Juvenescence for the Brain

A friend of mine posted an article today poking fun at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. As with most criticisms against Gore, it relies on two specific points: that <insert particular city or region> received a lot of snow this winter, thereby irrevocably and scientifically refuting the notion of climate change… and that Gore is a money-grubbing, self-aggrandizing preacher who’s pursuing this issue more for personal reasons than for any greater sense of public service.

As for the first one, I rarely know how to even begin countering such a statement. Typically, a person using this argument is committing a number of logical fallacies. For starters, they imply that weather in a given (tiny) area is somehow reflective of the planetary climate as a whole. This is like generating a U.S. Census by surveying only families living on the Jersey Shore.

Secondly, they confuse the message about climate change with that of global warming. Yes, the two are related, yet completely distinct. Climate change has no significant detractors. The climate is changing, and it’s changing faster and in more peculiar ways than we can possibly predict. Humans are at the root of much of this change. That much is agreed upon by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.

global warming may or may not be a legitimate, long-term trend, but climate change is.

Global warming is a different story. Even with thousands of scientists working to understand the climatological processes we face, its not entirely clear how today’s climate will differ from that of ten, twenty, or a hundred years in the future. If you’ve ever learned much about Earth and how its climate works, you will have realized how overwhelmingly complex it is, and how difficult it can be to predict anything. So far, the temperature on our planet has increased noticeably (to scientists) over the past half-century. We think that the trend will continue, but the main point here is this: whether or not global warming is a legitimate, long-term trend, climate change most definitely is.

True, Gore doesn’t make this distinction very clear. However, perhaps it’s better that he shouldn’t. His film is neither directed toward scientists nor politicians, but rather the average viewer — a viewer whose attention span narrows with each passing year. With his main goal being to hammer home the importance of climate issues, it may actually be more effective to dumb down the message.

Many people also deride Gore’s lifestyle, insinuating that someone who cares so much about the environment shouldn’t fly around in a private jet, have such a big house, etc etc. He’s suuucch a huge hypocrite for putting out a supposedly “environmentalist” film and then guzzling jet fuel to bounce around the country. To such a person, I would ask this: what have you done recently to inform the public about climate change?

No, really! You think you’ve got Gore all figured out, huh? He’s just doing this whole “environment” routine so he can assuage himself for having never become President. To collect royalties on his movie, and his book. To get an ego-massaging Nobel Peace Prize. Right?

Come on, people. If you created an equation that related the tangible and intangible results of his ongoing efforts to raise awareness about climate change with his carbon footprint, I think you would find that he still comes out as overwhelmingly “green”. Let’s (I believe, safely) assume that few or none of his critics have actually spent any of their own time or energy in support of the climate issue. In that case, their mere existence on the planet represents a far more negative influence on the environment, even without private jets…

Long story short: it’s going to take enough energy and thought, as is, to repair our environment and ensure its stability for future generations. Why in the hell does it seem productive to nitpick, misdirect, and misinform? At the end of the day, I must acquiesce to you Gore critics — yes, you have proven that Al Gore is a human. What now? Take that energy and pour it into something that will help the situation, not alienate and anger people.