Al Gore as Skeptic

At some point being a climate change advocate turned into a matter of faith. Perhaps its because the climate deniers choose not to “believe” in climate change, and thus the frame has been co-opted into a belief vs non-belief structure. Perhaps its because the evidence of climate change is not obvious, and either hidden in far off places (the arctic), or buried in layman-unfriendly scientific papers. Faith is an assurance of things one can not see.

However it happened, this faith-based advocacy has led to a streamlined sales pitch that identifies “unbelievers” as ignorant knuckle-dragging “deniers.” The meme goes something like this: “You don’t want to give up your F-250 pick up truck because you don’t believe in climate change.” Or “If you believed in climate change you’d support solar energy subsidies.” Or “Why don’t you compost and reduce your carbon footprint – do you deny climate change?”

Somewhere along the line, “believing” in climate change got lumped into endorsing a specific solution: reducing our carbon, and specifically CO2, footprint. Can’t have one without the other. To question the usefulness, scientific backing, or efficacy of setting an arbitrary 350 ppm CO2 goal is to question climate change altogether. 

Under this tortured logic, may I present to you Al Gore, Climate Change Skeptic.

Newsweek recently ran an extended, largely positive, profile of Al Gore and his current climate change advocacy efforts. He’s written a new book. He’s training others to give the Inconvenient Truth lecture. And he has quietly held summits of experts in various fields and asked uncomfortable science based questions. Some of the results are surprising in their intellectual honesty and non-partisan conclusions.

Here’s one nugget: 40% of our CO2 increase since the 1800’s is attributable to deforestation. Even now, it accounts for more for of the CO2 buildup (23%) than all the world’s cars and trucks. Farmers mulching and not-tilling would sequester 12 percent of all emissions. Further soil management could grab another 15 percent, and reduce our CO2 ppm count by 50. The logical conclusion to this?

“If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit,” says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. 

Why isn’t this solution given more air time? According to Gore’s advisors, who tried to downplay the findings – the political cost. Tell people we can manage our farms and forests to eliminate emissions issues, and they’d stop buying Prius’ and agitating for mass transit. And the tree-huggers wonder why the knuckle-dragging deniers say all this climate change talk is more about controlling behavior than helping the environment. . . .

Here’s another nugget: we’re still figuring out what causes climate change. Or to be more specific, we’re reordering the relative effects of various greenhouse gases. Scientists at the Goddard Institute of NASA reported in Science that methane accounts for 27%, halocarbons 8%, black sooty carbon 12%, CO 7%, and CO2 . . . 43%. 43% of the effect but nearly 100% of the public discussion. Never mind that targeting CO2 is the most cost intensive to reduce, and that “removing one ton of black carbon will have the same effect as removing 2,000 to 3,000 tons of CO2.” Where does black carbon come from? Highly regulatable diesel engines, fixed by a $250 filter. Methane emissions could similarly be cut by filters on highly regulatable oil wells. Forget tax incentives and regulations – the United States could BUY AND GIVE AWAY these filters for every diesel engine on the planet for a fraction of the cost of the climate change package working its way through Congress or at Copenhagen. Once again, is this about changing and controlling behavior, or pragmatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

To his credit, it was Al Gore himself  teased out these solutions and contradictions, and let the science, not politics, lead his way. In this he seems quite unlike his fellow climate change agitators.

So let me present you with a more nuanced, thinking man’s skepticism on climate change, that focuses on two related issues.

First, we don’t know as much about climate change as we think we do. My proof of this is the yearly varied reports of the potential impacts, effects, and how long they will take to occur. Climate is complicated. Something bad is probably happening. We don’t understand enough of why or how that is.

Second, we know even less about our “solutions”  to climate change. Hard to come up with a solution if we are still defining the problem. For proof of this, I don’t need to get all Michael Crichton and pull out eugenics. I can simply look to 15 years ago, when corn-based ethanol was being highly touted, pushed, and subsidized as the solution to not only our shortage of foreign oil, but climate change as well. Wait, you mean to tell me we now understand that corn-based ethanol produces MORE CO2 in its lifecycle than extracting oil from the ground? Oops. The Law of Unintended Consequences appears to be on overdrive as our push for corn-based ethanol not only produces more carbon than it saves, but caused riots in the Third World because of food shortages. 

Many climate change advocate politicians like to refer to the “All of the above” approach, meaning we don’t know what the solution is, so we’ll just fund everything. In a fantasy land of infinite resources, this makes sense. But we don’t live in that world. President Obama is testing its limits now, by running a deficit equal to his 43 predecessors combined, but eventually, the government runs out of borrowing ability. Before the world spends tens of trillions of dollars on solutions to stop global warming (a sum that may be able to lift the entire world out of poverty), don’t policy makers have some obligation to know if the funded solutions will work? We don’t need 100% clarity. But we do need solutions that are not proven detrimental only ten years later.