How Al Gore Deceived Me About CO2 and Temperature Changes

I remember back in the day watching Al Gore's 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth and being persuaded that there was great cause for alarm about humans' impact on the climate.

One graph in particular struck me as clearly demonstrating that human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a huge problem. It showed historical temperatures alongside atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 650,000 years. Here's a screenshot:

"When there is more carbon dioxide," Gore claimed, pointing to the graph, "the temperature gets warmer."

And I believed him. There it was, clear as day: CO2 levels obviously were driving temperature changes.

My conclusion that we should be alarmed by human emissions logically followed.

Or so I thought.

But then I watched another documentary challenging the narrative presented by Gore and other climate alarmists. I don't recall the name of the film, but the piece of information I remember being most struck by was the counterclaim that Gore had the causal relationship exactly backwards.

In fact, the documentary argued, the temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes in the record. It wasn't that CO2 levels were driving temperature changes but that temperature changes were driving CO2 levels.

The reason given for this is that the oceans essentially breathe CO2, absorbing more when it is colder and releasing more into the atmosphere when it gets warmer.

Having been presented with two opposing claims, I sought to verify for myself which was correct by searching the scientific literature. And I found that, indeed, Gore's claim was wrong.

In fact, it appeared to me from my own research into the question that it was uncontroversial that CO2 changes actually lagged corresponding temperature changes by a few hundred years.

I found this study published in Nature in June 1999, for example, that confirmed for me that the counterclaim was correct. (The PDF file is available here.) Or take this study published in Science in March 2003 also confirming that Gore had it backwards.

To demonstrate just how uncontroversial it is that the CO2 changes lagged the temperature changes, see this 2007 New Scientist article titled "Climate myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming".

You might think from that headline that the article challenges the claim that CO2 increases lag behind temperature increases, but, on the contrary, it cites that Science paper and confirms that this is so. It instead argues that this doesn't mean that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 do not in turn contribute to warmer temperatures.

Regarding the idea that rising CO2 levels were the driving force of temperature increases, the article argues that "no climate scientist has ever made this claim."

But that just makes me wonder why I never saw all these climate scientists who knew better excoriating Al Gore for making exactly that false claim in his famous film. Instead, all I ever heard was how Gore's film was right in line with this "consensus" I kept hearing about.

Moreover, the New Scientist article also appeared to me to be arguing against a strawman of its own creation. I had never seen anyone argue that the lag proved that CO2 levels had no effect on temperatures, only that it showed that the claim that CO2 levels were driving temperatures was false.

When I would come across those types of arguments attempting to sustain the mainstream narrative that we should be very alarmed about humans' impact on the climate, it only served to heighten my skepticism about what we are told.

A key question news consumers should always ask themselves with everything read or watched is whether the information serves a political agenda.

And in the case of information we get about climate change, the answer to that question is obviously "Yes." The political agenda is no secret: governments seek ever greater powers to control us.

You might say that the the true historical relationship between CO2 levels and temperatures is an inconvenient truth for people like Gore pushing that political agenda. He should have said, "When temperatures get warmer, there is more carbon dioxide." But that obviously wouldn't have served the agenda.

After becoming a father in 2012, I began diving deeply into the medical literature on vaccines, a topic I have written much about. It became absolutely clear to me that what we are told science says about vaccines and what science actually tells us are two completely different things.

Another thing that became clear to me was how the process of scientific inquiry was being totally corrupted by government and pharmaceutical industry funding.

The same appears to me to be true about climate science, as well.

I have not researched this topic anywhere near as deeply as I have with the topic of vaccines or, in the past few years, the COVID-19 lockdown madness and its coerced mass vaccination endgame.

But I know enough to be skeptical, and contrary to what we are told, skepticism is not unreasonable. On the contrary, it is at the very heart of scientific inquiry.

So what about you? Have you had any experiences like mine where you discovered that you had been deceived in a way that led you to a fallacious conclusion, one way or the other, about the effect of CO2 and human activities on the climate?

Let me know in the comments below!