An Inconvenient Truth turns twenty next month. In the coming weeks, I am sure that there will be many retrospectives seeking to relitigate the scientific claims in the film. [some emphasis, links added]
But the far more important anniversary story is not about the accuracy of any of Gore’s individual claims, but rather what the film helped to unleash in the scientific community: a decisive turn to bringing partisan politics into the institutions of science.
Gore did not simply make a film about climate change. He implored the scientific community to join him in overt climate advocacy. The fuel that Gore added to the fire of pathological politicization of the climate science community is the most important legacy of An Inconvenient Truth (AIT).
Almost three years after the release of AIT, Al Gore took the stage at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago and delivered something much closer to a revival sermon than a scientific lecture.
On first glance, the venue for Gore’s jeremiad might have seemed odd. The AAAS was founded in 1848, and with more than 120,000 members in 2009, it is the most prominent and authoritative scientific association in the United States.
In retrospect, it is clear that with AIT, Gore was not just speaking to the public — he was also recruiting the high priests of the secular apocalypse to his cause, and he did so brilliantly.
Fresh from two Oscars for AIT and a Grammy for its accompanying audiobook — awarded just days before — Gore told the assembled scientists that they could no longer “in good conscience accept this division between the work you do and the civilization in which you live.”
His directive to the assembled scientists was clear:
“Leave this city after this meeting and start getting involved in politics. Keep your day job, but start getting involved in this historic debate. We need you.”
The reception in the room was rapturous. The standing ovation Gore received from the scientists lasted over a minute until he left the stage.
The AAAS press release celebrating the occasion described Gore’s appearance in terms more suited to a rock star prophet.
James McCarthy, the Harvard oceanographer serving as AAAS president — and himself an adviser on the original 2006 documentary — effusively praised Gore’s political call to arms:
“No single individual deserves more credit . . . for our public acceptance of climate science—public acceptance that has emboldened growing numbers of mayors, governors, senators, and presidential candidates to embrace the urgency of addressing anthropogenic climate change.”
To understand the underlying dynamics, it helps to understand how catastrophism came to take root in the climate science community — and also how science came to play a central role in catastrophism.
In 1983, Michael Barkun, a professor at Syracuse University, identified the rise of a “New Apocalypticism” in American life. He described a secular variant of religious millenarianism — rooted not in scripture but instead in science, yet structurally identical in its essential features.
Barkun explained:
“The so-called “New Apocalypticism” is undeniably religious, rooted in the Protestant millenarian tradition. Religious apocalypticism is, however, not the only apocalypticism current in American society. A newer, more diffuse, but indisputably influential apocalypticism coexists with it. Secular rather than religious, this second variety grows out of a naturalistic world view, indebted to science and to social criticism rather than to theology. Many of its authors are academics, the works themselves directed at a lay audience of influential persons — government officials, business leaders, and journalists — presumed to have the power to intervene in order to avert planetary catastrophe.”
Gore’s orations perfectly followed the script of the “New Apocalypticism”: The identification of an existential crisis, the diagnosis of human sin as its cause, the urgency of transformation, and the comfort of redemption for those who heed the warning.
The climate science community readily embraced this script and adopted the language of believers and deniers to differentiate those with faith and those yet to be converted, and who risked excommunication.
Barkun explained that scientific predictions of “last things” generate the feelings of awe that have always surrounded eschatology, even if in this case the predictions often grow out of computer modelling rather than Biblical proof-texts.”
Gore was an extraordinarily skilled evangelist, and he took his message to scientists on their own terms — with a PowerPoint presentation.
But even so, AIT was not really about science; it was a sermon — complete with a moral arc (with those who are evil and those who are righteous), a clear account of sin (fossil fuel emissions), a warning of coming judgment (floods, storms, tipping points), and a path to redemption (political will, renewable energy, personal responsibility).
The film ends with a call to conversion.
Gore was part of a broader trend in which leaders of the scientific community were increasingly associating themselves with Democratic politics. When he stepped onto the stage in Chicago, he was already a liberal cause célèbre — and he knew exactly the choir he had assembled before him.
Matt Nisbet’s Climate Shift helps to explain why scientists at AAAS were so receptive to Gore’s message. In 2009, >50% of AAAS members self-identified as liberal or very liberal, just 9% as conservative, and 55% identified as Democrats versus just 6% as Republicans.
The figure below, from Nisbet’s report, shows that AAAS members self-reported being more partisan and more ideological than Fox News viewers on the right and MSNBC viewers on the left.
Nisbet observed, “AAAS members rank among the most like-minded” of any major social group in the United States. At the 2009 AAAS meeting in Chicago, Gore was not speaking to an audience with political views that resembled those of the American public.
He was speaking to an audience that was, by its own description, already supportive of the politics and ideology that his message reinforced.
Looking back, my reaction to Gore’s AAAS talk focused on its substantive content, not its symbolic significance. I missed the forest for the trees.
Two days after Gore’s Chicago sermon, on Prometheus — the popular science policy blog hosted at the university center I directed — I called out Gore for including scientifically incorrect claims in his lecture.
I pulled no punches:
“In his speech Gore attributed a wide range of recent weather events to human-caused climate change including floods in Iowa, Hurricane Ike, and the Australian bush fires.
“Gore sought to sum up all of these weather anecdotes by citing data from the CRED in Belgium showing that the total number of disasters has increased in recent decades.”
For his AAAS lecture, Gore had updated his famous slideshow from the original film with some new slides.
Near the end of his talk, he showed a graph from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters — CRED — displaying a dramatic upward trend in weather-related disaster events, which he used to argue that climate change was already producing “weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”1
A snippet of that slide can be seen above.
As THB readers well understand, the CRED time series on disasters cannot be used to say anything about trends in weather phenomena.
We should always use climate data to investigate climate trends, not data on economic losses or casualties.
In the days following my critique, Andy Revkin of the New York Times asked Gore’s representatives for their reaction. CRED issued a statement that backed me up, which was no doubt more important than my critique for what came next.
Within days, Gore’s office confirmed they were pulling the slide that argued that increasing disaster counts signified increasing extreme weather caused by accumulating greenhouse gases.
His spokesperson’s statement:
“We appreciate that you have pointed out the issues with the CRED database and will make the switch back to the data we used previously to ensure that there is no confusion either with regards to the data or attribution.”
At the time, I thought that getting Gore to correct the factual record was a victory for scientific integrity.
I was wrong. The real issue was not the science, but the sermon.
I was on the right track, though. In my critique of the disaster slide, I reserved my strongest criticism not for Gore — he is, after all, a campaigning politician, not a scientist — but for the scientists in the room who happily cheered on being told false information.
The Honest Broker is written by climate expert Roger Pielke Jr and is reader-supported. If you value what you have read here, please consider subscribing and supporting the work that goes into it.
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