There have been few of these threads here lately. So far I haven't posted, but now I cannot keep my mouth closed anymore.
I'm not an Al Gore fan, but neither I like Bush II "the dummer".
I haven't seen the film and I rather read the scientificly trustworthy sources.
Few things, not commenting directly those points claimed to be lies in the film.
- Temperature rise would be more like a global average and local changes can be more or less severe. There are many factors which affect the local climate like geographical features and jet streams. But it is wrong way to think that my area might benefit from warmer weather, so I don't care. Especially because the exact changes can be quite hard to predict.
- Generally this means more extreme weather phenomena like hurricanes, drought and floods. Also many things which many consider permanent or at least semi-permanent can get messsed up. The El Nino/La Nina phenomenon has great effect in weather in Australia and South America (and Fishing). It could mess up the monsoon weather, which is more or less vital part of the nature e.g. in India.
- In many areas even a small rise in temperature causes changes in plants and animals. And e.g. in Europe it would mean more severe pest problem (actually we alredy see bugs not seen before)
- Many animals which are on the extreme on their living area may disappear. E.g. polar bears hunt mainly seals which need ice cover for nesting. How fast the seals and polar bears could learn to the new situation? Could be that they die complete before they adapt. In Finland we have ringed seals in lakes and many years it has had a bad reproduction year because the nests built inside snow have collapsed too early in spring.
- when sea level rises it threatens first the near sea level areas. For example many Pacific islands. Even if the islands are not complete sunken the rising sea level 'pollutes' the fresh ground water with salt. That means people have to move away. Also the rising sea level and more frequent storms start to erode the land faster and sink islands before the normal rise would sink them. (all these happening)
- Gulf stream. It makes the northen Europe warmer than what the latitude would tell. Not ice age w/o it, but it could mean same weather as nothern Canada, Alaska or Siberia. E.g. Helsinki is about as North as Anchorage in Alaska. How would we deal the increasing power demand?
- Referring to stats telling there were so much more CO2 in millions of years ago is not sound. No way the current plant and animal species or even the current human society would survive from such a change.
- Together with increased CO2 output, human cuts down forest especially in the Amazon region. So the ways to deal the CO2 becomes harder.
Global temperature has changed a lot before the man started to pollute, but it would be better not to add this human effect into the mess. Even if we couldn't decide how much human affects the climate, it certainly isn't improving it. If you see an obstacle ahead of you while driving, you start to slow down in good time - not only when you have already hit it. If you don't know when to start break, better start break right now.
We have only this one Earth. Have you really thought what we are playing with? We simply cannot lose this.