That doesn't discount the rest of the movie or his work to admit that he may have been stretching things a bit far with that particular claim. When that finishes melting, it's going to cause a nice little bump in sea level, and it's only the beginning. More than 1/10th of the Larsen C ice shelf gone in a second. It's still on pace to happen after the massive work we've done, just later (based on our current path).Ī chunk of ice the size of Delaware/P.E.I./twice the size of Luxembourg just broke off the Antarctic ice shelf. We were on pace for the ice caps to potentially melt by the mid 2020s (certainly melt enough to flood parts of Manhattan, which was the question he was being asked). I'm not a climate or ecological scientist, maybe you are, but it seems pretty sensational to say (at the time the movie came out) that the ice caps would have been completely melted by 2020 had we not curbed what we currently have (which by every other metric is still not enough).
However, the essential point that temperatures are greater now than during the Medieval Warm Period is correct and confirmed by multiple proxy reconstructions. The graph is actually a combination of Mann's hockey stick (Mann 1998) and CRU's surface measurements (Jones 1999). There is ample and conclusive evidence that Earth's average temperature has increased in the past 100 years, and the decline of mid- and high-latitude glaciers is a major piece of evidence."Īl Gore refers to a graph of temperature, attributing it to Dr Thompson. But Mote puts it in perspective: "The fact that the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro cannot be used as proof of global warming does not mean that the Earth is not warming. In his defence, the study by Philip Mote came out after Gore's film was made. Indeed deforestation seems to be causing Mount Kilimanjaro's shrinking glacier so Gore got this wrong. This is the sum total of what was wrong- hardly a disaster! So many people here convinced AIT was riddled with falsehoods but offer no detailed proof.