Recently I decided to educate myself on the issue of Global Warming. I purchased Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth DVD as well as The Great Global Warming Swindle DVD and watched them back to back. 4 hours later, here are my reviews of the videos and my conclusions on global warming:

Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’:
(available on amazon.com)

About 10 % of this video focuses on Gore’s childhood and life story. Pointless.
Another 10% of this video focuses on the election of 2000. Pointless.
The vast majority of this video focuses on the effects of global warming:

• Receding glaciers
• Drying up of lakes
• Species loss
• Severe weather (Katrina)
• Rising sea levels

And about 1% of the video show facts that suggest that global warming is man made.

This video is highly political, nearly void of any real data and very alarmist and hysterical. It operates on the assumption that global warming is man made and that man can reverse it. It has a very limited scope regarding factual data and an unlimited scope regarding emotional pleas. However, the production quality is very good.

The Great Global Warming Swindle:
(available on amazon.com)

This British documentary focuses on about 6 scientists (including the co-founder of Greenpeace) who give arguments and data that demonstrate that global warming is real, but is not man-made or man-preventable. Using the same data as Gore used to show the relationship between temperature and CO2, this film’s scientists show that CO2 actually lags behind temperature. In other words, a rise in temperature causes a rise in CO2. The lag is about 800 years.

The film also gives a scientific explaination for global warming: The Sun. It shows that increased sun activity corresponds with increased temperatures. They attribute this to solar wind acticity indirectly causing an increase or decrease in clouds, which either block or don’t block the suns rays–resulting in either cooling or heating.

They also point out that CO2 is a tiny percentage of the Earth’s greenhouse gasses, with water vapor making up something like 75%.

When addressing the IPCC, the UN body that has declared that man made global warming is real and that 2500 of the world’s top scientists agree, the film shows that many of those listed are either not scientists or don’t agree. The film shows the highly political nature of global warming and even uses Gore’s point of  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” to explain the political slant of the issue. Of course in this case its funding or grants instead of salary.

The DVD also points out that from around 1945 to 1975 the earth was cooling (as the post-war industrial boom was in full effect, creating more and more CO2) and scientist alarmists were calling for the next ice age. Here are some pretty good quotes from that time. Since the mid 70s the Earth has been warming and now the alarmists are calling for warming disasters. It demonstrates the cyclical nature of temperatures.

The film has about an hour worth of bonus features which discuss various topics, including attacking some of Gore’s specific points and showing them to be false as well as showing very detailed (and quite boring) science behind the argument that global warming is just a cyclical phase and is not man made.

Finally, my favorite point of the whole movie was when one of the scientists pointed out that if we had to choose between global warming and global cooling/freezing, we’re lucky its warming. “If you’re choosing between the glaciers receding or advancing, I would think you would want them to receed.” hah.

All in all, this video was packed with logic and data, something very much lacking in Gore’s movie.

If you believe that global warming is man made, I highly recommend you purchase the video, or watch it (without bonus features) online.

Conclusion:

I am 100% certain that there is significant scientific debate on the issue of man made global warming. Based on the evidence I have seen so far, it seems extremely likely that global warming is natural and cyclical and the the rise and fall of temperature, as a result of increased or decreased sun acticity, leads to (rather than is caused by) an increase or decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.