https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-legacy-of-al-gores-an-inconvenient
By ROGER PIELKE JR.
Excerpt:
An Inconvenient Truth was not really about science; it was a sermon — complete with a moral arc (with those who are evil and those who are righteous), a clear account of sin (fossil fuel emissions), a warning of coming judgment (floods, storms, tipping points), and a path to redemption (political will, renewable energy, personal responsibility). The film ends with a call to conversion.
Gore was part of a broader trend in which leaders of the scientific community were increasingly associating themselves with Democratic politics.
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Gore was using science symbolically to preach the gospel of the “New Apocalypticism” — and scientists rose to their feet to give an “Amen.”
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Gore also got some things very wrong:
Hurricanes. The theatrical poster — a hurricane emerging from an industrial smokestack (shown above) — strongly suggested causality. Gore presented the active 2005 Atlantic hurricane season as part of an ongoing trend. Ironically, for more than a decade after AIT was released not a single major hurricane made landfall on the continental United States, and today the science of tropical cyclones still does not support claims of detection or attribution of trends, with high confidence.
Sea level rise. Gore claimed that melting ice sheets could produce twenty feet of sea level rise “in the near future,” accompanied by animated maps drowning present-day Manhattan and south Florida. Gore’s claims departed significantly from the IPCC then and now, without acknowledging that he was advancing fringe views.
Lake Chad misattribution. Gore presented the shrinkage of Lake Chad (bordered by Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon) as a consequence of climate change. He should have known better: Coe and Foley (2001) attributed about half the lake’s decline to agricultural water extraction, with multi-decadal Sahel rainfall variability accounting the rest. Today, ironically, increased rainfall and flooding in the Lake Chad region is also blamed on climate change.
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