I got my start as a consultant, working on the Y2K bug for a major financial firm.
I never heard any CEO of any major corporation who made the dismissal you describe in 1998. Can you provide a cite, please?
Regards,
Shodan
The big problem i have is with Al gore’s propaganda film. He makes assertions that are simply NOT borne out by the facts, and presents the situation as a catastophe about to happen. It’s not science and it is not honest. I have NO problems with efforst to conserve fossil fuels-I think its important, and we may actually find ways to live better with lower energy consumption. But Al Gore isn’t interested in that-he has an agenda, and his propaganda is dedicated to pushing that agenda.
Can you provide specific examples?
Is anything in the political arena not “overhyped”? I don’t know how to measure if this topic is any more or less so, and I think concentrating on that aspect of the debate is a distraction. It would be more worthwhile to focus on specific claims and not to get too caught up with Al Gore’s status as the national spokesperson on the subject. Al Gore could have gotten any number of things wrong, and that wouldn’t change the nature of the problem.
The IPCC report which **jshore **linked to seems like the right place to look instead. Gore isn’t a scientist, and I don’t expect him to actually understand all the details of Anthropogenic Climate Change. I didn’t care much for his movie, but I’m more the type to prefer a dry, scientific article if I’m trying to understand something this complicated.
What agenda does he have, other than his stated agenda of reducing greenhouse gas emissions? (Which is not the same thing as fuel conservation, BTW, though what achieves the one will achieve the other.)
Forgot to add… I also agree that an editorial on the subject is not any kind of proof one way or the other about the amount of hype out there. But if you really want to get into the claims made in Gore’s movie, a better place to start would be this article in the Science section of the NYT: From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype. But I still think it’s a mistake to use Al Gore as the determining factor in whether this is being overhyped or not. There are plenty of folks on the other end of the spectrum underhyping it, and some of those folks have huge audiences (Rush Limbaugh, for example).
I don’t see Al Gore as the problem, it is the non-scientific backlash from the right that really elevated this issue to prominence. It’s presented as if global warming wasn’t an issue until Gore came along, and then all these scientists started publishing papers in support of Gore’s hypothesis.
Well, I graduated with a degree in meteorology in 1985, and greenhouse gases and global warming were being discussed heavily at that time. It’s just that nobody really cared what a bunch of nerdy climatologists were studying.
Gore may be guilty of propogating some ideas that may turn out to be false, but that is to be expected in a field as complex as climate.
If one really “follows the science”, then there’d be far less debate on this issue, since the vast majority of climate scientists agree, generally, with the positions put forth by Al Gore. The opposing voices are really very small.
Well, for one, he states that the Greenland ice cap is melting. The southern portions are showing increased melting, the northern portions are showing groth. No net change.
or the thing about hurricanes-Gore & Co. make the claim that global warming will cause more hurricance. this hasn’t been the case, so far.
Cite?
I believe the theory is that it will cause more intense hurricanes. At any rate, that has yet to prove false or true. It’s based on averages over several years. Too soon to tell. We had no big hurricanes last year, but consider the year before. A bad hurricane season is expected this year.
And I repeat: What “agenda” does Gore have?
Not sure that’s true about his predictions, though. Is it? He seems to stress the worst case scenario, and sometimes goes well beyond what the science is telling us. From the NYT articled I linked to in my previous post:
Another place to look is RealClimate since that is the site run by a bunch of climate scientists all of whom have are well-published in the field. Although they had some quibbles with Al Gore’s representation of the science in his movie, their take on the movie was generally fairly positive and their take on that article you link to by William Broad in the N.Y. Times was generally fairly negative.
I’ll consider global warming to be ‘overhyped’ when the level of global warming hype is high enough that it has a nontrivial likelihood of giving rise to our overresponding to the threat.
(Any reason why that shouldn’t be our yardstick?)
As I’m sure everyone has noticed, we’re in no immediate danger of that. 
Wow, that was a pretty scathing attack. “Fairly negative” is an understatement!
By the same token I found the review of Gore’s movie fairly…glossy…and a bit tolerant. Even the reviewer admitted that there were problems, but seemed content to gloss over them…or say things like "Gore is careful not to state what the temperature/CO2 scaling is. He is making a qualitative point, which is entirely accurate. " Technically this is true…but Gore is IMPLYING this connection in the movie, as he IMPLES other things and connections that even the reviewer says are at a minimum inaccurate or misleading. However he’s given a pass because technically he didn’t come right out and make a firm statement.
While the negative review was in fact as John says “a pretty scathing attack” (and rightfully so for all of me…I have only a very limited grasp on the subtle shadings of the subject), I found the review of Gore tolerant…and showing perhaps a touch of bias (which makes sense since obviously the reviewer was in general agreement with Gore, mistakes or misrepresentations or no). BTW, my impression was that the link you provided was for an INDIVIDUAL at RealClimate, jshore…not an official position of the organization as a whole on Gore’s movie.
(“Gore’s aim is to change that viewpoint, and the colleagues I saw the movie with all seem to agree that he is successful.” This seems to imply to me that in general Eric Steig agree’s with Gore and his movie, and in talking to his various colleagues they mostly agree too).
-XT
Oh, yeah…the OP. 
Forgot all about that.
Yes, I think that GW IS being ‘Overhyped’. Not in the scientific community but in the popular press. One has but to look at the general trend in ‘gloom and doom’ ‘documentaries’ on things like Discovery, TLC and even History Channel to see that its being overhyped.
-XT
Well, true enough. The piece was only authored by one of them. I don’t know what sort of internal policy the folks at RealClimate have for vetting each others posts, however it does seem to me that they generally try to speak with a unified voice on that blog. (I have seen them disagree somewhat with each other in responding to comments.) And, in their post on the Broad article, Mann and Schmidt refer to the post by Eric Steig on Gore’s movie by saying, "We reviewed the movie ourselves, looking hard for such ‘inaccuracies’, so I take it to imply that at least those two were also in agreement with what Steig wrote in that piece.
Just FTR jshore I’m not implying that by and large the folks at RealClimate aren’t in general (or even specifically) in sympathy/agreement with Gore’s movie. My guess is that they are…as my guess is that by and large the movie generally reflects their own thoughts on GW.
I still think GW is being overhyped in the popular press. This doesn’t mean that its not very real (I believe it is), or that mankind is having a non-zero (or even very significant) effect on it (I beleve we are). I just don’t think that things like the global conveyor is poised to shut down (throwing Europe and the Northern parts of the America’s into a new ice age while the rest of the world goes into a heat induced drought from which blah blah blah), nor that we are about to become Venus, etc etc. As you are the expert on the folks at RealClimate you know as well as I do that THEIR prediction for the next century, while serious and of great concern are no where close to what the popular press is telling the general public as to predictions of gloom and doom.
-XT
I’d nitcpick – if the dangers of overresponding outweigh the dangers of underresponding that a more moderate strategy would yield.
Come to think of it, even if there is a danger of overresponding, there might be an even greater danger of underresponding. Considering the entrenched beliefs and politically contentious nature of GW, whatever technical merits it may have, any strategy and/or hype that has any chance of succeeding or being taken seriously will have chances of both under and overresponding, IMO.
Well, I have to admit that I haven’t studied the media coverage in great detail. (Do you really hear them talking about the Earth becoming Venus?!? I agree that the probability of the global conveyer shutdown and its effects does seem to be one misconception that a lot of people seem to have gotten, so the media probably did influence that.)
And, I agree that the media has a tendency toward certain things such as hype…but I think the whole picture is actually more complicated. For example, while the media do tend to hype stories like AGW, they also tend to hype controversy (partly to improve ratings / sales but also out of a sense of trying to be balanced) so that, at least until quite recently, you were getting stories in which you had almost an equal amount of time dedicated to the viewpoint of a small minority of scientists as was being given to the majority viewpoint. The media also tend to hype the latest and greatest study. It is much more interesting to say that this latest scientific paper is very important or the definitive evidence of something than to say it is just a tiny piece of a huge mountain of evidence…and this effect can probably cut both ways depending on the study in question.
Sorry, I doubt that any of the CIOs I knew were able to get the CEOs to commit those thoughts to paper (and if any had, they probably made excruciating use of the shredder by 1999).
I’m not sure what you point might be. Are you thinking that the scare happened in '97 or '96? Or do you think that no CEO ignored the professional warnings, only to be turned around after seeing some of the sillier TV shows?