Not particularly promising material, especially when you consider one of Gore's co-stars was a graph, but it was a critical and box-office success, winning 2 Oscars and pulling in $49m at the cinemas. Not bad for a documentary.
The film was probably responsible for raising awareness of climate change across the globe and making the said graph a celebrity. Dubbed the 'hocket-stick', that graph showed how global temperatures have remained relatively steady for hundreds of years until the late 20th century when it rose dramatically. It's not just the rise that's remarkable but the way in which it dwarfs all temperature changes over the preceding thousand years (or back to the last Ice Age in fact). One simple graph, one big message.
Because of the impact of the 'hockey-stick' graph, it's creator, Michael E. Mann, has become a hate figure for climate sceptics. Meanwhile, the hockey-stick is frequently referred to by sceptics as "discredited". This, despite the fact that numerous alternative methods of piecing together global temperature graphs have resulted in identical curves. But then, the sceptics do criticise those as well.
So I was really intrigued to hear that a climate sceptic physicist called Prof. Richard Muller had put together a team of scientists that he hoped would show how it should be done.
Called the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature project, it merged a collection of 14.4m land temperature observations from 44,455 sites across the world dating back to 1753. Any homogenisation of data from various sources would be automated to remove human bias. In short, it would eliminate any of the 'problems' climate sceptics attribute to all the other analyses and graphs.
As a result, the project received some of it's funding from climate sceptic sources, and even arch climate sceptic, Anthony Watt, said that he would accept whatever results it came up with.
Trouble is, when the project finally produced it's report last week, it concluded that the global temperature IS rising, and that the best explanation was that humans were responsible. Not only that but their graph matched the hockey-stick.
To his credit, Prof. Richard Muller, says that he is now no longer a sceptic: The data has convinced him climate change is real. He hopes that it will finally settle the debate and that the politicians will now sort out what to do. It's a very brave thing to do, as Muller will now join Mann as sceptic hate-figure.
True to form, other climate sceptics, Watt included, are already backing away from the project, and criticising it's methodology. Funny that.
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