On March 21, 2007 former Vice-President Al Gore was invited to speak to a joint meeting of the United States House and Senate about global warming. Gore had recently won an Oscar in Hollywood for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary is not entirely truthful, downplays large uncertainties, lacks historical climate context (its always changing), and is loaded with half-truths, which is troubling to many scientist. Given that it is being portrayed as the last word in climatology to the youth of the world, it also has long-range ominous impacts if the public is so badly misled.

International energy policies based upon erroneous climatology could lead to economic and social disasters based upon the resulting energy shortages, especially  of fossil fuels. Climatology is not an exact science, and we still don’t completely grasp how the climate works, or fully understand the impacts of aerosols, clouds, land use variations, the oceans, the sun, etc. It is scientifically dishonest to suggest we know more than we really do.

In fact, the whole process of simply measuring global temperatures does not inspire confidence. Instruments are changed and moved constantly.  Vast parts of the oceans are unmeasured, so there is a bias toward temperature data collected on land, specifically to stations in the developed world. Many measuring stations are sited in urban settings, where the urban heat island effects bias the temperature data upward. Furthermore, most stations are sited in the Northern hemisphere leaving the Southern hemisphere relatively unstudied. Some sites in Antarctica gradually are cooling which seems like an important point to bring out.

When looking for very small temperature variations ( + 0.01 degrees per year), the instrumentation must be of excellent quality,  then standardized, validated, calibrated, and very well maintained. They often aren’t. 

Worse, at any one instant temperatures on the Earth range from -50F (South Pole) to +90 F (equator) to back to -50F (North Pole), a rough swing of 140 deg F along any one longitude line. These will change hourly throughout the day. They will also change seasonally throughout the year. Given all of these large temperature magnitudes and variations throughout the years, the decades, and centuries, it raises a lot of questions about the confidence of such measurements.  Computer models do not help since they do not produce climate data, only predictions.  

A golden opportunity was missed to resolve much of this when Vice President Gore was not placed under oath. Watching lawyers debate each other on scientific issues is extremely superficial and disappointing. But the pursuit of collegiality unfortunately trumped any serious attempt to resolve the errors in Gore’s documentary. For some it was a love fest and the return of the warrior, replete with dueling clichés.  

One congressman referred to the Vice President as a prophet. This particular congressman has fought for years in his attempt to abolish nuclear energy (which doesn’t emit a single molecule of CO2). It wasn’t abolished but it certainly has been crippled thanks to the congressman and others.  

The irony was missed that much of today’s CO2 worries of these congressmen could have helped mitigate global warming with a much larger number of nuclear power plant in the US. But the environmentalists and their congressional friends have been wrong on a number of other issues too, costing billions of dollars and millions of lives. 

Senator Frank Lautenberg, a white haired, elegant senator from New Jersey, missed a golden opportunity to finally appear as a senatorial statesman. Instead he argued the case for Gore’s comments for alleged administration suppression of the intrepid Jim Hansen, perennial climate catastrophist from NASA. Hansen had complained that he was being suppressed by the Bush Administration in his public communications efforts regarding his theories.  

What is usually left out of media discussions of Dr. Hansen’s “muzzling”, and illuminated by Congressman Dan Issa of California, is that at last count Hansen has had 1400 media opportunities to speak his mind. What Lautenberg and other sympathizers have overlooked, is that government agencies have been intimidating their scientists for decades, and have been promoting anti-scientist agendas as well.

When former Congressman Mike McCormack of Washington was on the House Science and Technology Committee, (ca 1980), his committee wrote a summary document of Department of Energy intimidation, some lasting for decades. The Committee report was highly critical of the antinuclear crowd which had taken over the Carter administration. Educational literature was collected and later destroyed. The DOE even provided funds for an antinuclear rock group called the Plutonium Players.

Senator Lautenberg has a very selective memory of government intimidation. This intimidation has remained policy in many government agencies, both federal and state. Many such scientists would hope and pray to get 1400 media opportunities. Nor would they be so silly as to call it intimidation. Shame on Hansen and shame on Lautenberg and Gore. 

Al Gore said the Earth had a fever. He didn’t mention what the normal temperature should be, how high the fever was, how these temperatures were measured, if the earth has had these fevers before, and if so, what had caused them, and what were the results of them. And what would be the costs if Gore’s diagnoses were wrong, as they very likely are? 

There is new and compelling evidence that the solar magnetic fields (as distinct from solar irradiance) of the Sun represent a new and significant forcing function on the climate effect. Obviously, this is yet another natural forcing function having nothing to do with human activity. The evidence is from laboratory experiments where this was demonstrated, not computer models which produce no evidence at all.

The recent Congressional hearing would have been a great opportunity for the Vice President to disclose and describe this recent discovery. The solar magnetic field activities are currently the highest they’ve been in 150 years. These activities in turn lead to a warming over the same period, having little or nothing to do with man-made activities. This warming is now being observed on Mars, Pluto, and Triton, a moon of Neptune as well. It would also have been a great opportunity for him to point out that over the past 1 million years the Earth has had some 600 periods of global warming.

The opportunities were missed. When you have a cause…. 

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is the science and energy reporter for Hawaii Reporter and the Director of the Center for Science, Climate, & Environment at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. A resident of Kaneohe, he has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the university level. His interest in the communication of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via e-mail at foxm011@hawaii.rr.com.