Movie Report
Jun. 18th, 2006 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcusmarcusrcOooh! I haven't written a movie report since... since... erm, have I ever written a movie report? Book reports I remember.. oh, wait, yes, we watched movies for Henry Jenkin's class! Okay. Anyway, here is my report on An Inconvenient Truth
Title: An Inconvenient Truth
Director: David Guggenheim
Star: Al Gore
Website: www.climatecrisis.net
I'm going to concentrate mostly on the science here, though I will start with a few sentences on the non-science. The first 30 seconds of the movie Gore's monotone voice over about placid waters and peaceful trees made me worry that the movie was going to be very very painful. Fortunately, that got a _lot_ better fast. For the most part I felt that the interludes about Gore's life and family were good for giving the documentary a human feel, though not so relevant to climate change. And I felt the political touches were only a little bit too much, though if I were Gore I would have tried to err the other way in hopes that it didn't turn off conservatives/republicans. And Gore really came through as human, touching, humorous, thoughtful, and all those characteristics I'd want in a president. Alas. Sigh. But then, I always liked Gore even back when the media somehow all came to the weird conclusion that he was wooden and robotic (he gave a fine graduation speech at MIT).
Okay. To the science! First: The Sally&Global Warming story was _great_. Oddly, I think it was a better explanation than the graphic that came before it of sun beams bouncing off the planet and getting trapped by the greenhouse gas (GHG) barrier. But then, one of the things that is on my todo list is to come up with an actually correct description of the greenhouse effect, which is harder than you think, because step 1: the greenhouse effect is totally unlike an actual greenhouse. It is more important that greenhouses stop convection than that they trap radiation. A "thin layer" being "thickened" which is a description that Gore uses is kind of correct, in that one description of the effect is that you radiate heat to space from a higher altitude when you have more GHGs - of course, the graphic was misleading, but anyway. Minor point.
Two: Of course Gore showed the Mauna Loa CO2 graph. You've got to. But his explanation about the earth breathing in was a little wrong: he pointed out correctly that the northern hemisphere has more landmass and therefore vegetation than the southern. Which would lead one to naturally assume (as does Gore) that the northern hemisphere seasonal signal would dominate the southern one: except it turns out that there is a mixing period on the scale of a year or two between the two hemispheres. So that if you actually look at the data, at Mauna Loa there is a CO2 peak in May and a trough in September or so (eg, breathe in as plants grow, breathe out as they decay), and in the southern hemisphere while the cycle is much smaller and sometimes disappears in the noise, it looks like there is an October peak and a March trough. Note that my estimation comes from eyeballing the data, and I didn't subtract the linear trend out. But, anyway, minor point.
Three: Lots of pretty pictures (or depressing pictures) of disappearing glaciers. Of course, any individual glacier isn't evidence: glaciers advance and retreat all the time. Its the statistics, and he didn't show the statistics. But that is fine, because the statistics do support his point, which is that the vast majority of glaciers are retreating fast, and people should do their glacier tourism now because by the time we're all retired they'll be a lot harder to find. He also showed calving glaciers, and implied that that was global warming caused, whereas all glaciers calve on occasion. The point is that global warming is accelerating the process, so here is one of the cases where he didn't _state_ a lie, but the implication was misleading, but the takeaway point was true.
The "40% of the world's population gets their water from spring systems which are half glacier fed" is a frightening statistic. I knew the "big picture" argument (eg, a lot of countries depend on the Himalayas for their fresh water) but I hadn't internalized the numbers before.
Ice cores give a yearly record of CO2 trapped in bubbles, and Temperature records by oxygen isotope analysis. True. (there's some art in the temperature reconstruction, since basically what you are measuring is the O18:O16 ratio in historical snowfall, and that ratio is determined in part by condensation at the poles, and in part by evaporation in the oceans, and depending on air circulation patterns you are measuring the ocean surface temperature at different locations on the globe, but anyway. Cool science).
He claims you can see the Clean Air Act in Antarctic ice cores. Realclimate.org claims this is false, and I believe them.
He shows a 1000 year Northerm Hemisphere temperature reconstruction. He doesn't show the uncertainty bars on it (there are several reconstructions). Again, it is true that the reconstruction exists, and it is true that we are (almost certainly) warmer than any time in the past 1000 years and getting even warmer fast, but it would be more accurate to show a whole bunch of overlaid reconstructions because proxy temperature analysis is _hard_ and different people get different results (though they all have the same general final conclusion). More iffy is that he says "look - CO2 and temperature both go up at the end of the 1000 year period", when our best attribution work suggests that the 1880 to 1940 warming was natural, and only the 1970 to present warming is CO2 induced.
When he shows 650,000 years of history he _states_ that the CO2 and temperature relationship is very complicated, but so quickly that I think most viewers would miss it. At the end of the period, he shows CO2 rising to 2050 - while there are no #s on the graph, it looks suspiciously like CO2 reaches 500 ppm by 2050, which is on the high end of projections. (edit: looking at a paper I'm coauthor on, we actually project 400 to 600 ppm in the business as usual case, so if my guess of 500 from looking at Gore's graph was right, then in fact, he was right on the money). Anyway, he then _implies_ but does not state that if a 60 ppm difference (220 to 280) is the difference between an Ice Age and an interglacial, then what is the _huge_ difference between 280 ppm and 500 ppm going to do? Which is again, right in big picture - we are going into seriously uncharted atmospheric territory - but it is very unlikely that 500 ppm will actually cause a temperature change as big as the Ice Age/interglacial difference, which, after all, is dependent on all sorts of things like orbital radiative forcing changes and serious feedbacks from retreating ice caps of a magnitude that we can't see because there just isn't that much ice left. Of course, we aren't likely to stop at 500, so we may very well see by a world "one ice age to interglacial unit" warmer by 2200 or so... which is kind of scary...
He cites 2005 as the hottest year in recorded history. It is actually kind of tied with 1998. Of course, 1998 was an El Nino year, and so expected to be anomalously hot, whereas 2005 was a "normal" year, and so the heat is more disturbing. Minor point.
The chart he showed of ocean temperatures was, well, kind of ick in my opinion The first graph was "predicted natural variability" using a model. The 2nd was "predicted temperatures under greenhouse warming". The 3rd (falling inside the 2nd, of course) was experimental data. Basically, my issue is that our ocean heat models aren't so good. I'm perfectly fine with the conclusion: the evidence is the ocean is warming to an extent that can't be explained with natural variability, but I don't think we need to resort to model data for that.
His hurricane stuff was mostly good: obviously we can't attribute any individual hurricane to global warming, but we do for the most part expect hurricanes to get more powerful with warmer oceans, though it is complicated. His citation of 10 typhoons hitting Japan was not as good, as I believe we currently have little evidence that _frequency_ of Pacific cyclones have increased. The _intensity_ of Pacific cyclones _has_ gone up, and both the intensity and frequency of _Atlantic_ cyclones have gone up (statistically), but this research is kind of new and still not fully accepted.
Increase in precipitation (on average), likely increase in high precipitation single events, shifting of precipitation such that you get both more floods and more drought: all matches the current expectations, though regional predictions and precipitation in specific are all really hard to do.
He _shouldn't_ in my opinion have showed the "damage from severe weather events" graph, as that is probably more due to increase in property to _be_ damaged than increase in actual events. (the "increase in major flood events in Europe" graph was fine, though, as long as "major flood" is measured by water levels and not by economic impact)
I don't know if we attribute the sub-Saharan drought to global warming. Neither did he, exactly, but he implied it. I would certainly believe it is related, but again, our regional predictions are for the most part pretty bad.
His "tundra travel days" chart is misleading because I believe that it isn't that it is physically impossible to drive across the tundra when it isn't frozen, but rather that environmental regulations restrict travel on non-frozen tundra because it permanently damages the ecosystem. He kind of implied it was from trucks getting stuck in mud. Which I'm sure happens, but there is technology to deal with that. This does, of course, still show how much the arctic is warming...
He cited 5 degrees fahrenheit as the low end of predictions. I would have said 3-4 degrees as the low end for 2100. He didn't state a date. (in fact, that was a recurrent weakness: he often didn't give time scales for impacts) (the high end for 2100 would be on the order of 10-12 degrees, with a median of 7 or so)
Arctic Ocean ice free in the summers by 2050: I can believe that. I also hear that the portion of the Arctic where they released navy sub data on ice thickness was nicknamed "the Gore Box" because it was Gore's pet project.
He talked about the thermohaline collapse, and the Younger Dryas event. He implied we might need to worry about Greenland causing a recurrence. While I do worry about the thermohaline circulation shutting down, I don't think we need to worry about it causing a European ice age: if anything, it will counteract warming in Europe and keep Europe's climate more temperate. I worry more about the massive changes in regional weather patterns and ocean ecosystems that would occur after such a collapse.
His invasive species graph in Switzerland was misleading, though we do believe that invasive species thrive in disrupted environments which changing climate will cause. But today most of the disruptions are caused by non-global changes, or by people physically carrying the disruptive species from one part of the world to another. (bark beetles in Alaska is an exception)
He also listed infectious diseases and didn't ever draw a clear link to global warming. Probably because there aren't clear links, with the except of some issues like the mosquitoes and high altitude city issue.
Example of a caveat: Coral reefs bleaching will occur because of "warming and other factors". So the "other factors" is in there, but if you aren't watching for it, you won't notice it. Of course, enough warming and we won't need other factors to kill off the coral, but right now coral is dying because of warming on top of other strains.
He spends a lot of time showing the impacts of 20 feet of sea level rise. Most of the science he talks about is good, but he doesn't mention the time scale: it is highly unlikely that we will see more than 3 feet of sea level rise this century. Of course, Greenland is kind of precarious in that the reason why the center of Greenland is cold enough to maintain an ice cap is because there is so much ice there that the top of the cap is at a high (and therefore cold) altitude. Which means that if the center of Greenland ever warms enough to start general melting... well, then you get a decrease in height, followed by warming because it is at lower elevation, followed by... well, you get the picture. One professor I know thinks that once that process starts, all of Greenland will go in "a few decades" which is a scary thought. But again, I don't think that will happen this century. Then again, if you'd asked me 3 years ago, I would have said the net contribution to sea level rise from Greenland and Antarctica would be near zero, and recent evidence (which Gore cites: the whole water tunneling down and lubricating the bottom of the ice) suggests that in fact they will contribute several centimeters or more to the sea level rise that we'd predicted from thermal expansion and glacial melt (which was 20 cm to 1 m or so).
Then he talks about the scientific consensus. Again, big picture is true: there is a pretty overwhelming scientific consensus which is _not_ reflected in the popular press which often hunts a skeptic down for "equal time" quotes. But the study he cites which surveyed 960 studies and found no negative evidence (Noami Oreskes, Science or Nature, I think) - well, I read that study when it came out and despite agreeing with the conclusion I found the methodology dubious.
I hadn't remembered that Bush had appointed an API crony (Philip Cooney) to head his environmental unit. API has some of the scummiest pond suckers out there. Philip Cooney now works for Exxon Mobil, but honestly, I have more respect for Exxon Mobil's scientists than I do for the API mouthpieces. But that's probably just because I know Brian Flannery, co-author of Numerical Recipes and former astrophysicist and really smart guy, and he works for Exxon and he isn't all bad, though obviously he has a bias (note: Exxon funds some of my program's research). But one of the API pondsuckers once gave a talk at a conference I was at, and my advisor, who is normally one of the nicest and most gentle men in existence, slowly turned red and I thought he was going to get up and walk out in disgust.
When Gore got to talking about "choosing between the economy and the environment" I thought he was being a bit disingenous when he said that doing the right thing would generate jobs and wealth. While there probably are a few real "negative cost" options out there, and while certainly individual companies can profit greatly off of environmental standards, and while there may be a significant amount of "low-hanging fruit" that we could grab if there was just a small carbon price, to really deal with the climate problem will take significant resources which, even if it doesn't hurt the economy directly (which it might, through higher energy prices) will at the least be drawing resources from other research areas and problems. Of course, we'd be improving the economy of the future by delaying the necessity of moving 100 million plus people out of coastal cities in the 22nd century. But anyway.
He compared US mileage standards to Chinese mileage standards. I wonder if Chinese vehicles are actually meeting those standards? But yes, the US fleet average should be _much_ higher than it is, we're just being wasteful. But I would prefer a regulation that didn't look like CAFE, which regulates "fleet average", which ironically means for every high mileage car a company sells it can sell a low mileage one. I'd prefer a regulation that penalized low mileage cars/subsidized high mileage cars regardless of what the fleet average was. But if CAFE is all we have, we should raise CAFE. Especially on SUVs. Anyway...
Gore then went into optimistic mode, which I think is good because you want to make people leave the movie thinking that they can do something, because going "from disbelief to despair" isn't very useful. However, his citation of the "wedge paper" (Pacala & Socolow, Science, 2005) was... well... okay, _everyone_ cites the paper now because it entered the popular scientific consciousness, but I think it downplays the difficulties in a) implementing the wedges, and b) going beyond 2050. I was interested to see that 1) Gore didn't include any of the nuclear wedges from the paper, but 2) he _did_ include CO2 sequestration and even drew attention to it by saying "we'll see more of this". CO2 sequestration (at the gigaton scale) is basically taking CO2 from coal plants and shoving it underground. Controversial in some environmental circles. Most of the people I know accept it as part of a "bridging strategy" to slow down CO2 growth in the next few decades until we get better solutions.
He also talked about "reducing personal carbon emission to zero". This is practically impossible, unless he is talking about using carbon offsets like Carbonfund.org, which are... kind of fuzzy. Though better than nothing, I guess. I occasionally think about starting to buy them myself, but haven't yet. I think that real personal reductions and persuading government to make regulations are both much better than offsets, if possible.
"At stake: our ability to live on this earth and continue as a civilization": I think this statement was exaggerated. Global warming might be very, very bad but I don't think it will be civilization ending.
Other notes:
Good quotes from Churchill, Mark Twain, and someone else famous (Sinclair?). I wish I had been fast enough to write them down.
The tobacco analogy I thought was powerful: we don't like admitting that we're doing something wrong until it really slams us in the face, and of course it the tobacco issue was very personal in his case. The frog analogy was also good, though I have heard that frogs don't actually behave that way.
Good question about "How do we react when we hear warnings?"
Did Marburger really teach Gore in 6th grade???
Overall Impression:
Facts Cited: Good
Caveats Used: Fairly Good
Big Picture, eg, Man is Causing Global Warming, it will be bad, we should work on stopping it: Good, though I might have put in a little more uncertainty (it is _very likely_ to be bad)
Some of the implied bits in between the facts and the big picture, on the other hand, were kind of misleading. Also, while the caveats were good, you had to be paying attention to catch them.
Movie Overall: Good, well worth watching, and mostly scientifically accurate.
And this ends my report. =)
Title: An Inconvenient Truth
Director: David Guggenheim
Star: Al Gore
Website: www.climatecrisis.net
I'm going to concentrate mostly on the science here, though I will start with a few sentences on the non-science. The first 30 seconds of the movie Gore's monotone voice over about placid waters and peaceful trees made me worry that the movie was going to be very very painful. Fortunately, that got a _lot_ better fast. For the most part I felt that the interludes about Gore's life and family were good for giving the documentary a human feel, though not so relevant to climate change. And I felt the political touches were only a little bit too much, though if I were Gore I would have tried to err the other way in hopes that it didn't turn off conservatives/republicans. And Gore really came through as human, touching, humorous, thoughtful, and all those characteristics I'd want in a president. Alas. Sigh. But then, I always liked Gore even back when the media somehow all came to the weird conclusion that he was wooden and robotic (he gave a fine graduation speech at MIT).
Okay. To the science! First: The Sally&Global Warming story was _great_. Oddly, I think it was a better explanation than the graphic that came before it of sun beams bouncing off the planet and getting trapped by the greenhouse gas (GHG) barrier. But then, one of the things that is on my todo list is to come up with an actually correct description of the greenhouse effect, which is harder than you think, because step 1: the greenhouse effect is totally unlike an actual greenhouse. It is more important that greenhouses stop convection than that they trap radiation. A "thin layer" being "thickened" which is a description that Gore uses is kind of correct, in that one description of the effect is that you radiate heat to space from a higher altitude when you have more GHGs - of course, the graphic was misleading, but anyway. Minor point.
Two: Of course Gore showed the Mauna Loa CO2 graph. You've got to. But his explanation about the earth breathing in was a little wrong: he pointed out correctly that the northern hemisphere has more landmass and therefore vegetation than the southern. Which would lead one to naturally assume (as does Gore) that the northern hemisphere seasonal signal would dominate the southern one: except it turns out that there is a mixing period on the scale of a year or two between the two hemispheres. So that if you actually look at the data, at Mauna Loa there is a CO2 peak in May and a trough in September or so (eg, breathe in as plants grow, breathe out as they decay), and in the southern hemisphere while the cycle is much smaller and sometimes disappears in the noise, it looks like there is an October peak and a March trough. Note that my estimation comes from eyeballing the data, and I didn't subtract the linear trend out. But, anyway, minor point.
Three: Lots of pretty pictures (or depressing pictures) of disappearing glaciers. Of course, any individual glacier isn't evidence: glaciers advance and retreat all the time. Its the statistics, and he didn't show the statistics. But that is fine, because the statistics do support his point, which is that the vast majority of glaciers are retreating fast, and people should do their glacier tourism now because by the time we're all retired they'll be a lot harder to find. He also showed calving glaciers, and implied that that was global warming caused, whereas all glaciers calve on occasion. The point is that global warming is accelerating the process, so here is one of the cases where he didn't _state_ a lie, but the implication was misleading, but the takeaway point was true.
The "40% of the world's population gets their water from spring systems which are half glacier fed" is a frightening statistic. I knew the "big picture" argument (eg, a lot of countries depend on the Himalayas for their fresh water) but I hadn't internalized the numbers before.
Ice cores give a yearly record of CO2 trapped in bubbles, and Temperature records by oxygen isotope analysis. True. (there's some art in the temperature reconstruction, since basically what you are measuring is the O18:O16 ratio in historical snowfall, and that ratio is determined in part by condensation at the poles, and in part by evaporation in the oceans, and depending on air circulation patterns you are measuring the ocean surface temperature at different locations on the globe, but anyway. Cool science).
He claims you can see the Clean Air Act in Antarctic ice cores. Realclimate.org claims this is false, and I believe them.
He shows a 1000 year Northerm Hemisphere temperature reconstruction. He doesn't show the uncertainty bars on it (there are several reconstructions). Again, it is true that the reconstruction exists, and it is true that we are (almost certainly) warmer than any time in the past 1000 years and getting even warmer fast, but it would be more accurate to show a whole bunch of overlaid reconstructions because proxy temperature analysis is _hard_ and different people get different results (though they all have the same general final conclusion). More iffy is that he says "look - CO2 and temperature both go up at the end of the 1000 year period", when our best attribution work suggests that the 1880 to 1940 warming was natural, and only the 1970 to present warming is CO2 induced.
When he shows 650,000 years of history he _states_ that the CO2 and temperature relationship is very complicated, but so quickly that I think most viewers would miss it. At the end of the period, he shows CO2 rising to 2050 - while there are no #s on the graph, it looks suspiciously like CO2 reaches 500 ppm by 2050, which is on the high end of projections. (edit: looking at a paper I'm coauthor on, we actually project 400 to 600 ppm in the business as usual case, so if my guess of 500 from looking at Gore's graph was right, then in fact, he was right on the money). Anyway, he then _implies_ but does not state that if a 60 ppm difference (220 to 280) is the difference between an Ice Age and an interglacial, then what is the _huge_ difference between 280 ppm and 500 ppm going to do? Which is again, right in big picture - we are going into seriously uncharted atmospheric territory - but it is very unlikely that 500 ppm will actually cause a temperature change as big as the Ice Age/interglacial difference, which, after all, is dependent on all sorts of things like orbital radiative forcing changes and serious feedbacks from retreating ice caps of a magnitude that we can't see because there just isn't that much ice left. Of course, we aren't likely to stop at 500, so we may very well see by a world "one ice age to interglacial unit" warmer by 2200 or so... which is kind of scary...
He cites 2005 as the hottest year in recorded history. It is actually kind of tied with 1998. Of course, 1998 was an El Nino year, and so expected to be anomalously hot, whereas 2005 was a "normal" year, and so the heat is more disturbing. Minor point.
The chart he showed of ocean temperatures was, well, kind of ick in my opinion The first graph was "predicted natural variability" using a model. The 2nd was "predicted temperatures under greenhouse warming". The 3rd (falling inside the 2nd, of course) was experimental data. Basically, my issue is that our ocean heat models aren't so good. I'm perfectly fine with the conclusion: the evidence is the ocean is warming to an extent that can't be explained with natural variability, but I don't think we need to resort to model data for that.
His hurricane stuff was mostly good: obviously we can't attribute any individual hurricane to global warming, but we do for the most part expect hurricanes to get more powerful with warmer oceans, though it is complicated. His citation of 10 typhoons hitting Japan was not as good, as I believe we currently have little evidence that _frequency_ of Pacific cyclones have increased. The _intensity_ of Pacific cyclones _has_ gone up, and both the intensity and frequency of _Atlantic_ cyclones have gone up (statistically), but this research is kind of new and still not fully accepted.
Increase in precipitation (on average), likely increase in high precipitation single events, shifting of precipitation such that you get both more floods and more drought: all matches the current expectations, though regional predictions and precipitation in specific are all really hard to do.
He _shouldn't_ in my opinion have showed the "damage from severe weather events" graph, as that is probably more due to increase in property to _be_ damaged than increase in actual events. (the "increase in major flood events in Europe" graph was fine, though, as long as "major flood" is measured by water levels and not by economic impact)
I don't know if we attribute the sub-Saharan drought to global warming. Neither did he, exactly, but he implied it. I would certainly believe it is related, but again, our regional predictions are for the most part pretty bad.
His "tundra travel days" chart is misleading because I believe that it isn't that it is physically impossible to drive across the tundra when it isn't frozen, but rather that environmental regulations restrict travel on non-frozen tundra because it permanently damages the ecosystem. He kind of implied it was from trucks getting stuck in mud. Which I'm sure happens, but there is technology to deal with that. This does, of course, still show how much the arctic is warming...
He cited 5 degrees fahrenheit as the low end of predictions. I would have said 3-4 degrees as the low end for 2100. He didn't state a date. (in fact, that was a recurrent weakness: he often didn't give time scales for impacts) (the high end for 2100 would be on the order of 10-12 degrees, with a median of 7 or so)
Arctic Ocean ice free in the summers by 2050: I can believe that. I also hear that the portion of the Arctic where they released navy sub data on ice thickness was nicknamed "the Gore Box" because it was Gore's pet project.
He talked about the thermohaline collapse, and the Younger Dryas event. He implied we might need to worry about Greenland causing a recurrence. While I do worry about the thermohaline circulation shutting down, I don't think we need to worry about it causing a European ice age: if anything, it will counteract warming in Europe and keep Europe's climate more temperate. I worry more about the massive changes in regional weather patterns and ocean ecosystems that would occur after such a collapse.
His invasive species graph in Switzerland was misleading, though we do believe that invasive species thrive in disrupted environments which changing climate will cause. But today most of the disruptions are caused by non-global changes, or by people physically carrying the disruptive species from one part of the world to another. (bark beetles in Alaska is an exception)
He also listed infectious diseases and didn't ever draw a clear link to global warming. Probably because there aren't clear links, with the except of some issues like the mosquitoes and high altitude city issue.
Example of a caveat: Coral reefs bleaching will occur because of "warming and other factors". So the "other factors" is in there, but if you aren't watching for it, you won't notice it. Of course, enough warming and we won't need other factors to kill off the coral, but right now coral is dying because of warming on top of other strains.
He spends a lot of time showing the impacts of 20 feet of sea level rise. Most of the science he talks about is good, but he doesn't mention the time scale: it is highly unlikely that we will see more than 3 feet of sea level rise this century. Of course, Greenland is kind of precarious in that the reason why the center of Greenland is cold enough to maintain an ice cap is because there is so much ice there that the top of the cap is at a high (and therefore cold) altitude. Which means that if the center of Greenland ever warms enough to start general melting... well, then you get a decrease in height, followed by warming because it is at lower elevation, followed by... well, you get the picture. One professor I know thinks that once that process starts, all of Greenland will go in "a few decades" which is a scary thought. But again, I don't think that will happen this century. Then again, if you'd asked me 3 years ago, I would have said the net contribution to sea level rise from Greenland and Antarctica would be near zero, and recent evidence (which Gore cites: the whole water tunneling down and lubricating the bottom of the ice) suggests that in fact they will contribute several centimeters or more to the sea level rise that we'd predicted from thermal expansion and glacial melt (which was 20 cm to 1 m or so).
Then he talks about the scientific consensus. Again, big picture is true: there is a pretty overwhelming scientific consensus which is _not_ reflected in the popular press which often hunts a skeptic down for "equal time" quotes. But the study he cites which surveyed 960 studies and found no negative evidence (Noami Oreskes, Science or Nature, I think) - well, I read that study when it came out and despite agreeing with the conclusion I found the methodology dubious.
I hadn't remembered that Bush had appointed an API crony (Philip Cooney) to head his environmental unit. API has some of the scummiest pond suckers out there. Philip Cooney now works for Exxon Mobil, but honestly, I have more respect for Exxon Mobil's scientists than I do for the API mouthpieces. But that's probably just because I know Brian Flannery, co-author of Numerical Recipes and former astrophysicist and really smart guy, and he works for Exxon and he isn't all bad, though obviously he has a bias (note: Exxon funds some of my program's research). But one of the API pondsuckers once gave a talk at a conference I was at, and my advisor, who is normally one of the nicest and most gentle men in existence, slowly turned red and I thought he was going to get up and walk out in disgust.
When Gore got to talking about "choosing between the economy and the environment" I thought he was being a bit disingenous when he said that doing the right thing would generate jobs and wealth. While there probably are a few real "negative cost" options out there, and while certainly individual companies can profit greatly off of environmental standards, and while there may be a significant amount of "low-hanging fruit" that we could grab if there was just a small carbon price, to really deal with the climate problem will take significant resources which, even if it doesn't hurt the economy directly (which it might, through higher energy prices) will at the least be drawing resources from other research areas and problems. Of course, we'd be improving the economy of the future by delaying the necessity of moving 100 million plus people out of coastal cities in the 22nd century. But anyway.
He compared US mileage standards to Chinese mileage standards. I wonder if Chinese vehicles are actually meeting those standards? But yes, the US fleet average should be _much_ higher than it is, we're just being wasteful. But I would prefer a regulation that didn't look like CAFE, which regulates "fleet average", which ironically means for every high mileage car a company sells it can sell a low mileage one. I'd prefer a regulation that penalized low mileage cars/subsidized high mileage cars regardless of what the fleet average was. But if CAFE is all we have, we should raise CAFE. Especially on SUVs. Anyway...
Gore then went into optimistic mode, which I think is good because you want to make people leave the movie thinking that they can do something, because going "from disbelief to despair" isn't very useful. However, his citation of the "wedge paper" (Pacala & Socolow, Science, 2005) was... well... okay, _everyone_ cites the paper now because it entered the popular scientific consciousness, but I think it downplays the difficulties in a) implementing the wedges, and b) going beyond 2050. I was interested to see that 1) Gore didn't include any of the nuclear wedges from the paper, but 2) he _did_ include CO2 sequestration and even drew attention to it by saying "we'll see more of this". CO2 sequestration (at the gigaton scale) is basically taking CO2 from coal plants and shoving it underground. Controversial in some environmental circles. Most of the people I know accept it as part of a "bridging strategy" to slow down CO2 growth in the next few decades until we get better solutions.
He also talked about "reducing personal carbon emission to zero". This is practically impossible, unless he is talking about using carbon offsets like Carbonfund.org, which are... kind of fuzzy. Though better than nothing, I guess. I occasionally think about starting to buy them myself, but haven't yet. I think that real personal reductions and persuading government to make regulations are both much better than offsets, if possible.
"At stake: our ability to live on this earth and continue as a civilization": I think this statement was exaggerated. Global warming might be very, very bad but I don't think it will be civilization ending.
Other notes:
Good quotes from Churchill, Mark Twain, and someone else famous (Sinclair?). I wish I had been fast enough to write them down.
The tobacco analogy I thought was powerful: we don't like admitting that we're doing something wrong until it really slams us in the face, and of course it the tobacco issue was very personal in his case. The frog analogy was also good, though I have heard that frogs don't actually behave that way.
Good question about "How do we react when we hear warnings?"
Did Marburger really teach Gore in 6th grade???
Overall Impression:
Facts Cited: Good
Caveats Used: Fairly Good
Big Picture, eg, Man is Causing Global Warming, it will be bad, we should work on stopping it: Good, though I might have put in a little more uncertainty (it is _very likely_ to be bad)
Some of the implied bits in between the facts and the big picture, on the other hand, were kind of misleading. Also, while the caveats were good, you had to be paying attention to catch them.
Movie Overall: Good, well worth watching, and mostly scientifically accurate.
And this ends my report. =)
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Oh, right, I had a question
Date: 2006-06-19 01:51 pm (UTC)Thanks!
Date: 2006-06-19 02:39 pm (UTC)unless he is talking about using carbon offsets like Carbonfund.org, which are... kind of fuzzy.
Can you elaborate? I'm seriously considering working something like that into my travel budget, so at least our discretionary expenses could zero out?
no subject
Date: 2006-06-19 02:45 pm (UTC)CAFE
Date: 2006-06-19 03:00 pm (UTC)Dear God, no.
CAFE doesn't apply to (really large) SUVs at all, which is one of the problems with it (because it couldn't work if you apply it to trucks, and then you get into 'what is a truck' etc). But the real problem arises from the attempt to pretend that CAFE is free, because it's 'just regulation'.
You note that for every high mileage car a company sells it can sell a low mileage one. Thus, the actual effect of CAFE is not spending more on SUVs to get higher mileage (which is the intent, but we want to pretend this is free, so the rule doesn't say that); that isn't cost-effective. The actual result is that car companies sell as many tiny high-mileage, low-cost subcompacts as possible without actually losing major money on them.
The net result is a higher average mileage, but only by adding high-mileage cars, not by improving the mileage of low-mileage ones (thus making mass transit less viable, etc.) It probably has the safe effect in other countries by creating a glut of used cars that are exported.
CAFE, in short, is responsible for the smog in Mexico City.
(I'm probably exaggerating a bit here - I'd love to see a proper economic analysis - but really, if CAFE is the answer you've got the wrong question. Now, if you want to replace it with a carbon tax, let me know where to sign!)
quotes
Date: 2006-06-19 03:19 pm (UTC)The Churchill one was very good, but I can't find it quickly. I don't remember the Twain quote at all.
Re: CAFE
Date: 2006-06-19 03:22 pm (UTC)Re: Mexico City: The city used to export used cars to the rest of the Mexican countryside until it implemented "Hoy no Circula", which basically meant that every vehicle had a day when it couldn't be driven. The short term (1-2 year) impact was a drop in emissions and increase in public transit use. The long term impact was that households decided they needed a 2nd car for the "off day", and they could only afford cheap dirty 2nd cars, and if you have 2 cars with 6 days each that's 12 days which is more than 7, so driving went up and congestion went up and emissions per vehicle went up. The program has since been modified such that new clean cars don't have "off days", and the dirtiest cars have 2 days they can't be driven, in an attempt to encourage shifts to cleaner cars, but it was kind of too little too late... Also, private autos in Mexico City, even after this program, are only responsible for 25% of NOx and 15% of VOCs, so there are plenty of other reasons for Mexican smog.
Re: quotes
Date: 2006-06-19 03:23 pm (UTC)Churchill: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences."
Re: Thanks!
Date: 2006-06-19 03:32 pm (UTC)The issue is how one determines that you've actually reduced a ton of CO2. If there was an actual global cap on emissions, and you bought and emissions credit and retired it, that would be a real reduction. But buying an emission credit from a renewable energy installation - well, it is good thing in that you are subsidizing clean energy, but I'm not convinced that that is equivalent to an emissions reduction. But maybe if these funds get big enough, they will make the transition to a real cap easier, so who knows. I still think they are fuzzy.
Re: Oh, right, I had a question
Date: 2006-06-19 03:43 pm (UTC)Re: quotes
Date: 2006-06-19 03:44 pm (UTC)Re: CAFE
Date: 2006-06-19 03:50 pm (UTC)CAFE: Yeah, if the US market is saturated that might make the export problem much worse; I've seen speculation about this before but don't recall if I've seen analysis or not. It strikes me that in general non-global rule-based regulation of this sort of fungible resource is pretty much guaranteed to have perverse consequences. If we magically doubled mileage of every car in the US, it would drive down global oil prices, increasing demand in the developing countries, possibly to the point of giving back most of that gain. It's a hard problem.
Re: Thanks!
Date: 2006-06-19 03:53 pm (UTC)(I want to be able to determine an actual cost when looking at energy efficient options. Not just the cost of energy, but the cost of carbon. Emission certificates seem more relevent to this than offsets.)
I'm not finding the carbonfund site sufficiently detailed to make me happy.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-19 04:36 pm (UTC)Ooh! I can step in here. We did a report last year on the likely impact of global warming on vector-borne disease!
You are right in general that there are a lot of infectious diseases that won't really be impacted. They are much more dependent on population dynamics (behaviors, population density, travel) than on global warming. But there is a real effect seen in the natural range of vectors such as mosquitoes. What do we need to worry about?
(1) Right now we don't have much locally transmitted malaria: just about a case a year for the last 50 years, but we do have one to two thousand imported cases which could at any time re-infect local populations of mosquitoes. In the early part of the 20th century malaria was still endemic in the south. There's no reason why it couldn't be again. How did we combat it then? Massive environmental campaigns of draining wetlands and such. Mucho dinero. And of course we still don't have a vaccine, and god forbid we get a drug-resistant sort.
(2) But you could say, well, we conquered malaria before, so what next? Well, there's dengue fever and yellow fever, both common in the warmer regions of Central America. There is no treatment for dengue other than supportive treatment (makes sure you're comfortable and hydrated) since it's a virus. We already have signs of more dengue fever infiltrating southern states such as Texas. We could see a big increase in this disease.
(3)Other vectors such as ticks shouldn't be discounted. There are about 20,000 cases (yes, that order of magnitude is correct) of Lyme disease each year. Okay, so it's not as scary as yellow fever and malaria but it can be debilitating if untreated and certainly no one would choose to get it. The ticks are on the move just like the mosquitoes.
(4) And none of this takes into account the health effects such as heat stroke or lack of access to clean water after major flooding.
So in short, there is a real threat on the infectious disease side. Is it gonna hit us all at once? Of course not. We'll just have extra reasons not to live in Florida or Texas -- or alternately, reasons to spend all our time indoors (no exposure = no disease). Still, it's a consideration.
carbonfund.org
Date: 2006-06-19 05:12 pm (UTC)Re: Thanks!
Date: 2006-06-19 05:13 pm (UTC)Yeah, they're irritatingly vague about what they actually do.
"Hoy no Circula"
Date: 2006-06-19 05:15 pm (UTC)the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-20 05:59 pm (UTC)Actually, make that two questions. I recall seeing something about the oil industry starting to use pumping CO2 into mostly spent wells to force out more oil. I gather they currently use CO2 they make, but there as some talk about tying to get them to instead pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for that purpose instead. Is this whole concept of pumping the CO2 underground just crazy? Is it likely to just pop back out at a later date?
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-21 02:53 am (UTC)Or, a better more technical pointer: the paper (http://fire.pppl.gov/energy_socolow_081304.pdf)
The nice part of this paper: it shows that we have current technologies which can accomplish a lot, but it emphasizes that we will need a "basket" of solutions, not one silver bullet. The drawback of the paper: there is some double counting. Both because the "business as usual" case assumes a lot of efficiency improvements, and because several of the wedges actually overlap each other. Another issue is that beyond 2050, we will need advanced technologies. But really, if we can actually keep emissions constant for 40 years, that would be very, very impressive.
On the oil industry: yup, CO2 is often used for "enhanced oil recovery", but most of the CO2 used is actually CO2 from underground in the first place. CO2 sequestration is a very similar process, using similar technologies, only you often want to inject the CO2 into saline aquifers or other deeper holes so it doesn't come back out again. The one example I know of in operation now is Sleipner in Norway, where they have to separate out CO2 from the natural gas before they can sell the gas. Because Norway has a carbon tax, venting the CO2 would be expensive, so they inject it back underground. (Some people are still dubious about how long the CO2 will stay underground, but there are natural CO2 reservoirs that have lasted for millions of years, so as long as people are careful about their reservoir choices, it should be possible for us to find good storage spots too)
Now, if we want a full "wedge" of this, we need to capture a lot more CO2. The front runner for this is taking the CO2 rich stream coming out of coal-fired power plants, purifying the CO2, and condensing it. This is especially nice for the new technology "integrated gasification and combined cycle" plants which actually gasify the coal and turn it into hydrogen, and the hydrogen gets burned in a gas turbine... and the carbon is mostly a pure CO2 stream already!
There are some people who think that it is possible to pull CO2 directly out of the air. One guy at Penn State (I think) wants to build these huge towers which force air through aqueous calcium containing solutions. The calcium binds the CO2 and makes calcium carbonate. Of course, you need to regenerate the calcium, by driving the CO2 off and capturing it, and that is hugely energy intensive. So most of the people I work with think this isn't at all practical on large scales, and maybe even not thermodynamically possible unless you have carbon free power.
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-21 03:20 am (UTC)Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-21 05:10 pm (UTC)I'll point out that trees _do_ have access to carbon free power. And in fact, net ecosystem uptake is already order 1 gigaton carbon/year, from forest regrowth, fire suppression, and CO2 fertilization. Of course, getting another gigaton per year from forest planting would take huge tracts of land !
There have been some combination plans involving growing algae off the exhaust from coal plants, thereby using nice carbon-free sunlight energy _and_ high CO2 streams to grow stuff that can be easily converted into liquid biodiesel.
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-22 03:17 pm (UTC)Obviously I knew what you meant, but I figure if we've got access to a carbon sequestration technology that's been developed and tested over 1.6 billion years, we should make use of it.
Seriously, if we get a truly global carbon protocol, we should award credits for having lots of trees.
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-22 05:26 pm (UTC)I certainly think there should be incentives for encouraging bio-uptake (trees or switchgrass or whatever) and disincentives for releasing biogenic carbon (eg clearcutting amazonian rainforest). I'm not clear if this should be included in the same trading system as everything else... there are arguments for it (standard economic "let the market figure out the cheapest alternative"), but also arguments against ("its temporary. What if Country A plants trees and sells credits to Country B in year 5, then in year 10 Country A backs out of the treaty and burns its forests down?", and also that measurement is much more difficult than for fossil fuels. Presuming, of course, that you are doing the "right thing" and doing the carbon accounting at the wellhead/mine mouth rather than trying to do the much trickier accounting downstream at the vehicle or power plant)
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-23 02:55 am (UTC)Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-23 03:48 am (UTC)I would have thought that measuring vegetation could be done reasonably accurately by satellite, but I know absolutely nothing about that question.
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-23 02:33 pm (UTC)Kyoto is still distributed annually (well, for 4 year periods), even if it does have the kind of stupid 1990 benchmark. Allocation based on a variable is mostly better, though it runs into the problem that, for example, were you to base on population - which is politically infeasible anyway - you are kind of giving incentives to grow your population, which isn't good. Basing on GDP might be better, because you want to give people incentives to produce more, but then you get into issues of whether to use regular GDP or one of the "green" GDP measures, plus it sucks if you go into a recession because now not only are you in a recession but your allowances have suddenly shrunk.
The inverse modeling problem to determine carbon sources and sinks is actually kind of hard. We can't even accurately partition sinks between ocean and ecosystems, much less accurately determine sinks for a given country. You can make "ground cover" approximations, but it turns out that a significant fraction of the US sink, for example, comes from fire suppression in the west which is a) not visible from satellites (brush buildup under the canopy), and b) it will probably eventually lead to nasty forest fires which will release all the carbon you were storing.
Re: the wedge paper & carbon sequestering
Date: 2006-06-25 02:35 am (UTC)Seems to me that the penalty for burning stuff ought to be the same, regardless of whether the stuff you're burning was planted before or after you signed the treaty.
Re: how to allocate credits, yeah, there could be a perverse incentive to grow your population, but I don't know how big a problem that would be practically speaking. Your allocation of carbon per person would be the same, so unless you have some major economies of scale working at a country-level scale (unlikely), your people aren't actually any wealthier as a result of the increased allocation.
I know nothing about "green" GDP measures, but without thinking too deeply about it, it seems like it would be equivalent to the idea about credits for being forest rangers, with the same problems of how to measure carbon sinks.