”

ERROR 4 CO2 "driving temperature"

Gore says that in each of the last four interglacial warm periods it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that caused changes in temperature. It was the other way about. Changes in temperature preceded changes in CO2 concentration by between 800 and 2800 years, as scientific papers including the paper on which Gore’s film had relied had made clear.

ERROR 5 Snows of Kilimanjaro "melting"

The melting of the Furtwangler Glacier at the summit of the mountain began 125 years ago... Temperature at the summit never rises above freezing and is at an average of –7 Celsius. The cause of the melting is long-term climate shifts exacerbated by imprudent regional deforestation, and has nothing to do with “global warming.”

ERROR 6 Lake Chad "drying up"

Over-extraction of water and changing agricultural patterns dried the lake, which was also dry in 8500BC, 5500BC, 1000BC and 100BC.

ERROR 7 Hurricane Katrina "man made"

[Hurricane Katrina] was caused by the failure of Gore’s party, in the administration of New Orleans, to heed 30 years of warnings by the Corps of Engineers that the levees – dams that kept New Orleans dry – could not stand a direct hit by a hurricane. Katrina was only Category 3 when it struck the levees. They failed, as the Engineers had said they would.

ERROR 8 Polar bear "dying"

A report for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that polar bears, which are warm-blooded, have grown in numbers where temperature has increased, and have become fewer where temperature has fallen. Polar bears evolved from brown bears 200,000 years ago, and survived the last interglacial period, when global temperature was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present and there was probably no Arctic ice-cap at all. The real threat to polar bears is not “global warming” but hunting.

ERROR 9 Coral reefs "bleaching"

There was some bleaching in 1998, but this was caused by the exceptional El Nino Southern Oscillation that year. Two similarly severe El Ninos over the past 250 years also caused extensive bleaching. “Global warming” was nothing to do with it.

ERROR 10 100 ppmv of CO2 "melting mile-thick ice"

Gore is accordingly implying that 100 ppmv can cause a temperature increase of up to 12 degrees C. However, the consensus as expressed by the IPCC is that 100 ppmv of increased CO2 concentration, from 180 to 280 ppmv, would increase radiant energy flux in the atmosphere by 2.33 watts per square meter, or less than 1.2 degrees Celsius including the effect of temperature feedbacks.

ERROR 11 Hurricane Caterina "manmade"

Gore says that Hurricane Caterina, the only hurricane ever to strike the coast of Brazil, was caused by “global warming.” It was not. In 2004, Brazil’s summer sea surface temperatures were cooler than normal, not warmer. But air temperatures were the coldest in 25 years. The air was so much colder than the water that it caused a heat flux from the water to the air similar to that which fuels hurricanes in warm seas.

ERROR 12 Japanese typhoons "a new record"

Gore says that 2004 set a new record for the number of typhoons striking Japan. It did not. The trend in the number of typhoons, and of tropical cyclones, has fallen throughout the past 50 years. The trend in rainfall from cyclones has also fallen, and there has been no trend in monsoon rainfall.

ERROR 13 Hurricanes "getting stronger"

Over the past 60 years there has been no change in the strength of hurricanes, even though hydrocarbon use went up six-fold in the same period.

ERROR 14 Big storm insurances losses "increasing"

Insured losses, as a percentage of the population of coastal areas in the path of hurricanes, were lower even in 2005 than they had been in 1925.

ERROR 15 Mumbai "flooding"

Rainfall trends at the two major weather stations in Mumbai show no increase in heavy rainfall over the past 48 years.

ERROR 16 Severe tornadoes "more frequent"

More tornadoes are being reported because detection systems are better than they were. But the number of severe tornadoes has been falling for more than 50 years.

ERROR 17 The sun "heats the Arctic ocean"

t is the atmosphere, not the Sun that warms the ocean. Also, Gore’s diagram confuses the tropopause with the ionosphere, and he makes a number of other errors indicating that he does not understand the elementary physics of radiative transfer.

ERROR 18 Arctic "warming fastest"

While it is in general true that during periods of warming (whether natural or anthropogenic) the Arctic will warm faster than other regions, Gore does not mention that the Arctic has been cooling over the past 60 years, and is now one degree Celsius cooler than it was in the 1940s.

ERROR 19 Greenland ice sheet "unstable"

Greenland ice grows 2in a year. The Greenland ice sheet survived each of the previous three interglacial periods, each of which was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present. It survived atmospheric CO2 concentrations of up to 1000 ppmv (compared with today’s 400 ppmv). It last melted 850,000 years ago, when humankind did not exist and could not have caused the melting...

ERROR 20 Himalayan glacial melt waters "failing"

The water comes almost entirely from snow-melt, not from ice-melt. Over the past 40 years there has been no decline in the amount of snow-melt in Eurasia.

ERROR 21 Peruvian glaciers "disappearing"

Except for the very highest peaks, the normal state of the Peruvian cordilleras has been ice-free throughout most of the past 10,000 years.

ERROR 22 Mountain glaciers worldwide "disappearing"

...The glacial melt began in the 1820s, long before humankind could have had any effect, and has continued at a uniform rate since, showing no acceleration since humankind began increasing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. Total ice volumes in three of the last four Ice Ages were lower than they are today, and “global warming” had nothing to do with that.

ERROR 23 Sahara desert "drying"

There is no drought caused by “global warming.” In 2007 there were record rains across the whole of the southern Sahara. In the past 25 years the Sahara has shrunk by some 300,000 square kilometers because of additional rainfall...

ERROR 24 West Antarctic ice sheet "unstable"

...Most of the recession in this ice sheet over the past 10,000 years has occurred in the absence of any sea-level or temperature forcing. In most of Antarctica, the ice is in fact growing thicker. Mean Antarctic temperature has actually fallen throughout the past half-century.

ERROR 25 Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves "breaking up"

Global warming is unlikely to have been the cause. Gore does not explain that the ice shelves have melted before, as studies of seabed sediments have shown. The Antarctic Peninsula accounts for about 2% of the continent, in most of which the ice is growing thicker. All the recently-melted shelves, added together, amount to an area less than one-fifty-fifth the size of Texas.

ERROR 26 Larsen B Ice Shelf "broke up because of 'global warming'"

There has been extensive ice-shelf break-up throughout the past 10,000 years, and the maximum ice-shelf extent may have been in the Little Ice Age in the late 15th century.

ERROR 27 Mosquitoes "climbing to higher altitudes"

Most recent outbreaks have been at lower levels than those of a century and more ago.

ERROR 28 Many tropical diseases "spread through 'global warming'"

Of the diseases named by Gore either in his film or in the accompanying book, not one is sensitive to increasing temperature. They are spread not by warmer weather but by rats, chickens, primates, pigs, poor hygiene, ill-maintained air conditioning, or cold weather.

ERROR 29 West Nile virus in the US "spread through 'global warming'"

West Nile virus flourishes in any climate. Warming of the climate, however caused, does not affect its incidence or prevalence.

ERROR 30 Carbon dioxide is "pollution"

It is not. It is food for plants and trees. Tests have shown that even at concentrations 30 times those of the present day even the most delicate plants flourish. Well-managed forests, such as those of the United States, are growing at record rates because the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is feeding the trees. Carbon dioxide, in geological timescale, is at a very low concentration at present. Half a billion years ago it was at 7000 parts per million by volume, about 18 times today’s concentration.

ERROR 31 The European heat wave of 2003 "killed 35,000"

...extreme cold anomalies also occur regularly; El Niño and volcanism appear to be of much greater importance than any general warming trend; and there is little evidence that regional heat or cold waves are significantly increasing or decreasing with time.

ERROR 32 Pied flycatchers "cannot feed their young"

...adaptation is easy for the flycatchers: they merely fly a few tens of kilometers further north and they will find caterpillars hatching at the appropriate time. Besides, though Gore does not say so, what is bad news for the pied flycatchers is good news for the caterpillars, and for the butterflies they will become.

ERROR 33 Gore's bogus pictures and film footage

Gore similarly misuses spectacular footage of a glacier apparently calving off enormous slabs of ice into the sea – footage that is often shown on television to accompany stories about “global warming.” However, the glacier in question is one that is known to be advancing – and to be doing so more rapidly and more often than previously...not because of “global warming” because of the regional cooling of the southern Atlantic.

ERROR 34 The Thames Barrier "closing more frequently"

The barrier is indeed closed more frequently than when it was built, but the reason has nothing to do with “global warming” or rising sea levels. The reason is a change of policy by which the barrier is closed during exceptionally low tides, so as to retain water in the tidal Thames rather than keeping it out.

ERROR 35 "No fact...in dispute by anybody."

Gore says that his prediction that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will rise to more than 600 parts per million by volume as soon as 2050 is “not controversial in any way or in dispute by anybody.” However, not one of the half-dozen official projections of growth in CO2 concentration made by the IPCC shows as much as 600 parts per million by 2050.

It is clear that Al Gore is just trying to incite unnecessary fear and panic in people as a way to make big money and to give the liberals just one more reason to make policies that will tax and burden hard-working citizens!

Click here for more information about Al Gore's errors.