James Risen’s compelling book, State of War
James Risen’s Compelling
State of War,
The Secret History Of The C.I.A. And The Bush Administration
by Henry Edward Hardy
State of War, (Free Press, 2006) is the bestselling expose of the Bush administration’s manipulations of the U.S. intelligence community. In State of War, New York Times national security reporter James Risen accuses the George W. Bush administration of massaging intelligence to support their post-9/11 political agenda.
Risen has written one-ninth of a blockbuster book about the CIA and the Bush administration. That is to say, one of the nine chapters has spawned a continuing national controversy and talk of impeaching George W. Bush. Curiously, the no-less explosive material in the rest of the book has been met with resounding silence by the mainstream American media.
Risen’s most resounding charge is that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in widespread and systematic surveillance within the United States in contravention of the law.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978:
“A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally —
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
(2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.”
The imminent publication of Risen’s book caused The New York Times to reveal that it had known of, and suppressed, news of warrantless National Security Agency surveillance of Americans for a year. In a Times story on Dec. 16, 2005 titled, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” Risen and co-author Eric Lichtblau revealed that the NSA, under direction from the Bush administration, had engaged in widespread violations of the FISA law by engaging in warrantless surveillance of Americans.
The reason The New York Times waited so long to run the NSA eavesdropping story remains murky. In a New Year’s Day column titled, “Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence,” the Times Public Editor, Brian Calame wrote, “For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making,” leaving both Mr. Calame and the public to wonder what machinations underlay the year-long hold on the story and the subsequent decision to publish.
The NSA program was fueled by concern that foreign calls routed through the U.S. were not being monitored because of the probable cause stipulation under FISA. But once the “back door” capability was in place at the major telecommunications hubs, the program expanded to include calls in which one, and sometimes both callers were physically within the U.S. In the absence of any congressional or judicial oversight, there must be tremendous temptation to listen first, and seek a warrant later if at all. The implications of such widespread illegality raises a number of questions. Have we seen the beginnings of an electronic police state such as was envisaged in George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ?
Risen recounts a fascinating story of 30 relatives of people who were known to have had a role in Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear bomb effort. Recruited by the CIA before the Iraq war to investigate their relatives’ knowledge of alleged WMDs, all 30, according to Risen, returned from Iraq with the same message: the programs had been shut down and the personnel mothballed.
What Risen does not provide is evidence. Much of the book has the odor of sour grapes from CIA, FBI and State Department lifers who have been run over or shunted aside by the gun-happy Vice President Dick Cheney. For more in this vein the curious reader might consult Imperial Hubris by Anonymous, as well as former Bush counter-terror czar Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies.
The allegations in State of War deserve a full public inquiry. If true, then the republic stands at a crisis, having fallen into the hands of fools and/or traitors. On the other hand, if false, then these accusations deserve to be discredited and laid to rest. Either way, one should read this book in order to gain a clearer perspective on what these charges against the administration are and how much or how little evidence there is to support them.
A version of this review was previously published in Current Magazine and at eCurrent.com.
State of War (Metacritic)
James Risen (wikipedia)
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Federation of American Scientists)
Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence. New York Times, January 1, 2006.
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
“Control Room” Delivers Some Bitterly Ironic Retrospection
Control Room
Delivers Some Bitterly Ironic Retrospection
by Henry Edward Hardy
If 2004 was The Year of the Documentary, then Control Room, Jehane Noujaim’s film on the independent Arab News channel, Al-Jazeera, ranks among the best. Control Room tells the story of the network and the early days of the Iraq War through the eyes of Jazeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim, senior producer Samir Khader and U.S. spokesperson Lieutenant Josh Rushing.
Khader makes penetrating points about the climate of fear perpetuated inside the U.S. by the Administration, and both he and Ibrahim express substantial (and warranted) skepticism about Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.
“Pulverized. Dead bodies en masse — and why? We get these pictures and we show them. Unfortunately we get grief from the Americans who say we are inciting rebellion, instigating anti-American sentiments. They cannot have their cake and eat it,” says Ibrahim.
Lt. Rushing is a surprisingly appealing figure in the film, genuinely troubled by many of the inconsistencies between the war as he is told to present it and the feedback and questions presented by foreign press such as Jazeera.
The film shows powerfully how both Al-Jazeera and western coverage are manipulated by reporters, producers, governments and public opinion. We see how the iconic footage of the statue of Saddam being toppled was the result of a U.S. “Psyops” (psychological operations) battalion’s efforts and not a spontaneous uprising of the Iraqi people.
We see civilian casualties, simple homes of simple people. A woman stands in front of a house with its front blown off and shouts, “Welcome to my house, Mr. Bush. Look at this! Don’t you have any humanity? How can you accept a little girl crying for her mom and dad?”
We then cut to U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, explaining, “What they do is when a bomb goes down, they grab some children, and some women, and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children,” Rumsfeld continues with a death’s-head, rictus-like grin. “To the extent that people lie, ultimately they are caught lying. They lose their credibility. And one would think that that wouldn’t take long dealing with people like this.”
Viewing the film now is informed by subsequent revelations. One cannot help a bitter smile at the irony and self-serving hypocrisy of Bush when he says he expects Iraq to treat U.S. captives humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, as he asserts, the U.S. treats its captives.
Control Room is available on DVD and VHS and for rental from local video stores.
A version of this article was previously published in Current Magazine and on Electric Current, http://www.eCurrent.com .
Control Room (IMDB)
Control Room (Rotten Tomatoes)
Control Room (wikipedia)
Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
The Power of Nightmares: Film-maker Adam Curtis Uncovers the Truth (and Lies) About Terrorism
The Power of Nightmares:
Film-maker Adam Curtis Uncovers the Truth (and Lies) About Terrorism
by Henry Edward Hardy
Americans are voicing growing concern over the progress of the war in Iraq. A 37-year Marine veteran and chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Representative John Murtha said in November 2005, “The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.” British film-maker Adam Curtis explores the use of illusion and deception by American neo-conservatives and the Muslim extremist jihadi to inflate the threat of terrorism in The Power of Nightmares. This timely BBC documentary has not been widely distributed in the United States, but is currently available on the World Wide Web.
Curtis presents a startling thesis. Throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides maintained their popularity and legitimacy through promises of a better life. Those promises failed, however, and leaders found their authority hampered by public mistrust and cynicism. In the post-9/11 climate, politicians revisited another way of powerfully motivating public attention and obedience: fear — terror from an invisible enemy, an “Al Qaeda network” whose operatives could be anywhere and everywhere. Curtis claims that this terrorist super-organization is a fantasy, an illusion deliberately manufactured and maintained.
Hebrew University Professor of Political Science and American Studies David Ricci currently (2006) teaches about American political conservatism at the University of Michigan, and he agrees with Curtis about this illusion. “There are some elements in the world of Islam who are extremists. There are people who are trying to revolutionize Islam, no less attack the United States. But I don’t see them as this enormous conspiracy. I am inclined to see them as particular groups which have some common interests and therefore cooperate with each other,” says Ricci. “For some publicity purposes, it helps to talk about ‘Al Qaeda’ as if it’s this enormous monster.”
Ricci suggests that the language used to frame the war is misleading. “The idea of talking about a ‘war on terror’ is unrealistic. The real war is against ‘terrorists,’ not ‘terrorism.'”
The Power of Nightmares was first shown on BBC television in the fall of 2004, and an edited version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2005. It was also scheduled for New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival and on CBC television. Curtis says, “Something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11. A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show it …. He added, ‘We would get slaughtered if we put this out.'”
The three-part series traces the evolution of two groups which have manipulated the image of “Islamic terrorism” for their own ends. In Egypt followers of the Muslim Brotherhood thinker Sayyid Qutb were impressed by his revulsion of Western decadence. After series of attempted coups and assassinations failed to produce popular revolutions, Qutb and his followers decided that the infidel West and the decadent Muslim leaders weren’t the only ones who had fallen into jahaliyah, or a state like that of the world before Muhammad. The Arab masses had also become unsanctified and essentially non-Muslim, and they could now be killed. Among those influenced by Qutb were Islamic Jihad figure Ayman Al-Zawahiri and later, a financier of the U.S.-sponsored Afghan resistance, Usama bin Laden.
In the West, another influential figure was also revolted by the laxness, immorality and cynicism of liberal Western culture. At the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, philosopher Leo Strauss taught that sometimes a “noble lie” is justified in order to provide society with unifying myths.
“Strauss was a refugee from Nazi Germany,” says Ricci. “He, who had just fled from one of the worst manifestations in the modern world, was offering this view to his students. And they were very, very good students, and they went out into other universities and into the world of public affairs.” Among the followers of Strauss’s school of political philosophy are U.S. neo-conservatives such as Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, American Enterprise Institute Scholar Michael Ledeen, and Richard Pearle, former chair of the Defense Policy Review Board for President George W. Bush.
“Neo-conservatives are a very loosely knit group of people,” says Ricci. “They were being turned off by the counterculture of the 1960s and the early 1970s.” He says, “They wanted to conserve the American way of life.” They saw themselves more as revolutionaries than conservatives, however.
The series follows the origin of the neo-conservatives and the jihadi in the 1950s, their coalition in the CIA-supported resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the subsequent breakup of the U.S.S.R. and events leading up to and following 9/11.
This thoroughly researched documentary uses authoritative primary sources. Curtis interviews at length the head of the Arab Afghan resistance. He also interviews several of the most prominent neo-conservatives. The editing is fast-paced and montage-like and contains a lot of oblique commentary in clips and stock footage presented in a light, sarcastic vein.
There has been considerable dissent within the U.S. military and bureaucracy against the undermining of traditional American values by the “neo-cons” in the administration. On October 19, 2005 first-term Bush State Department Chief of Staff and retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said, “What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.”
The Power of Nightmares does a fine job of laying bare the ideology, structure and history of this “cabal.” Where Curtis errs is in saying that before 9/11 there never was an organization called “Al Qaeda.”
Former U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who died suddenly in August 2005, wrote in the July 8, 2005 Guardian that “Al Qaeda, literally ‘the database,’ was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahedeen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.” A key figure in the mujahedeen was Usama bin Laden. Cook observed, “It never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden’s organization would turn its attention to the West.” He also wrote, “So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail.”
The Power of Nightmares tears down walls of myth and obfuscation — myths which are used to sell products from “Homeland Security” to “home security.” No wonder commercial networks and the Republican-eviscerated PBS won’t show it. In explaining why the BBC has run this program, BBC Director of Factual and Learning John Willis reminds us of the words of former CBS News President (and Edward R. Murrow producer) Fred Friendly: “‘Our job is not to make up anyone’s mind but to make the agony of decision making so intense you can only escape by thinking.'”
The Adam Curtis documentary The Power of Nightmares has been available free as streaming or downloadable MP4 movie files at the Internet Archive’s Internet library at http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares/
A longer excerpt from the interview with Professor David Ricci will be available on the Web at http://www.ecurrent.com/art/ricci0106.php .
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on http://eCurrent.com/ .
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Between Eraserhead and The Grapes of Wrath : The American Astronaut
Between Eraserhead and The Grapes of Wrath dances
The American Astronaut
by Henry Edward Hardy
The American Astronaut (2001) is surely the best, worst, and only, black-and-white comedy-western-sci-fi rockabilly punk surrealistic musical. Think of it as one part Luis Bruñel’s Un chien andalou, one part David Lynch’s Eraserhead, one part John Carpenter’s Dark Star, three parts punk-shockabilly music video, one part Devo show, one part Busby Berkeley extravaganza, one part John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath plus liberal doses of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Now add a cat, a cloned woman in a box, the Blueberry Pirate, the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast and a mad Professor who kills for no reason and you have the basic ingredients for this unique film.
The American Astronaut is the work of Cory McAbee and his band “The Billy Nayer Show.” The music is polymorphous, ranging from chants to rockabilly to hardcore post-punk. Rocco Sisto goes far over the top as Professor Hess, a Doctor Strangelove-like character as William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski might write him. The Professor pursues bushy side-burned protagonist Samuel Curtis (McAbee) and his companions throughout the dilapidated bar, mining colony and space barn of this rather minimal solar system.
The special effects and props in The American Astronaut are intentionally on the level of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space or Robot Monster. This is a boy’s universe; women are abstracted to the succinct tale of a woman’s breast as told by the Boy: “It was soft and round.” The film has a disconcerting but somewhat charming nastiness to it. Veteran character actor Tom Aldredge’s long, spellbinding recitation of the old saw about the “Hertz Donut” is weirder and creepier in its funny-not-funniness than anything this side of The Aristocrats.
The 2005 video release special features section includes storyboards, promotional art, and a talk-through by McAbee during a live showing of the film in a New York bar. Also included is the peculiar chant, “Don’t you fear the Yeti’s of Rio? No, no, no, no, no, no!”
The American Astronaut is at least half-witty, and the production numbers are spectacular in a grimy way. The high contrast black-and-white cinematography is outstanding, and the music is energetic and entertaining. This very strange film is worth a look for those with a sense of humor and an open mind.
The American Astronaut is now available on DVD. For more information, visit http://www.americanastronaut.com.
A version of this review was previously published in Current Magazine and at Electric Current.
The American Astronaut
The American Astronaut (IMDB)
The American Astronaut (Rotten Tomatoes)
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Do several convenient half-truths make “An Inconvenient Truth”?
Do several convenient half-truths make “An Inconvenient Truth”?
by Henry Edward Hardy
v. 1.06
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
–Al Gore, purportedly quoting Mark Twain
I really thought I would like, even love the new Davis Guggenheim film about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Not only was the film “scientifically accurate”, I read, Gore was relaxed and likable! I wanted to see this new, Gumby-like, personable and flexible Gore.
And I do like the new, new Al Gore. He is charming and very believable. Unfortunately the redacted version of his family and political history omits several “inconvenient truths”. And the scientific arguments he presents are at best anecdotal and oversimplified, and at worst, either speculative and unsupported by clear evidence, or are just plain wrong.
There are basically two components of this film. One is Gore’s slickly produced multimedia show on global warming and climate change. Intercut with this are a series of soft-focus, personal vignettes of the sort usually seen in half-hour paid political advertisements during presidential campaigns.
Who was Al Gore, Sr.?
We learn that Gore’s father was a tobacco farmer. And we learn that Gore’s sister, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer. And Dad and son were so remorseful they never grew tobacco again. This is very touching and well-produced, certain to give the sense that Gore has acknowledged, grown and learned from his mistakes and life experience. But has he?
There’s a few inconvenient facts about Gore’s family which go unmentioned. Far from being only a small to middling southern tobacco farmer, what we don’t learn is that Al Gore Sr. was one of the wealthiest, and longest serving members of Congress in his time, serving 7 terms in the US House and three terms in the US Senate. We don’t learn of Gore Sr. and Jr.’s relationship with their political and financial mentor, Dr. Armand Hammer, Chairman of Occidental Petroleum and arguably one of the wealthiest and most influential men of his time. Hammer was a fascinating character. One the one hand, his father, Julius Hammer, was one of the founding members of the Communist Party USA and Hammer himself was perhaps the only American capitalist to receive the Order of Lenin, the highest national Order of the old Soviet Union. According to The New York Times, Dr. Hammer’s first name was derived both from the name of the Dumas character, Armand Duval, in “La Dame aux Camelias” and from the arm-and-hammer symbol of socialist labor. (Not after the baking soda brand, though Hammer did later in life buy a minority stake in the company). On the other hand, Hammer was a confidant of and major supporter of President Richard Nixon. Hammer was convicted of making illegal contributions to Nixon and sentenced to a year in prison. However, he never served any time as he was pardoned by George Bush the First.
We don’t hear anything about how Gore Sr. became Vice President of Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum after leaving the Senate, nor do we learn of how the elder Gore went on the be chairman of the Island Creek Coal Company in Lexington, Kentucky. Nor do we hear anything about Gore Sr.’s most famous triumph, the passage of the Interstate Highway Act. This Act transferred millions of defense dollars into building the familiar system of interstate roads. This represented a huge transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector and a vast and lasting gift to the automobile, petroleum, and manufacturing mega-corporations. The car went from being a luxury to being a necessity. The commuter culture and suburbia were born. Vast tracts of undeveloped or agricultural land were paved over. Vast amounts of asphalt were produced, liberating vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere and vast amounts of pollutants into groundwater and streams. Oh but we are oh so sorry about the tobacco. But no mention of these other things. Hmmm.
Who is Al Gore, Jr.?
So much for the sins of the father. But how about Gore Jr? Apparently he’s always been a liberal. At least one could easily form that impression from the movie. No mention of Gore’s support for the Hyde Amendment or his pattern of anti-abortion voting up to 1988. No mention of his enthusiastic support as one of eleven Democrats to cross party lines in the Senate to vote for Gulf War I. No mention of his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia, the US “humanitarian” invasion and occupation of Somalia, or other imperial misadventures of the Clinton administration. So much for Gore’s platitudinous mea culpas. They ring pretty hollow compared with the record of his very real mistakes. So much easier not to talk about these “inconvenient truths”.
What really causes the earth to be warm?
Gore attributes much of global warming to “the greenhouse effect”. One gets the strong impression based on gigantic charts Gore projects that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are primarily responsible for the observed warming. These charts are misleading for several reasons. The charts are not to scale and do not have their origin at 0,0, thus making them very deceptive. They don’t clearly display the units of measurement. The data isn’t properly sourced. Finally, coincidence does not in itself imply or prove causation.
Ok now for the real science which Gore omits. This is really pretty simple, its all basic algebra and geometry with a very little bit of optional trig. Imagine we have a black ball sitting in cold, empty space. Now we shine a light on it. The ball will heat up until the energy it emits is equal to the energy it receives. This is called “thermal equilibrium”.
We can calculate the temperature of the ball and the frequency of the energy it radiates via a lovely and elegant equation called the “Stephan-Boltzmann Law”. This emitted energy is sometimes referred to as “black-body radiation” as it is the ideal thermodynamic description of a “perfect” radiator. The energy given in terms of watts per square meter per unit time is equal to the absolute temperature in Kelvin raised to the 4rth power times a constant, called the Boltzmann constant (= about 1.3807 x 10 ^ -23 J K ^ -1).
Well suffice it to say the most important input into the earth as a thermodynamic system is the sun’s energy striking the earth, measured as “incident solar radiation”.
However, the earth is actually a good deal cooler than we would predict if it were a classical black body. Whats up with that?
Well, the earth isn’t really black. It reflects back some of the light without absorbing and re-emitting it. The percentage of light which is reflected from an object rather than being absorbed is called the “albedo”. The higher the albedo, the “whiter” the object, and the more light it reflects, the less it absorbs, and the cooler it will be.
There are a couple of problems with the “greenhouse effect” analogy. First off, that isn’t how real greenhouses work. Glass doesn’t “reflect” radiation, it absorbs it, thus lowering the albedo, and increasing the temperature derived from the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Gore shows a chart showing light coming in, bouncing off the earth’s surface, then being trapped in the atmosphere and bouncing up and down. (The whole graphical presentation reminded me strongly of the 1955 Disney film, “Conquest of Space” based in part on the book by German-American rocket scientist Willy Ley). Gore quickly glosses over this part by saying “you all already know this”. However, it is completely wrong.
Carbon dioxide (and other, more powerful “greenhouse” gasses such as methane, which Gore omits to discuss in the film) don’t “reflect” infrared radiation. If they did, they would *cool* the earth rather than warming it by reflecting away more of the incident solar radiation, thus raising the albedo. In fact, the correct explanation is that they *absorb* more radiation, thus lowering the albedo and consequently raising the temperature of the earth a little bit. Most of the albedo however is derived from the albedo of the surface particularly where ice is present (as Gore correctly, but self-inconsistently points out). Another factor is that the incoming radiation may be in one frequency range, and the “black body” radiation at another frequency range, and the constituents of the earth and its atmosphere may reflect or absorb these wavelengths to different degrees. This effect is called “radiative forcing”. But Gore’s picture of the atmosphere capturing and reflecting light back to the earth like a one-way mirror — nope that’s just flat wrong. Everyone may “know it” but it is not factually correct (cf Gore’s “Mark Twain” quote above).
What factors contribute to keeping the earth warm? There are a number. There is residual heat left over from the formation of the solar system. (The earth is big and will take a long time to cool). As the earth cools it shrinks, and as it shrinks, it falls in on itself, converting some of the potential energy to heat energy, establishing a new equilibrium. There is thermonuclear heat from deposits of radioactive minerals. There is stored chemical energy which is converted through anaerobic metabolism by archaea and extemophile bacteria such as iron-oxidizing and sulphate-reducing organisms. There is photosynthesis, by which energy from photons is trapped and used to produce sugars and ultimately, ATP. A significant amount of energy is sequestered in the earth’s biosphere, and in subterranean carbohydrates such as oil, coal, coal tar, oil shale, and gas. There is energy stored in the form of angular momentum as the earth spins like a top, and as it orbits the sun. There is energy “produced” by the gravitational interaction of the earth and moon. The tides being one obvious example. There is electromagnetic energy produced by the interaction of the earths magnetic field (which we don’t well understand or have a good predictive model for incidentally), and the charged particles in the solar wind, an example being the aurora, or “northern lights”. There are underwater and possibly subterranean deposits of methane hydrate which may be significant in the thermodynamic and carbon cycles of the earth.
Most of the heat stored in the earth is, well stored *in* the earth. We basically have very little direct evidence of what is in the earth’s mantle, and no clear idea at all what is in the core. It is on average 3,950.5 miles to the center of the earth from the surface. We have actual data of what is in the first 5 miles or so (12,262m being the deepest documented “hole” (Elert, 2003)), or about the first 1/10 of 1% of the surface. Below that, its all pretty speculative. And yet almost all of the earths stored heat is stored in the terrestrial rock and underlying structures whatever they may be. Shouldn’t we get a better understanding of how heat and carbon are sequestrated and released in the earth itself, before we say as Gore suggests that the science of the issue is settled, we know exactly what to do to fix the problems, and we lack only the political will to carry through?
Next in importance to the lithosphere in terms of the earth’s heat transport system, is the hydrosphere, the oceans, lakes, and rivers. We are just beginning to understand how ocean currents transport heat and chemicals, and we have no strong predictive model relating the transport of heat within the hydrosphere to heat transport in the lithosphere. Should we not also study the oceans more thoroughly before we declare that we know enough to solve the issues?
And the atmosphere. How well do we really understand it? Not well. Can we with certainty predict what the mean surface temperature on the earth will be in 2010? Or 2100? We don’t have a strong predictive model which doesn’t break down fairly fast compared to real data. Gore points out that the ten warmest years on record occurred during the past 14 years. But what about those other four years? If there was a constant heating going on, the increase, one might reason, should be constant. Clearly there are some hidden variables, the huge one being… we don’t have a good objective measure of the energy output of the sun. And we don’t really have more than a clue about how the sun works. We have the general idea that it works by hydrogen fusion, but there is the nagging problem of the “missing neutrinos”. A big huge problem for studying the thermodynamics of the earth since the major input into the system is incident solar radiation. [However, see Solving the Mystery of the Missing Neutrinos, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/bahcall/]
We don’t understand why the Sun’s corona is is 2 million degrees hotter than the surface. We don’t well understand or have a good predictive model of sunspots or solar flares. We understand little about the sun with certainty. Do we really know enough about stars like our Sun to be able to predict, and if necessary, modify its behavior? Is all the science settled and we just need political will?
Finally, Gore uses words and pictures to strongly imply (although he is careful not to state it categorically) that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming. That’s a big assumption and really not supportable based on the evidence.
The Gore Sound-and-Light Show
In September of 2005, Al Gore spoke to the Sierra Club and said, “We must disenthrall ourselves with the sound-and-light show that has diverted the attentions of our great democracy from the important issues and challenges of our day.” Indeed we must.
We really don’t understand what the consequences of the massive deforestation, species die-offs, and fossil fuel orgy of the last century will be. It could have little long-term effect as the earth and biosphere’s homeostatic mechanisms are probably (hopefully!) orders of magnitude stronger than whatever good or harm man can yet produce. The earth may reach a new, quasi-stable equilibrium at a higher temperature, as in the Carboniferous Period when the earth is believed to have had no permanent icecaps. It may result in runaway heating of the earth which boils the oceans and turns the Earth into another Venus. Human activity may even trigger the collapse of the biosphere and a catastrophic deep-freeze as in the “snowball earth” hypothesis of Harvard scientist Paul Hoffman (Hoffman and Schrag, 1999). The fact is we don’t know what effect our human depredations on the environment will bring. And thus in our ignorance we should try to follow the first principle of “do no harm”. And second, we should really try to figure out how our terrestrial and solar systems work. We should not offer false certainty or false hope however. Whatever is going on with the climate and the biosphere whether it is of human origin or causation or not is already too big an effect for our primitive society at our low technological level to remediate or “fix”. So let us walk softly on the earth, all learn to do the math and science, and let us all hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
“An Inconvenient Truth” is a beautifully produced and presented, but misleading and self-serving compilation of half-truths, omissions, oversimplifications, and misrepresentations. Not recommended.
An Inconvenient Truth (wikipedia)
School Board Folds After One Idiot Parent Objects to Global Warming Video (discussion of and links to this article and blog)
Al Gore, the Other Oil Candidate, Corpwatch
Gore isn’t quite as green as he’s led the world to believe USA Today
Global Warming Fever San Francisco Chronicle
Letter to Environmentalists from Ralph Nader
Challenge issued to environmental journalists and advocates of catastrophic AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) from junkscience.com
Gore as climate exaggerator Reason Magazine
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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