Think tank sponsors skeptic to dispute Gore film

In a talk sponsored by the John Locke Foundation, Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow of Environment Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, gave a point-by-point rebuttal of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (AIT) on Apr. 11 at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville. Lewis said that the film "put [global warming] on the political map in a way it's never been" but questioned whether AIT deserves to have such influence. Calling the film a "scare-umentary" and a "computer-enhanced lawyers brief," Lewis claimed AIT was misleading, one-sided and exaggerated. He used data from both peer-reviewed and unpublished studies, and the work of such climate skeptic luminaries as Sherwood Idso, Patrick Michaels and Bjorn Lomborg to rebut AIT. While many of Lewis's concerns about the film have also been points of contention among the scientific community, Lewis often fell into the same trap of which he accused Gore. For instance, Lewis referenced a 2004 study to dispute Gore's assertion that the disappearance of the Kilimanjaro glacier is connected to global warming. However, one of the study's author's, Dr. Douglas Hardy, told the New York Times that the use of the study's two-and-a-half years of field data "to refute or even question global warming borders on the absurd." Lewis also stated that Gore's premise that global warming will harm ecosystems was based on only "one study" and criticized Gore for not mentioning "the ecological benefits" of an elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) environment and a warmer climate. The recently released IPCC Working Group II Summary for Policymakers, which reflects a wide analysis of peer-reviewed literature on the subject, projects that a temperature increase of 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit would bring "major changes in ecosystem structure and function, species' ecological interactions and species' geographic ranges, with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services." To the surprise of many in the audience, most of whom had yet to see the film, Lewis acknowledged at the end of the speech that his "reading of the science is it's very likely that much of the warming of the past 30 years is due to greenhouse gas emissions." Despite this, he claimed that attempts to regulate CO2 using such measures as the Kyoto Protocol would be "all cost for no benefit" and that attempts to curb global fossil fuel consumption "would doom millions to perpetual poverty."