Finally Feeling the Heat
Greg Easterbrook, NY Times (Op-Ed)
TODAY "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie about the greenhouse effect, opens in New York and California. Many who already believe global warming is a menace will flock to the film; many who scoff at the notion will opt for Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks. But has anything happened in recent years that should cause a reasonable person to switch sides in the global-warming debate?

Yes: the science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous. As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert.

...[The] research is now in, and it shows a strong scientific consensus that an artificially warming world is a real phenomenon posing real danger:
(24 May 2006)

The Flipping Point
Michael Shermer, Scientific American
How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip
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... Politics polluted the science and made me an environmental skeptic.

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians--the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon--issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for "national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions" in carbon emissions.

Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance.

Four books eventually brought me to the flipping point. Archaeologist Brian Fagan's The Long Summer (Basic, 2004) explicates how civilization is the gift of a temporary period of mild climate. Geographer Jared Diamond's Collapse (Penguin Group, 2005) demonstrates how natural and human-caused environmental catastrophes led to the collapse of civilizations. Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) is a page-turning account of her journeys around the world with environmental scientists who are documenting species extinction and climate change unmistakably linked to human action. And biologist Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) reveals how he went from being a skeptical environmentalist to a believing activist as incontrovertible data linking the increase of carbon dioxide to global warming accumulated in the past decade.

...Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
(June 2006 issue)

Al Gore Revisits Global Warming, With Passionate Warnings and Pictures
Michiko Kakutani, NY Times
...with the emerging consensus on global warming today, Mr. Gore's passionate warnings about climate change seem increasingly prescient. He has revived the slide presentation about global warming that he first began giving in 1990 and taken that slide show on the road, and he has now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called "An Inconvenient Truth." The movie (which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday) shows a focused and accessible Gore — "a funnier, more relaxed and sympathetic character" than he was as a candidate, said The Observer, the British newspaper — and has revived talk in some circles of another possible Gore run for the White House.

As for the book, its roots as a slide show are very much in evidence. It does not pretend to grapple with climate change with the sort of minute detail and analysis displayed by three books on the subject that came out earlier this spring ("The Winds of Change" by Eugene Linden, "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery and "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" by Elizabeth Kolbert), and yet as a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, "An Inconvenient Truth" is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective.

...in this multimedia day of shorter attention spans and high-profile authors, "An Inconvenient Truth" (the book and the movie) could play a similar role [like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring] in galvanizing public opinion about a real and present danger. It could goad the public into reading more scholarly books on the subject, and it might even push awareness of global warming to a real tipping point — and beyond.
(24 May 2006)
David Roberts of Gristmill summarizes:

The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani -- the most feared, worshiped, loathed, influential book reviewer on the literary scene -- gives Al Gore's new book a strong thumbs up.

In praise of ... Al Gore
Leader, The Guardian
F Scott Fitzgerald's principle that "there are no second acts in American lives" does not apply to Al Gore.

The man who had the most powerful job in the world wrested from his grasp by an ill-designed ballot paper and a capricious supreme court is making a comeback almost unheard of in a country where second place is nowhere. Having recently appeared on the front covers of Vanity Fair, Time and Wired, and with his documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, opening nationwide in the US this week, Mr Gore is in the limelight and, it seems, in the running for the White House.

So far Mr Gore's responses to questions of whether or not he will run have been inconclusive: "I have no plans" and "Politics is behind me" are two of his recent formulations. But his new-found celebrity and relaxed manner have made many think a "Gore 2008" campaign might be the antidote to Hillary Clinton's inevitable run for the presidency. Mr Gore may be the only candidate who could deny Mrs Clinton the Democratic nomination - and it would make for a riveting primary campaign.

Even if he does not run, Mr Gore's record as a pioneering campaigner on global warming is admirable: next week he brings the show to Britain with an appearance at the Hay festival. In a sign of how far Mr Gore's arguments have moved into the mainstream, remember that in the 1992 election President Bush (senior) could parody him as "Ozone Man". That's a joke no one would find funny today.
(24 May 2006)

Devastating in Its Implications
Go see Al Gore’s new documentary—and then pay attention to who attacks it.
David Edelstein, New York Magazine
As the controversy over The Da Vinci Code makes clear, a vast majority of Americans—among them our president—regard the divinity of Jesus as a fact, not a theory. So what’s a theory? Global warming, of course. And it’s a theory that needs more study, preferably carried out by the unbiased scientists at ExxonMobil and their past or future colleagues in the Bush White House.

On the other hand, someone who would treat as fact the self-serving yammerings of Al Gore must be an environmentalist wacko, right? So let’s have a good laugh at An Inconvenient Truth, a feature-length lecture directed by Davis Guggenheim (there’s a limousine-liberal name for you!) in which the failed presidential candidate (lampooned a few weeks ago on the libertarian-tinged South Park, where he raved about a creature called “ManBearPig”) drones on about cracking ice shelves and disappearing permafrost and soaring temperatures and rising sea levels. It’s obviously just a tedious, 96-minute presidential-campaign commercial, right?

That, in any event, is how much of the mainstream media is likely to characterize this new documentary of Gore and his traveling global-warming slide show: Anything else would invite charges of liberal bias. But the fact is—the fact is—that only a brainwashed audience (and their brainwashers) could portray anything in An Inconvenient Truth as even remotely controversial. Gore has all the graphs and charts and time-lapsed photographs and peer-reviewed scientific studies he needs to underscore his message about where the planet is heading—and sooner than we think. So be afraid. Be very afraid.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim weaves together the ex-vice-president’s speeches before a series of packed houses all over the United States and abroad. Casually dressed, Gore is less stiff than during his last presidential run, and he has learned not to drone. But he is still clearly in his element as a pedant. After introducing himself as the former next president of the United States (a joke that made at least one viewer wince at the thought of what might have been), he shows an image of the planet as it looked in the first pictures taken from space. Then he shows a picture of the planet as it looks now. Then he graphs the differences to show the acceleration of global warming. He debunks the theory that these changes are “cyclical”: Scientists have studied all the environmental cycles since the last Ice Age, he says. These are off the charts.
(5 June 2006 issue)

Losing Bet on Climate Change
Temperatures are rising-what now?
Ronald Bailey, Reason
Patrick Michaels, a University of Virginia climatologist, Cato Institute scholar, and long-time climate change skeptic, offered a bet back in 1998 that the globe's average temperatures would decline over the next decade. In 1998, an unusually powerful El Niño off the coast of South America had boosted the globe's average temperatures by half of a degree Celsius above seasonal norms. In his World Climate Report, Michaels proposed:

If we were of a betting sort (and there are some nasty rumors going around that we are), we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures. Surely such a wager should sound interesting to those who think the planetary temperature will increase several tenths of a degree during that period. No reasonable offers refused...

As far as I know, none of the climatologists who are concerned about dangerous anthropogenic interference with the earth's climate took Michaels up on his bet. If they had, they could have made a bundle.

... So what about the future? According to an article last October, Michaels seems unlikely to offer another bet on lower temperatures. "We already know that the world is warming and that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (with or without any greenhouse gas emission controls)," wrote Michaels. "Record temperatures will continue to be set every couple of years or so."

The question of how much danger the trend toward higher average global temperatures poses is still open, but that the earth's temperature is going up is not. The debate now is how bad it might get.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.
(3 April 2006)
UPDATE: Added this entry to the list of skeptics who saw the light. Thanks to Gristmill.

Attenborough: Climate change is the major challenge facing the world
David Attenborough, The Independent
... But I'm no longer sceptical. Now I do not have any doubt at all. I think climate change is the major challenge facing the world. I have waited until the proof was conclusive that it was humanity changing the climate. The thing that really convinced me was the graphs connecting the increase of carbon dioxide in the environment and the rise in temperature, with the growth of human population and industrialisation. The coincidence of the curves made it perfectly clear we have left the period of natural climatic oscillation behind and have begun on a steep curve, in terms of temperature rise, beyond anything in terms of increases that we have seen over many thousands of years.

People say, everything will be all right in the end. But it's not the case. We may be facing major disasters on a global scale.

I have seen the ice melting. I have been to parts of Patagonia and heard people say: "That's where the glacier was 10 years ago - and that's where it is today."

...I'm 80 now. It's not that I think, like any old man, that change is wrong. I recognise that the world has always changed. I know that. But the point is, it's changing more extremely and swiftly than at any time in the past several million years. And one of the things I don't want to do is to look at my grandchildren and hear them say: "Grandfather, you knew it was happening - and you did nothing."
(24 May 2006)
UPDATE: Added this entry to the list of skeptics who saw the light. Thanks to Gristmill.

Attenborough investigates climate change in a two-part BBC special: Climate Chaos. The first broadcast is May 24. BBC and the Open University have a joint related site.