Hurricane!

This blogger quotes Dr. Robert Balling Jr.'s critique of An Inconvenient Truth, a film featuring Al Gore on climate change.

Gore has ignored dissenting opinions. He has implied that certain changes are the fault of human made greenhouse gasses — something that is according to Balling — completely false. He’s cherry picked data to make his case, and has overstated the extent of the threat.

There are several obvious problems with Balling's arguments.

Balling says that the film's claim about water rising 20 feet is inconsistent with measurements of 1.8mm rise per year over 8,000 years. But the rise of 20 feet is based on the volume of water Greenland's glacier would add to the oceans if the glaciers melted. Currently, Greenland's glaciers are melting more quickly than anticipated.

Balling says that "... the snows of Kilimanjaro have been retreating for more than 100 years, largely due to declining atmospheric moisture, not global warming." While the local Kilmanjaro conditions may be due to declining precipitation, it doesn't seem logical to attribute measured melting of glaciers worldwide to declininng atmostpheric moisture. Is it possible that it stopped snowing at all the glaciers over the same time period?

The problem with Balling's arguments are that they focus on somewhat irrelevant details without looking at the basic physics. It's as if Balling is boiling water and saying that, because we can't predict when and where the bubbles will occur, the water must not be getting hotter.