John Tierney's blast of hot air

Not content with a front page story reminding us that Hilary Clinton's husband was once unfaithful to her,the Times today gives us John Tierney who (yes, the Time$ thinks it can charge for his insipid comment) takes on Al Gore to task, not only for being "boring," but for not going far enough to demand action on global warming.

If Al Gore's new movie weren't titled "An Inconvenient Truth," I wouldn't have quite so many problems with it.

He should have gone with something closer to "Revenge of the Nerd." That's the heartwarming angle to global warming. A college student is mesmerized by his professor's bold measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Our hero carries this passion into Congress, where no one listens to him, and then works up a slide show that he inflicts on audiences around the world, to no discernible effect.

But then his slide show becomes a horror movie — and it turns into a cult hit. The nerd becomes the toast of Hollywood, Sundance and Cannes. He is cheered at premieres across America. Audiences sit enraptured through a film starring graphs of CO2 concentrations and close-ups of ice cores.

The documentary doesn't open in theaters until tomorrow, but it's already a cinch for an Oscar, and deservedly so. Getting anyone to voluntarily endure 100 minutes of Al Gore and his slides is a historic cinematic achievement.

Gore isn't exactly likable in the film — he still has that wooden preachiness and is especially hard to watch when he tries to be funny. Yet you end up admiring him for his nerdly persistence. He turned out to be right about something important: global warming is a problem worth worrying about.

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But even as propaganda, the film is ultimately unsatisfying. Gore doesn't mind frightening his audience with improbable future catastrophes, but he avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries.

He doesn't propose the quickest and most efficient way to reduce greenhouse emissions: a carbon tax on gasoline and other fossil fuels. The movie gives him a forum for talking sensibly about a topic that's taboo on Capitol Hill, but he instead sticks to long-range proposals that sound more palatable, like redesigning cities to encourage mass transit or building more efficient cars and appliances.

Gore shows the obligatory pictures of windmills and other alternative sources of energy. But he ignores nuclear power plants, which don't spew carbon dioxide and currently produce far more electricity than all ecologically fashionable sources combined.

A few environmentalists, like Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, have recognized that their movement is making a mistake in continuing to demonize nuclear power. Balanced against the risks of global warming, nukes suddenly look good — or at least deserve to be considered rationally. Gore had a rare chance to reshape the debate, because a documentary about global warming attracts just the sort of person who marches in anti-nuke demonstrations.

Gore could have dared, once he enticed the faithful into the theater, to challenge them with an inconvenient truth or two. But that would have been a different movie.

Right, John Tierney.

In September of this year, Tierney wrote another story for the Times magazine, in which he attacked opponents of suburban sprawl, and called for "more tolls, more roads, and yes, more cars." As a way to reduce driving, Tierney proposed a punitive tax on the cost of gasoline. In return, environmentalists would have to support new toll lanes and road construction.

When environmentalists pointed out that a gas tax would do little to reduce driving as long as people continue to need to travel long distances to get to work, Tierney abruptly changed the terms of the debate, arguing that opposition to driving is mere snobbish elitism. "If people are willing to keep driving," he wrote, "why are they and their cars any more objectionable than the commoners who offended the Duke of Wellington with their desire to ride the railroad?" Along the way, he ignored entirely the reasons that environmentalists want to reduce driving in the first place: to curb global warming and air pollution. Indeed, in a 5,468-word story extolling the benefits of driving, the phrase "global warming" appears just once, in passing, and "climate change" not at all.

Neha Bhatt of the Sierra Club, who spoke to Tierney at length for the piece -- he quoted one sentence -- doesn't believe Tierney approached the issue in good faith. (Full disclosure: I used to work at Sierra Club. Bhatt was a colleague.) "There was no real sincere intent to look at the problems [of sprawl, smart growth, and global warming]," she told CJR Daily. "I think he wrote that article before he even called us."

Perhaps Tierney's lack of alarm at the looming threat of global warming isn't surprising -- he's on record as believing that it could be a good thing. A Tierney column from 2001 touted a study suggesting that expected future rises in mean air temperature were likely to be a boon to the U.S. economy. There's a far more substantial body of research that shows the opposite, of course -- that global warming and its effects will cost the U.S. billions of dollars. That research was ignored.

Yes, that John Tierney.

New York Times columnist John Tierney made several questionable and inaccurate claims about Arctic climatic change and its effect on polar bear populations. In his August 7 Times op-ed, Tierney claimed that the Arctic was as warm in the 1930s as it is now. He also suggested that recent Arctic warming may benefit polar bears, noting that polar bear populations have increased as the Arctic has grown warmer. In fact, data show that current Arctic temperatures are higher than they were in the 1930s. Also, many scientists believe that Arctic warming, rather than benefiting polar bears, will actually destroy their habitats and reduce their food supply.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but at least Tierney's consistent. Consistently wrong (as shown by our recent gas prices which have done little to curtail our taste for gasoline and big SUVs...so much for a "carbon tax" -- we're already paying it), but consistent.

Tierney ignores the fact that Gore's movie is intended to frighten people into demanding action from a political class which continues to take it's scientific guidance from Michael Crichton and views global warming as a hoax. If we're dealing with political leadership like that, proposing "solutions" like gas taxes and nuclear power plants hardly seems the point.