[jluetjen]

Originally posted by Dottore
So how do we find out who's right?

Critical thought -- that is assuming that there even is a "right" answer.

In the film Gore addresses this very point, and lists something like 500 scientific papers - all of which agree with his thesis and none of which disagree.

Al Gore says this knowing that virtually nobody will ever check the "500 scientific papers". I would be very shocked if you could 500 scientific papers that agree on any scientific subject that is less then 30 years old.

Gore claims that 99% of the serious scientific community backs his conclusions - and the naysayers are all in the pocket of Big-Oil.

Once again, uncheckable numbers -- which is another way of saying that these are his opinion. Has he done a scientific survey of a randomly selected group of scientists in the scientific community. Does Gore even understand what it is I'm talking about?

I am no fan of Gore, and neither am I a scientist who could evaluate his claims independently - but his core message sounded very, very convincing.

Gee. Gore is a politician. It is their "stock in trade" to be able to sound convincing about almost anything. Politicians can sound convicing about anything from defense spending to the justification of multi-million dollar bridge connecting two small Alaskan communities.

From my untutored perspective the thrust of the film is 150% right. We are incredibly wasteful with fossil fuels. There is much we could do to lessen our negative impact on the external environment. There are climatic trends that are very disturbing - and at least in large measure (if not entirely) these trends are exacerbated by the indifference that most people/corporations/nations show towards environmental protection.

That's fine. Aside from your use of percentages, I understand your point.

Surely there is nothing controversial about these core propositions.

Here's where we disagree. There is certainly something controversial about decisions such as these when they impact real people's jobs, savings, costs of living, etc. Especially when they are mine!

Surely we should make our children aware of these concerns. Surely we can find 90 minutes in the school year for this.

You can teach your kids anything that you want. I take time to discuss social responsiblities with my daughters. But if you want to take time from my daughters' study of the essentials to make a demonstration of bad scientific reasoning, you will run into opposition from me.

And does anyone seriously believe that the entire science behind this film is unsound? That would make this film one of the biggest swindles in recent memory - and I just don't buy that.

Is the "entire" science unsound? No. As I said, it is substantially unsound. That is not to say that there isn't some sound science in it, but no where near enough to justify the personal investment in time to sit through it. To put it differently, the bad science far outweighs the good science in that film. And given the widespread availability of good science in the world, why waste time with bad science?