Al Gore and Climate Change
Climate Change Debate
In 2007, Al Gore won world wide recognition for his Noble Prize winning documentary on Global Warming, ironically titled, “Inconvenient Truth. “ In his documentary, Al Gore brought out terrifying figures that pointed to how the human “carbon” footprint was the leading reason behind the dangers presented by the catastrophic Global warming and the subsequent climatic changes. So persuasive was his documentary that soon, Global Warming, Al Gore and Climate Change were all spoken off in the same breath.
The earth has been going through a period of constant environmental and climatic change right from the day of its very birth. Whether in the form of climatic changes, geographical shifts and occurrences, the emergence of life and its subsequent evolution, the earth has never ever stopped changing and evolving. Thus global warming and cooling are inevitable and periodical occurrences that are free of human interference. So keeping that in perspective, the popular phenomenon of Global Warming, Al Gore and Climate Change perhaps needs to be reviewed again. And this time we need to understand climatic change for what it really is as opposed to what Al Gore and his documentary on climate change and global warming show.
Although mapping the earth’s various periods of cooling and heating is a laborious process and there is still a lot that needs to be studied, there are three prominent periods indicating how the earth is in a constant state of heating and cooling. Climatic changes or changes in the temperature are often blamed on global warming. However during the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Maximum, the earth was much warmer than what it is today. During the 17th century, much of Europe was reeling under a deep freeze. In fact, London’s Thames was one big skating rink at that time! So obviously unpredictable and unprecedented climatic changes have been around a lot longer than what Al Gore would like us to believe.
Climate change – we can do it.
Even during the industrial revolution, when the emission of CO2 was vastly increased and all through till the 1980’s, earth was in a state of cooling. Was this the new ice age after Europe’s little ice age of the 17th century? Environmental gurus during that period in fact rallied towards taking concrete steps to counter the falling temperatures! Zoom back to the present and now we have a fresh batch of “world watchers” shouting the same slogans, except this time they are fighting the war against global warming and subsequent climatic change. Al Gore’s documentary on Global Warming and Climate Change was focused on presenting facts in the form of figures to add credibility to the theory of human interference leading to climatic change. In one such reference the documentary points out how increased CO2 levels lead to a rise in temperature. However studies of the Antarctic ice core show that CO2 levels increased after almost 800 years of rise in temperatures. Thus refuting Al Gore’s Climate Change theory is caused due to increased CO2.
If anything, the real contributors to increased carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere can be attributed to natural means such as volcanic emission and CO2 produced by animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean. If we were to take away the human stamp altogether, we would still be left with a world that witnessed and went through alternating periods of intense climatic changes. Thus, Al Gore, Climate Change theory and all other such ill based theories are out of the window.