In a message dated 11/7/2006 10:23:31 AM Central Standard Time, 
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SIX INCONVENIENT TRUTHS 
by Andrew R.B. Ferguson
In the film An Inconvenient Truth, ex vice-president Al Gore presents the 
facts about climate change.  It is a bravura performance.  He makes use of 
brilliant presentational techniques to put before us all relevant current knowledge 
about climate change.  He lightens the factual burden with humour, and by 
including some interesting autobiographical vignettes showing how various things 
in his life brought him to see the subject as being of pre-eminent importance.
Although I am fairly familiar with the subject, he introduced me to a telling 
statistic.  He said that over 900 scientific peer reviewed papers had been 
published, yet none had argued that global warming was not taking place.  As 
part of the same survey, over 600 popular media articles were analysed.  More 
than fifty per cent of them presented the subject in such a way as to appear that 
it was still an open question whether global warming was taking place.  
Doubtless the media do this partly because they think that controversy is more 
interesting, but as Al Gore pointed out, they are helped by the industrial lobby, 
which thinks that it is to their benefit to create uncertainty where none 
should exist.  Such activities have been manifest in the tobacco industry as well 
as in the energy industry.  
As a presentation of the inconvenient fact of climate change, the film can be 
recommended merely on the basis of the pleasure of seeing something being 
done as well as it possibly could be.  But there are five other inconvenient 
truths which are of equal importance which were largely ignored by Al Gore.
The second inconvenient truth is the immense difficulty of replacing fossil 
fuels.  Fossil fuels contain energy by virtue of having accumulated millions of 
years of solar energy.  To replace fossil fuels we have two options.  One is 
to tap nuclear energy.  Nuclear fission — of uranium and thorium — is limited 
by the restricted supply of suitable resources (apart from any other 
dangers).  Nuclear fusion is at a stage where it needs still to be regarded as a 
possibility rather than a probability, and there is a good chance that even if it 
becomes possible to achieve, so much waste heat would be released in the 
process that the ‘cure’ would be worse than the ‘disease’ of inadequate energy 
supplies.  Nuclear fission leads to the overheating of rivers, and is already a 
problem in that regard.
The second possibility, in addition to nuclear energy, is that of capturing 
solar energy as it arrives on the Earth.  There are intractable problems to 
which evolution has not provided a solution, so we would be wise to withhold 
judgement as to whether the human race will be able to.  Where power density is 
fairly high, as with wind, photovoltaics and tidal stream, uncontrollability 
(i.e. intermittency) is an immense problem.  Where uncontrollability is either no 
problem or little problem, as with biomass and hydroelectricity respectively, 
power density is low.  Biomass captures and stores in its mass only about one 
thousandth part of the energy that falls on it, which is why I say that 
evolution has not provided an answer to how to store the immense quantity of energy 
that is needed to make it possible to sustain our present population.  
These difficulties lead those who have studied the matter to conclude that 
without fossil fuels the Earth is only likely to support about 2 billion people, 
rather than the 9 billion that are likely to be here by 2050.  Al Gore did 
not mention the number of people who might live on Earth in reasonable comfort 
with diminished energy resources.
The third inconvenient truth is that even a large reduction in fossil fuel 
usage by the developed nations — one so large as to be barely conceivable, a 60% 
reduction — is likely to be cancelled by a wholly justifiable increase by 
China, India and Indonesia.  If this 60% reduction could be achieved by 2050, 
China, India and Indonesia are likely to have increased their present per capita 
consumption by an amount that would match the decrease in the developed world. 
 Moreover their per capita emissions would still be less than the developed 
world after the mooted 60% reduction.  Thus the overall effect is likely to be 
little reduction in present emissions, even according to the most optimistic 
hopes.  Yet the world is currently emitting about two and a half times as much 
carbon as it should be to have a hope of stabilizing atmospheric carbon at a ‘
safe’ level.  The conclusion to this is that while taking action to reduce 
carbon emissions may help to mitigate some of the dire problems seen by Al Gore, 
it will not prevent most of them, so preparing for those problems needs to be 
as high on the agenda as attempting to reduce the emissions.  Al Gore sees 
hundreds of millions of refugees as the inevitable outcome of substantial sea 
level increase.  One of the most sensible methods of preparing for this is to do 
all that can be done to slow population growth.  Failing to take note of this 
inconvenient truth, Al Gore did not mention that much remains to be done to 
(a) change the Vatican’s belief that only ‘natural’ methods of contraception 
are permissible, and (b) combat the influence of the ‘right to lifers’.  In 
short to ensure that contraception is easily available to all those who wish to 
use it, and that abortion is readily available when contraception has failed 
and the mother does not want another child.  That inconvenient truth is about as 
inconvenient as inconvenient truths come!
The fourth inconvenient truth arises from the fact that it is bound to be a 
slow process to reduce the per capita emissions of the developed nations.  Thus 
the action that would most rapidly ensure that there was some mitigation in 
burgeoning use of fossil fuels would be to prevent the populations of the 
developed nations growing by net immigration (as is happening in the USA and to a 
lesser extent in the European Union).  
The fifth inconvenient truth is that a powerful driver for fossil fuel 
consumption is globalization.  There is little hope of making frugal use of energy 
while globalization requires that goods and consumables are unnecessarily 
transported around the world.  There are many problems associated with 
globalization, but this aspect is the one which is relevant to excessive use of fossil 
fuels, thus overloading the Earth with carbon.
The sixth inconvenient truth is that the belief of economists and the 
commercial world in ever continuing growth is impossible.  We need to change our 
capitalist system so that it works reasonably well without growth, with goods 
lasting as long as possible and designed so that they can be repaired when they go 
wrong, and with products being made only to satisfy real needs, not ‘needs’ 
invented by business to expand their markets.
Every one of those six inconvenient truths is of great importance, yet Al 
Gore attended in depth to only the first.  While he did mention population as a 
problem, he gave no indication of the immense reduction in population that is 
needed if everyone is to live even moderately well.  He indicated, with a 
passing remark, how he justifies that to himself, namely that he is himself party 
to the delusion that renewable energy can replace fossil fuels.  As to the 
other inconvenient truths, perhaps he did give an implicit explanation of why he 
kept quiet about so many important matters.  He mentioned that he had observed 
long ago that it is almost impossible to persuade someone of the truth of an 
argument if that person’s salary depends on their believing the argument not to 
be true.  After the above survey, I think we might extend that observation to 
conclude that it is almost impossible to persuade a politician of the truth 
of an argument, if that politician’s chance of office depends on their 
believing the argument not to be true!  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
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