Global Warming — Quite the Inconvenient Truth

Global Warming — Quite the Inconvenient Truth

May 25, 2006

In the face of strong scientific consensus on the dangers and sources of global warming, many members of the Bush administration and the right wing continue to insist it is all part of a harmless natural process. An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore's new documentary that opened yesterday in New York and Los Angeles, challenges those myths and provides striking evidence that "[h]umanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb." The critics of the film would prefer to ignore the overwhelming facts — that global warming is occurring, and if America doesn’t get serious about combating it, future generations will suffer the consequences. See how you can take action in the fight against global warming and help America kick its oil habit.

• The facts are in — climate change is happening. The growing temperature of the earth is just one sign of the existence of global warming (19 of the 20 hottest years on record have occurred since 1980, with 2005 marking the warmest year). In the far north, Inuit hunters have fallen through ice, and villages have lost ground to swelling seas. In the tropics, deluged islanders are making plans for permanent evacuation. Seas worldwide have risen four to eight inches in the last century; Massachusetts alone has lost 65 acres a year. Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places such as the Colombia Andes, which is 7,000 feet above sea level, and scientists are considering creating a Category 6 for hurricanes.
  
  
• The Bush administration refuses to deal with the fact of global warming. Since President Bush took office, he has either ignored or downplayed the threat of global warming. The President still thinks that there is a "fundamental debate" over whether climate change is "manmade or natural," ignoring the consensus of the scientific community and the opinion of his own Environmental Protection Agency, which in 2002 stated that global warming "is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years ... due mostly to human activities." James Hansen, the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate, recently said that he was being censored by the Bush administration from speaking out on global warming.
  
  
• The oil industry is pumping a lot of money into pseudo-science on global warming. The oil industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) have been at the front of the anti-global warming tirade. CEI has received $1.6 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 (PDF) and has received funding from other oil companies through the American Petroleum Institute. In example of faulty science, CEI released a set of misleading ads claiming "Greenland's glaciers are growing." Actually, the study cited by the ad found there was an increase in snow accumulation on Greenland's interior. Other studies show that glaciers are thinning on Greenland's coastal regions. Despite what CEI tried to argue, these findings fit with theories of global warming because "the thinning of the margins and growth in the interior Greenland is an expected response to increased temperatures and more precipitation in a warmer climate.