Headlines about new hybrid cars, congressional energy bills (i.e. Kyoto Protocol), and organizations dedicated to stopping toxic CO2 from entering the atmosphere have plagued the media for the past several years. Just the other day, I saw a video on the front page of YouTube that filmed hundreds of people posing nude ontop of a melting ice glacier, all in protest to stop global warming. Is it really that big of a deal?

I took the dive and bought a hard copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to go straight to the source of all this controversy. While I had my doubts about Gore and the Global Warming movement, I gave the book every benefit of the doubt in hopes of gaining an accurate and credible understanding of global warming.

I've come to learn that there are three very important questions that need to be asked in the global warming debate. First, is the world really getting warmer? Second, what is the cause if it is? Finally, can humans change it if we tried? It is my contention that An Inconvenient Truth makes the serious error of trying to answer all three of these questions simultaneously without making necessary distinctions between them. As a result, he has given the environmentalist movement a bad name by providing no scientific basis for his often radical and unverifiable claims.

By the second page of the introduction, Gore asserts that hurricane Katrina was the cause of human abuse on the environment. Ok, this is a huge, huge scientific claim. The amount of experimentation, studies, and research to empirically prove and uphold such an idea is astronomical. And in any circle of academia, science, or education, a person is only going to be taken seriously if he provides credible substantiation for what he says. But instead of citing references to science journals and fields studies, Gore only goes on to make more and more alarming statements that progresses by each page. Observe this typical train of thought found in pages 37-63:


In addition to wildfires, tornados, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and lightening, Gore goes on to blame carbon emitting Americans for exhausted polar bears (p. 86), drowned penguin chicks (p. 94), the spread of West Nile (p. 129) and more. This kind of incoherent jumping from disaster to disaster continues for the rest of the book (which only took me 45 minutes to read since it's essentially a photography book with captions). Here's my take:

First, Gore is much more concerned about the overall effect and emotional appeal of global warming than the scientific data. The absence of a bibliography, references, or even a single citation to any source in addition to having more photographs than text, is evidence of that. It is utmost surprising then, that his efforts sprouting from this 8th grade level literature earned him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Second, Gore clearly does not understand the difference between a correlation and a cause. Anyone with a first-year college education understands how huge the jump from corollary to cause is. In the context of his book, it makes no more sense to say increasing carbon emissions caused hurricane Katrina than it does to say the price increase of college tuition led to the increase of student enrollment. That's hardly a scientific theory, and certainly not science.

As Christians, we should strongly support preserving the environment, eliminating pollution, planting trees, recycling, and coming up with new ways to create environmentally-sound energy. But since Gore doesn't seem to possess the capability of providing actual science, he makes a leap of faith in asserting that global warming must equal a global crisis, and there is no plausible reason why we should believe that. I give An Inconvenient Truth two thumbs down. In closing, here are a few facts to ponder:

"Currently, human activity puts about 6 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Non-human activity, mostly volcanoes, accounts for about 200 billion tons. Human activity, then, constitutes 2-3% of carbon dioxide, which itself is less than 10% of the total." – John Loeffler, World Affairs Editor

"Human activity, carried out at the present rate indefinitely (more than 12 years) cannot possibly account for more than 6 per cent of the observed change in CO2 levels. Entirely shutting off civilization-or even killing everybody-could only have a tiny effect on global warming, if there is any such thing." – L. van Zandt, physics professor at Purdue University, cited in the National Review

"Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths...a year." – Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist

"Suppose the costs over a decade of trying to achieve a local goal are significant. And suppose the positive impact on the globe's temperature is insignificant -- and much less than, say, the negative impact of one year's increase in the number of vehicles in one country (e.g., India). If so, are people who recommend such things thinking globally but not clearly?" – George Wills, Washington Times