I haven't seen the film "An Inconvenient Truth," but I have problems with Jeff Klemzak's review of the documentary ("Hot topic leaves you cold," June 3, Reel Critic).
I am a scientist working on a climatology satellite, so I do know something about this subject. In the film, former vice president Al Gore refers to 900 peer-reviewed scientific papers that he says reached 100% agreement that carbon dioxide causes global warming, and Klemzak says, "It is difficult to believe that lock-step unanimity exists in the scientific community."
Actually, it has been known for more than a century that carbon dioxide leads to global warming. There is, however, no agreement on the magnitude of the effect, and if Gore implies such, he is misleading. Where there is disagreement is whether global warming since the Industrial Revolution, and especially its accelerated increase over the last few decades, is mostly due to mankind or to natural climatic cycles. Klemzak wonders whether the authors of the 900 papers were students or not, implying that the accuracy may be questionable. Having written some peer-reviewed papers, I can enlighten him about what "peer-reviewed" means. Most peer-reviewed papers have at least one doctoral author. The peer-review committee members are virtually all PhDs. If a student (usually a graduate student) is the primary author, they will almost always include their professor as co-author, since without that, the paper does not have a very good chance of being accepted.
