One of his key insights, described in the film, came from drinking whisky one day with colleagues. Watching ice crack in the glass made him realise he could extract ancient air bubbles from the ice samples they were collecting.Hmmm... all due respect to Claude Lorius, let's talk to a scientist who didn't get his "moment of fame" from the bottom of a whiskey bottle.
"I'd already had a bit to drink, otherwise I wouldn't have had this brilliant idea, this brainstorm," Lorius told reporters after the screening. "It took many years to put the ideas into practice."
So what exactly does an objective "sobre" study of the ice-core data reveal?
Global temperature change observed over the last hundred years or so is well within the natural variability of the last 8,000 years, according to a new paper by a former Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) lead author.After all the recent revelations about faked studies and fudging of data to support the theory of man-made global warming, Dr. Lloyd's study is yet another brick in the wall suggesting that Al Gore will come to be regarded as the P.T. Barnum of the 20th century.
Dr. Philip Lloyd, a South Africa-based physicist and climate researcher, examined ice core-based temperature data going back 8,000 years to gain perspective on the magnitude of global temperature changes over the 20th Century. What Lloyd found was that the standard deviation of the temperature over the last 8,000 years was about 0.98 degrees Celsius - higher than the 0.85 degrees climate scientists say the world has warmed over the last century.
"This suggests that while some portion of the temperature change observed in the 20th century was probably caused by greenhouse gases, there is a strong likelihood that the major portion was due to natural variations," Lloyd wrote in his study.
