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  National Geographic 24 May 06
Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" Movie: Fact or Hype?
Stefan Lovgren

ENN 19 May 06
Gore in Movie Campaign to Protect Earth
By Thomas Ferraro, Reuters

Channelnews Asia 21 May 06
 Al Gore to play weatherman at Cannes
CANNES, France : After years of failing to persuade the world's most powerful politicians to take it seriously, former US vice president Al Gore Saturday took his personal crusade against global warming to Cannes.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a documentary of Gore's slick one-man "travelling global warming show" which he has taken to some 1,000 schools and conferences around the United States.

Backed with graphics, facts and figures some dating back 650,000 years, and even a Bart Simpson-style cartoon short, Gore wittily and engagingly explains the dangerous path which the planet is pursuing.

When computer-generated graphics show rising sea waters creeping up Manhattan and swamping the World Trade Centre memorial site if the Greenland ice cap melts, Gore asks, "are there other threats, other than terrorist threats" that we should be taking seriously.

His slide-show is interspersed with family photos, a trip to the family farm, and a moving account of how he was forced to re-examine his life when his six-year-old son nearly died in a road accident.

Even those pesky dimpled chads which conspired to rob him of the presidency in 2000 make an appearance, as Gore admits that his defeat by George W. Bush was "a hard blow."

Gore hopes the 98-minute film directed by David Guggenheim, which is being shown out of competition here, will inspire action among those who have so far failed to grasp what he calls "the biggest moral challenge facing our global civilisation."

"There are five points on which the global scientific community agrees: global warming's real, human beings are mainly responsible for it, the results are catastrophic, we have to fix it and we have to start right away, and it's not too late," he told US journalists.

ENN 19 May 06
Gore in Movie Campaign to Protect Earth
By Thomas Ferraro, Reuters

WASHINGTON — Al Gore brushes aside talk of another run for the U.S. presidency and wages a new campaign to protect the Earth that he says must be won. The former Democratic vice president sounds the alarm as a citizen activist armed with his old slide show turned into a Hollywood movie about the threat of global warming.

"We face a planetary emergency," Gore told Reuters in advance of next week's opening in U.S. theaters of his critically acclaimed documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." It makes the case for the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions linked to climate change.

"My whole objective here is to try to move the country past a tipping point, beyond which politicians in both parties compete with each other for genuinely meaningful solutions ... and to change the minds of the American people to the point where people in both parties demand action," he said. "The habitability of the planet should be lifted out of the political context because so much is at stake," Gore said.

At a special showing in Washington Wednesday night that drew members of Congress, Gore said, "This should be a priority of the U.S. House and Senate." "It's a powerful movie," Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut said afterward. "If enough people see it, it could move Congress."

Having narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, Gore faces new speculation because of the movie he may make another White House bid. "I have no plans to run for president again," Gore said. "I have found other ways to serve and I'm enjoying them."

Gore has been hailed as an articulate innovator and mocked as a boring exaggerator. His movie blends the story of his life with a downright scary assessment of global warming. In it, Gore displays pictures, computer simulations and studies on the greenhouse effect that scientists worldwide contend is heating up Earth.

'THIS IS A MORAL ISSUE'

So-called greenhouse gases -- notably carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels -- trap heat around Earth like a blanket, contributing to global warming, scientists say. Global warming has been blamed for melting ice caps, rising sea levels, the spread of disease, more severe hurricanes and, with shifting weather patterns, increased floods and droughts.

The United States is the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, but efforts to get Congress to put mandatory caps on emissions have failed repeatedly.

As vice president, Gore helped negotiate the Kyoto treaty on climate change that he noted 132 nations ratified. Bush rejected the pact to reduce emissions after taking office, sayings its caps would harm the U.S. economy and that the plan was unfair for excluding developing nations from a first period of reductions until 2012.

Gore said he was encouraged by some recent developments, including some U.S. companies taking steps to cut emissions and more than 200 U.S. cities backing the Kyoto treaty and meeting the restrictions.

Still some critics persist.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative advocacy group that reflects the Bush administration's free-market approach, unveiled a TV ad campaign this week that denounced efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions as unwarranted.

Gore rejects such talk. He cites a broad consensus in the scientific community about the existence of global warming, and the widespread contention it needs to be curbed within the next decade before "we pass a point of no return."

He said he had shown his slide show on global warming more than a thousand times in the past 30 years and began showing it again, more frequently, after the 2000 election.

The movie grew out of one such showing in Los Angeles that attracted the attention of Hollywood producers. "They said they could take the message to many more people in a shorter period of time," Gore said. "This is a moral issue."

National Geographic 24 May 06
Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" Movie: Fact or Hype?
Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News

The message in An Inconvenient Truth, the new movie starring former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, is clear: Humans are causing global warming, and the effects are devastating. Most scientists agree that the Earth is heating up, due primarily to an atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum.

But how accurate are some of the scientific claims made in the documentary?

In an attempt to clear the air, National Geographic News checked in with Eric Steig, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who saw An Inconvenient Truth at a preview screening.

He says the documentary handles the science well. "I was looking for errors," he said. "But nothing much struck me as overblown or wrong."

Claim: According to the film, the number of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last year.

"This is true," Steig said. "There is no theoretical basis for the notion that this is a [natural] cycle."

A study published in the journal Nature in August found that hurricanes and typhoons have become more powerful over the past 30 years.The study also found that these upswings in hurricane strength correlate with a rise in sea-surface temperatures. Ocean heat is the key ingredient for hurricane formation.

Experts emphasize that neither Hurricane Katrina nor any other single event can be linked to global warming. "But," Steig said, "the statistics [show] that such events are more likely now than they used to be and will become more likely in the future."

Some scientists, however, believe that we are in the high-intensity stage of a decades-long natural hurricance cycle, which they say is primarily responsible for any uptick in storm activity.

Still others aren't even sure hurricanes are gaining strength. "I've got real concerns about whether this is a real change or whether it's an artifact of the data," Christopher Landsea told National Geographic News in a story published in September ("Hurricanes Are Getting Stronger, Study Says"). Landsea is a researcher with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. He noted that scientists now generally use satellite data to gauge hurricane stregth. This technique has greatly improved over the past 30 years, so earlier measurements may depict older hurricanes as weaker than they actually were, he said.

Claim: Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense as temperatures rise.

"There's no question about this," the University of Washington's Steig said. "If the average is going up, the extremes have to go up as well."

2005 was the hottest year on Earth since the late 19th century, when scientists began collecting temperature data. The past decade featured five of the warmest years ever recorded, with the second hottest year being 1998.

Claim: Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years to 300,000 people a year.

"The exact numbers are, at best, an extrapolation from [a heat wave that] was experienced in Europe in 2003," Steig said. "However, there is no question that that heat wave was a major event and statistically very unlikely to have happened unless the statistics are changing. "Since it did happen, the statistics are changing--that is, the globe really is warming up."

Claim: More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction in just half a century as a result of global warming.

An international study published in Nature in 2004 predicted that climate change could drive more than a million species closer to extinction by the year 2050. (Read "By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says.") "Climate change now represents at least as great a threat to the number of species surviving on Earth as habitat destruction and modification," said the lead author of that study, Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

Steig, the earth scientist, said he is "skeptical that climate change itself will cause this [extinction] ? so much as direct human impacts such as land-clearing."

Claim: Global warming will also cause the introduction of new, invasive species.

"I take issue with the invasive-species linkage, because the human influence--directly, by transporting species around--I suspect is much more important than climate change," Steig said.

Claim: Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet (6 meters) with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.

There is little doubt that sea levels would rise by that much if Greenland melted. But scientists disagree on when it could happen.

A recent Nature study suggested that Greenland's ice sheet will begin to melt if the temperature there rises by 3ºC (5.4ºF). The study concluded that Greenland could melt within a hundred years.

"It's uncertain how much warmer Greenland would get, [given] a certain carbon dioxide level, because different climate models give different amounts of warming," said Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

But many experts agree that even a partial melting would cause a one-meter (three-foot) rise in sea levels, which would entirely submerge low-lying island countries, such as the Indian Ocean's Maldives

Claim: The Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2050.

Some climate models are more conservative, suggesting that there will be no summer ice in the Arctic by the year 2100. But new research shows it could take as little as 20 years for the sea ice to disappear.

"Since the advent of remote satellite imaging, we've lost about 20 percent of sea-ice cover," said Mark Serreze, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. "We're setting ourselves up for very big losses this year."

"We think of the Arctic as the heat sink to the climate system," Serreze said. "We're fundamentally changing this heat sink, and we don't know how the rest of the climate system is going to respond."

There is no doubt that as sea ice continues to melt, habitat for animals like polar bears will continue to shrink.
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