Roy Spencer - An Inconvenient Deception - How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy

This is a critique of Al Gore, Jr.s movie, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. The movie is the second cinematic installment in his quest to solve the climate crisis. His first movie, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), led to an Academy Award and was a major reason he received a Nobel Peace Prize.

I have been involved in the global warming wars as a climate scientist for about the same amount of time as Al Gore, since the late 1980s, but generally from the opposing side. I have testified in Congress several times, the first time for then-Senator Gore in 1990, and along the way I have learned much about economics and alternative energy sources. While most of my formal education dealt with the physics of the ocean and atmosphere, I also was trained in the physics of glaciers and solar energy collection. As a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA I was principal investigator on missions to observe the Earth from a stand-alone satellite, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station. I am co-developer of the first method for monitoring global temperatures with satellites, which won an award from the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and have published research on determining how sensitive the climate system is to our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

I am not a global warming denier as is often alleged, nor am I opposed to alternative (non-fossil fuel) forms of energy per se. What I am opposed to is misleading people with false climate science claims and alarming them into diverting vast sums of the publics wealth into expensive energy schemes, thus creating energy poverty and reducing our standard of living. When such policies are followed, it is the poor who suffer the most.

When renewable energy becomes economically competitive and practical, as I hope it one day will, I will be all for it. But when that happens, we will not need politicians to convince us of its viability; the free market will handle it.

In the meantime, while human-caused global warming remains a theoretical threat to future human health and welfare, poverty remains a clear and present danger. Fossil fuels have enabled people to reduce poverty greatly worldwide over the last 150 years. Abandoning them for more expensive sources of energy will cause more harm than good in the near term.

The fact that the public has become tone deaf to the shrill claims of pundits like Al Gore - when I saw his latest movie there were only three of us in a 730-seat theater - suggests that people do not see the climate crisis he claims to see. Yes, we are somewhat warmer today than in decades past (which I will discuss below), but its by an amount too small for anyone to notice in a lifetime. In his latest film Gore admits to getting discouraged over the lack of public interest in the climate crisis. While he blames it on powerful special interests, the truth is that the public has grown tired of his exaggerations and failed predictions.

It doesnt help that Gore has a huge carbon footprint and multiple mansions and makes millions of dollars benefitting from companies that depend upon government subsidies that he personally lobbies to perpetuate.

Gore has had some admirable successes in government, for example his advocacy for the development of the Internet. But I consider his foray into climate and energy issues to be misguided. I am not sure whether he purposely deceives people, bends the truth to make vast sums of money, or has simply been misled by others who feed his particular worldview. No matter his motivations, as we shall see, people are being deceived by the claims in his films and books.

I will be advancing two main themes in this book regarding the claims of Al Gore:

1) Most of his claims about weather disasters, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels are either untrue, or the result of Mother Nature rather than human activities, and

2) Wind and solar power remain expensive, and so governments mandating their use as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will make their citizens poorer and more vulnerable to real threats.

I will admit that there is at least the possibility that humanity could suffer some harm from our greenhouse gas emissions. But I also believe that the benefits of more CO2 in the atmosphere will outweigh any harm. Published research demonstrates the Earth is undergoing global greening and increased agricultural productivity due to the fertilization effects of more CO2.

After more than a decade of his hand-wringing predictions of rising sea levels and rising global temperatures, have people grown tired of Gores dire warnings of impending doom? What changed since that record-setting 2005 hurricane season? Are climate scientists having second thoughts? Or has Al Gore been misrepresenting those scientists and their predictions?

Here I will focus mostly on his second movie, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. A book version was released at the same time.

But first I will review a little global warming background, Gores history in the global warming issue, his first movie, and some his other notable efforts in the eleven years between the two movies. If you want to skip the history and get to the point-by-point rebuttal of the latest movie, thats fine.

In order to better understand what we know - and dont know - about climate change, its useful to start with a basic concept: temperature. The temperature of anything - a room in your house, a pot on the stove, a car engine, the climate system - is determined by rates of energy gain and energy loss. For your house in the winter, the furnace is the energy source, and the walls and their insulation largely determine how fast that energy is lost. For the climate system, the energy source is the sun. As the Earth and its atmosphere warm, they lose energy to outer space from infrared (heat) radiation, analogous to your house losing heat to the cold outside air in winter.

And the point bears repeating: The average temperature of the climate system is not due only to how brightly the sun shines, but also to a balance between absorbed sunlight (energy gain) and infrared (heat) energy emitted to outer space (energy loss).

When the temperature in your house rises to the point where it balances the energy loss to the outside air, the temperature remains constant. The thermostat on the wall determines the temperature at which that occurs. When the temperature of the Earths surface and atmosphere rises enough so that the infrared loss to outer space equals the energy gain from the sun, the temperature also stops changing. This is called energy balance - and so it is for the temperature of everything you encounter in life.

The theory behind global warming predictions is based upon the fact that the carbon dioxide (CO2) humanity produces from burning fossil fuels is a greenhouse gas that acts as a radiative insulator around the Earth, reducing the rate of infrared energy loss to outer space. Somewhat like insulation in the walls of your home slowing the escape of heat to the cold winter air outside, CO2 enhances Earths natural radiative barrier that warms the lower atmosphere and keeps Earth habitable. Our addition of more CO2 to the atmosphere is like adding a little more insulation to the walls of your house. It is also somewhat like a real greenhouse in the sense that the glass roof of a greenhouse slows the rate of infrared energy loss to the outside (the enclosure of the greenhouse also slows the rate of convective energy loss).