Global warming documentaries

2007-04-12 · Original WordPress address

I think you will find more science in this documentary than in The Inconvenient Truth. Much of the the science you do see is questioned (wikipedia has a good write-up), but I came away from the film, at least the first half hour, knowing a little more about the mechanisms of anthropogenic global warming. I learned:

After WWII, there were 3 decades of cooling and followed by 3 decades of warming
CO2 rose through the whole period
CO2 trends seem to lag warming trends by about 800 years in the longer term scale
It was much warmer in the middle ages than now, specifically in Greenland
Greenhouse gas related global warming theories predict the upper atmosphere should get warmer than the ground... this doesn't seem to be the case in the data
There are competing theories of global warming, like solar variation
Explicating theory and sharing data are much more effective ways to make your point than appealing to "scientific consensus"

Oh, and the last 40 minutes of the documentary has really entertaining conspiracy theories. Who's to blame for the global warming conspiracy? The anti-humanist environmentalists! The capitalist hating commie pinko fags!! and the nuclear power loving Margaret Thatcher!!! And they all hate, hate starving children in Africa. Good stuff.