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I am guilty of reading "predicting foot to meter per year seawater rise" as a satirising exaggeration for "predicting immediate, catastrophic (plausibly sea-lev

I am guilty of reading "predicting foot to meter per year seawater rise" as a satirising exaggeration for "predicting immediate, catastrophic (plausibly sea-level related) consequences" and I did not state that clearly. With that amendment, I think my comment still has merit, but it may no longer have responded to anything you wrote. Sorry about that. That said, An Inconvenient Truth did suggest a 20-foot rise as something imminent. Did it "predict" it? No, not explicitly, it suggests and imagines and calls to action. It also doesn't specify the timescale, but there is great urgency. With that, your GP, while very much on the high end, is way closer to AIT than AIT is to IPCC. A short note on movies and art: the difference between "The Core" and TDAT (and "regular" art and the "climate" ditto) is that the latter didn't use science as a plot device, it explicitly injected itself into a political debate, dominated by a scientific discourse.

dalke 11y ago
How do you figure it is a satirising exaggeration and not a straw man designed for ridicule? I found a transcript of "An Inconvenient Truth" at http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/courses/blog/gw/An%20Inconvient%20Truth%20Transcript.pdf http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/courses/blog/gw/An%20Inconvien.... The section on 20 foot sea level rise is a description of what would happen "If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted" and ends with "Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other problems as well." I agree that it's a call to action. I disagree that it's a prediction of something imminent, as in, an outcome that will happen within a couple of decades of when the movie was made. I read it as a need for imminent action, to prevent one possible long-term outcome. BTW, Gore does make some short term predictions, which have proved to be incorrect. Gore said that within a decade there will be no snows of Kilimanjaro. That decade has passed. Instead, http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/419/2013/tc-7-419-2013.pdf http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/419/2013/tc-7-419-2013.pdf says that most of the ice cover will be gone by 2040, and the rest by 2060. http://lindseynicholson.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Moelg-et-al.-2013.pdf http://lindseynicholson.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Moelg... further points out that there will be snow even if there are no glaciers. (While incorrect, I do not think it seriously affects the underlying meaning. The choice of "snow" over "glacier ice" should be read as an homage to Hemingway, with some poetic license allowed.) Gore predicts Glacier Valley will have no glaciers within 15 years, or 2021. NPS estimates no later then 2030, https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm , so Gore may be a couple years off there as well. Gore was willing to make testable predictions in the 10-15 year span, which is a clue that the 20 foot rise in sea level that he described was not meant as a prediction of something imminent.

dalke 11y ago

How do you figure it is a satirising exaggeration and not a straw man designed for ridicule? I found a transcript of "An Inconvenient Truth" at http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/courses/blog/gw/An%20Inconvient%20Truth%20Transcript.pdf http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/courses/blog/gw/An%20Inconvien.... The section on 20 foot sea level rise is a description of what would happen "If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted" and ends with "Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other problems as well." I agree that it's a call to action. I disagree that it's a prediction of something imminent, as in, an outcome that will happen within a couple of decades of when the movie was made. I read it as a need for imminent action, to prevent one possible long-term outcome. BTW, Gore does make some short term predictions, which have proved to be incorrect. Gore said that within a decade there will be no snows of Kilimanjaro. That decade has passed. Instead, http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/419/2013/tc-7-419-2013.pdf http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/419/2013/tc-7-419-2013.pdf says that most of the ice cover will be gone by 2040, and the rest by 2060. http://lindseynicholson.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Moelg-et-al.-2013.pdf http://lindseynicholson.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Moelg... further points out that there will be snow even if there are no glaciers. (While incorrect, I do not think it seriously affects the underlying meaning. The choice of "snow" over "glacier ice" should be read as an homage to Hemingway, with some poetic license allowed.) Gore predicts Glacier Valley will have no glaciers within 15 years, or 2021. NPS estimates no later then 2030, https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm , so Gore may be a couple years off there as well. Gore was willing to make testable predictions in the 10-15 year span, which is a clue that the 20 foot rise in sea level that he described was not meant as a prediction of something imminent.