Dim Sun Of All Fears

" A Biblical famine,the closest thing to Hell on Earth"

Is not the sort of figure caption you run into in The Journal Of Geophysical Research, but Educational  TV tends to be a hotter medium than he scientific literature. With PBS airing of  'Dimming The Sun '  fact and image have been disconnected on the science screen to a degree rivaling The Great Global Warming Swindle. While the IPCC process ,shedding its earliest and wildest predictions of temperatures rising degrees per decade , ans subscribing to  scientific transparency  in placw of Green enthusiasm, has been converging on a  'consensus ' projection of some few degrees C of  global warming in this century,  NOVA  has been succumbing to hype. This program is  feverishly and unashamedly  bent on reimposing double digit  temperature inflation on the popular imagination --before the next election.

The NOVA  pseudo-documentary's erstwhile subject, --  the  falling rate at which sunlight drives evaporation on the ground -- is rapidly subordinated to the program's polemic agenda-- elevating to undeserved public credibility some of the most extreme climate modeling scenarios in existence , and implying that climatic doom awaits us before the century is out. At the films end and beginning the screen is  surreallly filled with a burning ocean - an icon old as Coleridge's albatross or the incendiary marine luminism  of Turner's Slave Ship. But this hot button icon has nothing to do with melting ice or methane clathrates- it is hoary footage  blownout gas well awaiting recapping in the Gulf of Mexico.

Like much  PBS science programming , it is a replay of an import- A DOX Production, produced, written and directed by Duncan Copp, a talented British filmaker who anticipated  Green demand by producing Planet Storm-- a scary  2001 compendium of extraterrestrial weather  implying that industry may create a literally alien atmosphere on earth. It  features wild  computer animations of imagined weather phenomena , much as featured in The Day After Tomorrow. I'd credit him with leading with production values for that other Sundance winner, An Inconvenient Truth, rather than following suit( James Bowman, are you taking notes ? )

'Dimming The Sun' introduces Peter Cox, a climate scientist whose main claim to fame is  his suitabilitay as  foil for Jim Hansen , whom he makes seem a paragon of moderation - the bait and switch works too ,
, as it screens  scenes of a burning  offshore gas well blowout , the voiceover speaks of fast forwarding  temperatures rise  to  whole degrees a year ,leading to a global extinctions  driven by  undersea methane clathrate meltdown :

NARRATOR: While today's models foresee a maximum warming of five degrees Celsius by the end of the century, Cox thinks that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that by 2100, temperatures could rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Many plant species could not survive such rapid climate change. In his scenario, trees would die all over the planet; the world's best agricultural land would be struck by drought and soil erosion; famine would not be far behind. And in the far north, there would be a risk of releasing a vast natural store of greenhouse gas bigger than all the oil and coal reserves of the planet.

PETER COX: We will be in danger of destabilizing these things called "methane hydrates," which store a lot of methane at the bottom of the ocean, in a kind of frozen form—ten thousand billion tons of this stuff—and they're known to be destabilized by warming.

NARRATOR: If this were to happen, some or all of the ten thousand billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas eight times stronger than carbon dioxide, would be released into the atmosphere. When this last happened 50,000,000 years ago, when the Earth was already warmer than it is today, the average temperature rocketed by 13 degrees Fahrenheit, making the Earth 25 degrees hotter than today, and life struggled to survive.

\If you like unadulterated tabloid journalism , buy the DVD. I confess I kind of like the  aviation impact of
sequence, since on September 12 2001, at the Hoffman Lab,  I told Harvard's Mike McElroy, now head of its Center For The Environment, to take advantage of the post- 9-11 halt in civil aviation to check the climate impact of the halt in aircraft contrails that at once reflect sunlight and shade the ground.

As ususal. AEI, CEI, and the rest of the  K Street  climate wizards and Planet Gore regulars again  failed to  provide warning of what the Public Broadcast system is  up to on Al's behalf.

D