Al Gore is back with global warming slide show 2.0

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

Perhaps most compelling, Gore shares "a tale of two planets": Earth, and Venus, sister planets that are almost exactly the same size and that contain the same amount of carbon.

The difference, Gore says, is that Venus' atmosphere is thick with carbon gas, whereas ours has, until recently, been relatively free of it

The average temperature on Earth is 59 degrees Fahrenheit. On Venus, it's 855 degrees. If you're thinking that's because Venus is closer to the sun than Earth, think again: Venus is three times hotter than Mercury, which, as Gore says, "is right next to the sun."

Gore reminds his audience that what's missing in the climate change debate is "a sense of urgency." To prove this, he trots out statistics showing how little coverage the subject gets in the mainstream media: Of the 3,201 questions the major TV networks directly asked the presidential candidates last year, only eight were about global warming.  The U.S., by the way, is now the only country that hasn't ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

What the crisis calls for, he says, is a "hero generation" -- of the kind that founded the United States, that abolished slavery, that won suffrage for women and civil rights for blacks.

At the end of the clip, the moderator asks Gore if he believes the climate positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are up to snuff. After an obvious pause, Gore says that he thinks "we should feel great" that all three candidates have their own approach, each of which is different from the status quo.

But you can tell what Gore is really thinking.

Comments

[Ed Halley]

I really wish that journalists would get a clue about science, especially the math involved. Simple errors can totally destroy an otherwise reasonable coverage of the events. Given the place of the quote marks, I can't even tell if it's Gore's error or the journalist's error. I'm not even a Global Warming Naysayer, but I think it's important to get your facts right and your science solid REGARDLESS of your point of view on the morality or policy.

What's the beef? One can't calculate "Venus is three times hotter than Mercury" by multiplying temperatures in Fahrenheit. Why? Because Fahrenheit's "zero" point is not at the point where you could say there is an absense of heat. Anytime "multiply" and "temperature" are in the same breath, you're on shaky ground.

Let's do some unit conversions to see the problem, I'm rounding off fractions. A quick lookup shows average Mercury temperature at 440 Kelvin or 167 Celsius or 332 Fahrenheit. Your article shows Venus at 855 Fahrenheit or 15 Celsius or 288 Kelvin. This gives Venus vs Mercury a 2.57x factor in Fahrenheit, a slightly scarier 2.74x factor in Celsius (since the zero point is higher and the degrees larger), and a mere 1.66x factor in Kelvin. If you insist on multiplying temperatures, use Kelvin units, as the zero point is at least a reasonable definition of "zero heat."

The gist of the point sounds true at face value (truthiness?): bare naked Mercury seems to be chilly on average, compared to its cloud-enshrouded neighbor Venus, despite being so close to the sun. But that's also patent nonsense: Mercury orbits and revolves in near lockstep, just as our man in the moon always faces us. One side is blistering hot, just about the same as Venus' average, according to another quick search of reference materials. The other side is a celestial icebox at -168 Celsius (105 Kelvin, -270 Fahrenheit) because it's in perfect shadow and never feels the rays of the sun. On AVERAGE, it is cooler than Venus. The clouds of Venus (and Venus' revolution) act to stabilize the temperatures, so day and night are much more similar. Yeah, that convinces us that atmospheric carbon is the problem, right?

[lester]

6.2*2000/1.2e9=10 micropound elephants or maybe it was supposed to say 6.2 billion tons and 10,000 pound elephants.

[Gabrielle]

Al Gore, my class is doing a project on global warming for earth day. Your movie is helping me so much on this project.THANK-YOU SO MUCH

Gabby

[Alyssa]

This crisis has more implications for politics and Al Gore's beard than anything else: http://www.236.com/news/2008/04/25/an_inconvenient_truth_ii_not_a_6048.php
Will global warming or Hillary Clinton end the world first?