|
From the desk of John Donohue, July 4, 2006
Movie Review Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth When you place the word “Truth” in the title of your thesis, when you travel the world as a passionate advocate for “the Truth” on the issue, when you are asking for massive, onerous restrictions on free people and businesses through government intervention with the justification that it is the “Truth,” there are certain meta-positions possible: 1) You have received a mystical revelation of the Truth from a Higher Power and you are spreading its Gospel, asking people to believe you based on faith; 2) You have established the validated, repeatable proof of the issue in objective reality through reason (facts and logic) and you are demonstrating the broad, detailed logic chain first to a 'close-in peer group', then to a 'broadly diverse unconnected peer group', as well as to a blind statistical analysis, persuading these other groups of professional rationals to vet it thoroughly and take their best shot at making you wrong as a welcome part of enriching the theory; 3) You are a true believer in a position, you have a few shreds of possibly true points that seem to support it, you puff them up with unsubstantiated, terrifying projections and you exploit them sensationally without proof to build a bandwagon of activism for your position. This is propaganda. Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is propaganda. Unsubstantiated assertions, emotional image sequences, anecdotal stories, ad hominem attacks on those who disagree, bizarre plotting of distorted graphs without providing the scale or data-points, personal visits to locations allegedly affected and a “loaded” film score are not arguments. Neither does a claim that a consensus of scientists “agrees with global warming" validate Mr. Gore's content. “Global warming” can mean anything from small recent natural changes towards warmer weather to the full apocalyptic, industrial-driven Gorian paradigm. Just because Mr. Gore calls forth this famous alleged Consensus, it does not follow that 'An overwhelming majority of independent-minded climate scientists have each vetted to the bottom all claims for Mr. Gore’s movie, played devil’s advocate with each other, ran it past the statistical community, and finally each independently declared "An Inconvenient Truth" factually true.' To put this "self-inclusion into consensus" another way: Does Mr. Gore’s invocation of The Consensus mean that a group “consented” to his specific presentation? No. Mr. Gore constructed the declaration of consensus himself* about ‘global warming’ in its most inclusive connotation, he made a list (so he says) of nearly a thousand writers who had assented to or written a study of something – anything – included in the broadest boundaries of Global Warming, and by association thus cravenly inferred that they signed off on his claims specifically. It is doubtful Mr. Gore has a vast, strong, independent consensus group specifically signing-off on the Truth of every claim of his presentation. 1. if I am wrong and vast numbers HAVE vetted Mr. Gore’s specific claims as factual, there should be a proud list of them at a site with contact information for each. When I see that I will apologize. 2. all the signing support scientists should indicate clearly that they agree with the proof as provided by Mr. Gore, and not on under some variant or partial or generic “I believe in global warming.” 3. if Mr. Gore’s science is so obvious, settled and irrefutable, there ought be no reticence in laying it out, fully referenced, so critical thinkers pro and con can see the logic chain for themselves. Sadly, nowhere in the film does Mr. Gore provide a citation chain, a source of statistical basis, a list of supporting scientists, or even a link to the “~983” scientific papers or websites in support. He cites only one website, http://www.climatecrisis.net This site merely promotes the film. It does not repeat any graphs or statistics, where the critical thinker (pro or con) would have time to study them and let their implications set in and then follow a link to their source. It does not refer the curious visitor to another site where Mr. Gore’s assertions are restated, then supported by rational sources. There is a button on the site that says “The Science.” However, the page linked provides no science whatsoever, only a repeat list of Mr. Gore’s assertions. I attempted to find algore.com, and algore.net as well as earthinthebalance.com .net and .org, but cannot find a supporting website. Algore.org is Mr. Gore’s political website. There is no science there. If you click on the link “An Inconvenient Truth” you get routed back to the movie’s website. I know that if I were attempting to fight for a gigantic idea on a world-historical basis which I suspected would save the Earth, I would certainly list at a website every assertion in my movie, one by one, and prove each point with references. I would challenge leading scientists to truth-test every word, then sign on as supporters. I would want my movie and website to be the locus where factual history was made and a magnificent theory was proven. The utter lack of scientific reference in “An Inconvenient Truth” nullifies it outright, rendering the movie absolutely void and useless. Therefore, this review contains no rebuttal of Mr. Gore’s claims. There is nothing to rebut; the film is pure propaganda. If he wishes it to rise above propaganda, he must bear the burden of the assertion-maker; he must prove his assertions. Mr. Gore makes no attempt whatsoever to do so, and therefore the film requires no respect as factual (let alone “Truth” with a capital “T”) in any way. Thank you for reading this movie review, John Donohue Pasadena, CA July 4, 2006 * there is a possibility Mr. Gore did not concoct The Consensus himself; there may be a consensus that there is a consensus. Ok, I WILL respond to one thing! Special condemnation of Mr. Gore: Even though an itemized rebuttal is NOT required to fairly and rationally reject this movie, there is one point that I will single out, one assertion for which Mr. Gore must be specifically excoriated. In the film a claim is made that the city of Nairobi, Kenya, was deliberately located at a certain place and altitude with intention that it sit above the “mosquito line.” That is, its location was specifically chosen to avoid mosquitoes. Mr. Gore reports in his movie that malaria rates in Kenya have recently skyrocketed because human-caused global warming has enabled the mosquito to thrive at a higher altitude. As usual, not a shred of validity is supplied to support either the claim of location or the claim of cause for malaria increase. So, here I will give some of the referencing Mr. Gore shamefully refuses to do: I attempted to investigate Mr. Gore’s assertion on the internet only. I paged through sites on Kenya, on Nairobi and on the British railway in Kenya. Nairobi appears to have been founded in 1898 as a way-station for the main railway line. I found no substantiation that Nairobi was located at a certain place because of mosquito levels, let alone because of malaria-bearing mosquitoes. “The City was totally rebuilt in the early 1900s after an outbreak of plague [not malaria] and the burning of the original town. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nairobi Until Mr. Gore tells us where he got that information, it is a groundless assertion, just like the rest of his movie. Meanwhile, my research (see links below) confirms that malaria was always a problem in Nairobi, until 1946. I then attempted to find anything that would support Mr. Gore’s assertion that the recent horrifying leap in malaria was due to global warming. I found a PBS website here: http://www.pbs.org/journeytoplanetearth/hope/nairobi.html As is par for the course with global warming alarmists, the PBS site simply “declares it true” and supplies no links to science where its claims might be proven as fact. As such, its claim that the new malaria epidemic is driven by global warming is no more than a groundless assertion. After about 30 minutes of doing Mr. Gore’s work for him, I found a left/progressive site that claims global warming is causing the malaria explosion. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1104-02.htm WARNING: this site, like Mr. Gore’s movie, makes wild, unsubstantiated apocalyptic projections and of course provides no supporting evidence. For more sober reading, here is a site that provides the source of a scientific paper published in Nature in 2002 stating it could find no link between global warming and the malaria explosion in the East African highlands. http://www.nature.com/news/2002/020218/full/020218-12.html However, there is a more odious and reprehensible reason for the explosion of malaria in Nairobi: The banning of DDT in 1988. Sources: http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol4no4/adobe/malakooti.pdf http://www.malariasite.com/malaria/history_control.htm Summary based on above sources: In Kenya malaria was always a big problem, right up to the end of WW2. People have been attempting to control if for centuries, millennia. Things got worse with population growth and new development in the 20th century. Malaria final was brought under control by the spraying of DDT after WW2. Forty years went by free of the scourge, except for occasional outbreaks which were subsequently controlled. Despite this history, DDT was banned by the government of Kenya in 1988, not because it was doing any harm to any human, bird or animal, but because European Green/Environmental activists became powerful enough in EU governments to push through a ban on agriculture imports from any country whose government did not enact and enforce a total ban on DDT. Kenya’s flower and fruit industry were threatened by this. After the lobby for that industry helped get a ban on DDT in 1988, malaria exploded in Kenya in the 1990s, after the nation being free of the disease for a generation. There are a few factors that probably contributed to the resurgence of malaria, such as widespread new irrigation, population shift which more easily brought infection to the area and insistence on old ineffectual drugs over newer when the disease began to appear, but the ban on DDT is the central culprit in the fact that the resurgence has not been and cannot be stopped. This tragedy was NOT caused by global warming. You can read the pitiful, horrifying results right on the PBS page cited above, and on hundreds of other pages http://allafrica.com/stories/200607030180.html which plead for an end to the ban on DDT in Africa, a ban which kills a million people per year and devastates whole populations, a ban caused by environmentalists. http://www.who.int/malaria/docs/ek_report3.htm Note: I find the page just linked depressing. It proves everything I am saying, that malaria has always been a problem in Nairobi from its founding in the 1890s through WW2, that an unbelievable, exhausting amount of effort has gone into failed methods, that DDT WIPES OUT MALARIA, and that the disease is on the rise again. However, by some inconceivable misguidedness, the report at that page does not mention the ban, does not advocate the withdrawal of the ban, and ends with an optimistic twinge for the Roll Back Malaria Initiative launched by the World Health Organization, which includes a modest nod to DDT, but with no more ambition than to “cut malaria by 50% by 2010. Let’s do the math. Instead of stopping malaria in Africa within a year or two through what would be an inexpensive, albeit all-out battle, let’s “hope” we can reduce it to killing 500,000 people every year, but not for quite a while. Imagine filling six Boeing 747s with children and crashing them against a mountainside. Then, tomorrow, you do the same. Then the next day. Every day, relentlessly, until you solve the problem. That is the world death toll of children from malaria -- 3,000 deaths a day. This atrocity is totally preventable through better drugs, insecticide-soaked mosquito nets (not very effective for poor people, though) and intelligent spraying of walls with dilute DDT. Please see http://www.fightingmalaria.org for more information. I urge all left-green activists to get behind the lifting of the ban. NOTE: the funding and the plan are already in place to eradicate malaria in Kenya through the proper controlled spraying program; only the ban – driven by the EU -- is in the way. I cannot claim to know if Mr. Gore supports the return to a malaria-free Africa though the use of smart-spraying of DDT supplemented by other strategies. If he does not support it, I will double condemn him. For now I only excoriate him for cynically blaming human-caused global warming for the explosion of malaria in Nairobi, despite the obvious, blinding, and, for Mr. Gore, inconvenient truth to the contrary. John Donohue |
WARNING: There is danger in this concept of "consensus" anyway. You have to be very careful with this term. Quite often, consensus is group-think. In it, one or more dominant persons persuade others in the group to go along with a constructed Consensus Position (collective opinion) for the purpose of “group solidarity in sentiment and belief.” [Merriam-Webster dictionary]. As part of the Academia-Government Complex, which I also call The Establishment Authority, with its billions in taxpayer funding, it is reasonable to check each signator to a global warming consensus for postmodernist “truth is socially constructed” bias, not to mention “what do I have to write to maintain my tenure, prestige and funding.” I’d be glad to do that myself, should Mr. Gore list his consensus coterie and provide access to them and their sources. In lieu of a rational attack on anything in Mr. Gore’s film, the reasons for the absence of which are stated on this page, the reader may be interested in a sharp rebuttal of general misinformation on Earth’s climate pouring forth from The Establishment Authority. If so, you are invited to read my commentary “The Earth in Time” here. In lieu of a rational attack on anything in Mr. Gore’s film, the reasons for the absence of which are stated on this page, the reader may be interested in a sharp rebuttal of general misinformation on Earth’s climate pouring forth from The Establishment Authority. If so, you are invited to read my commentary “The Earth in Time” here. |