Inconvenient Hype

It’s movie season, and there are a lot of films worth catching right now. So hopefully this one will fly under the radar. An Inconvenient Truth — headlined by, get this: Al Gore — is in select theaters right now, toting the terrors of global warming, and how it’s going to kill us all and bury Miami and New York under 20-feet of sea water.

Someone gag me, please.

It looks like Fahrenheit 9/11 was just the beginning in this new genre of un-documentaries distorting the facts in a not-even-disguised attempt at stirring up fear and paranoia. This particular attempt is obviously a response to Michael Crichton’s latest best-seller, State of Fear, in which he lambasts the theories of global warming, and cites his sources as he does it.

Now I might as well be totally honest here: I thought the whole global warming thing was bunk before I read Crichton’s book. But after reading State of Fear, I know it is. It is almost entirely a political movement, driven by fear and environmentalist agencies.

Perhaps most enlightening to me, though, was not Crichton’s novel, but instead a speech he gave last November concerning the things he discovered when researching for his book, titled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century. See, he set out to write a book speaking to the dangers of global warming. The problem was, the more he researched it, the more he found the evidence to be lacking, and eventually had to reverse the entire premise of his book.

If you plan on seeing this movie, you owe it to yourself to read Crichton’s article first. And don’t just buy into the hype. Al Gore will warn you: the oceans will rise 20 feet if the glaciers of the world all melt. The problem with that statement, though, is the “if”.

*edit* Here’s an article where scientists respond to Al Gore’s “circumstantial arguments.” Ha!

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore’s activism, “The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science.”