An Inconvenient Truth

Daniel went to see An Inconvenient Truth with some folks; I had a comment that I thought I'd reproduce here for my audience.

Yeah, I saw it last week and really liked it; I was considering blogging about it, but didn't work up the energy for it.

As you said, it doesn't present too much new information for those of us who have been following global climate change for a while. But two exceptions to that, for me:

I had an "oh duh" moment when he pointed out that the melting of the Arctic ice cap has no effect on sea level (i.e., floating ice cubes, displaced water weight=weight of ice), but that Greenland and Antarctica melting would cause sea level rise.

However, an important effect of the Arctic ice cap melting is that solar reflectivity goes from 90% (ice) to 10% (water)--it's basically a perfect positive feedback loop. Scary.

I thought that using a full 20 foot (6 m) sea level rise was a bit of an extreme demonstration, but it did basically get the point across. In case any of you haven't seen it, I have a link on my blog to an interactive web page that lets you map the effect of 1, 2, or 3 m sea level rise.

The second surprise was the whole "scientific consensus" issue, which he summarizes by noting that out of 985 peer-reviewed scientific papers, none disagreed with the idea that anthropogenic climate change is going on (I think that was the wording, basically). In contrast, in popular news/scientific writing, 53% of the articles have some disagreement with that. Day-umn. They had a great quote from the smoking industry as an analogy--that confusion about the science works to their advantage.

[Edit: Beemer--can you vouch for the accuracy of this point? Or are there nuances that were not presented? I would have guessed that there are 2-3% papers written by shills for the fossil fuel industry that would have gotten published.]