Column: Gore Takes Heat in D.C. Return

NEW YORK -- Al Gore has taken some heat lately for spreading the word about global warming.

First there were the allegations by a conservative group, the day after Gore collected an Oscar for his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," that his Nashville mansion consumes more than 20 times as much electricity as the average American household. Then there were charges that zinc mining on Tennessee property owned by Gore tarnished his environmentalist credentials.

By the time he arrived on Capitol Hill this past week to testify about his signature issue, the barbs Gore's congressional adversaries hurled at him sounded relatively benign.

"It seems that everything is blamed on global warming," Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma complained. "How come you guys never seem to notice when it gets cold?"

He then confronted Gore with the number of record cold temperatures measured at U.S. weather stations during the month of January. (This would be the same January that was part of the warmest Northern Hemisphere winter on record.)

"We need to be deliberative and careful when we talk about so-called scientific facts," Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas lectured, before enumerating a list of things he believed Gore got wrong in the award-winning documentary.

One of the problems Gore, environmentalists and the scientific community have in conveying the seriousness of global warming is that its most severe effects to date have been felt in the polar regions, far from the places where most politicians and their constituents live.

As Gore mentioned on Capitol Hill, in just the last few months a number of scientific studies have documented alarming environmental changes at both poles. The sea ice layer on the Arctic Ocean has shrunk so dramatically that scientists expect it to disappear completely during the summer months by mid-century. Scientists have seen glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica suddenly accelerate, increasing the rate at which they dump icebergs into the sea and contributing to the rise of the world's seas.

As part of an effort to draw attention to the poles, on March 1 the world's scientific community kicked off the International Polar Year, an intensive research effort and public awareness campaign focused on the Arctic and Antarctic.

"We're seeing the poles change faster than we had anticipated, than we as scientists could have imagined," said Robin Bell, a Columbia University geophysicist who chaired the U.S. national committee for the International Polar Year.

A few years ago scientists felt pretty confident that if anything, the polar ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica would grow due to global warming. Their calculations indicated that any melting would be more than offset by a warming-induced increase in snowfall over the South Pole.

Minds started changing in February 2002, when scientists watched in amazement as a Rhode Island-sized chunk of floating ice on Antarctica's coast disintegrated into icebergs and simply drifted away. Around the same time they noticed that Greenland's already growing output of ice into the North Atlantic had increased dramatically, doubling over the decade that ended in 2005.