Regarding the Tuesday letter “Guilty of crime against education” and its assertion that there is no controversy about the points Al Gore makes in his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”:
There is a controversy and there are credible objections. Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has put together a PowerPoint presentation and a book-length critique of Gore’s work. According to Lewis, “An Inconvenient Truth” is filled with exaggerations, distortions, speculative claims and outright untruths. To get an idea of how many we’re talking about, the appendix is a nine-page bullet list of problem areas. For each point that Lewis rebuts or clarifies, he gives citations of the supporting scientific research.
One of the items that Gore got wrong is that the rate of global warming is accelerating. In fact, it has been constant for the past 30 years – roughly 0.17 degrees C./ decade. Another is his claim that Venus is too hot and Mars is too cold because of their CO2 concentrations. In fact, the concentrations are nearly identical, but the atmospheric pressure is much greater on Venus, and Venus is much nearer the sun. Interested and open-minded readers can see more at http://www.cei.org/pages/ait_response.cfm
If we’re going to present something to impressionable young students, let’s make sure that what we’re presenting is correct. Where something is truly controversial, let’s make sure that opposing opinions are heard.
Mark Parker
Snohomish
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