Some Convenient Half-Truths

A review of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth

By Megan Sego
From the September 2006 Print Edition

This summer, Hollywood brings you a hero; swooping in from a mundane, everyday existence to save the future of mankind from all sorts of impending disasters. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s: Al Gore?

At its best, "An Inconvenient Truth" has all the elements of a compelling American story. There’s the sinister villain, unwitting victims, plot twists, a dash of comedy, and of course a daring hero. However, this unintended comedy falls short of its goal as a credible documentary based solidly in science. The pathos-filled picture features claims of Gore’s victory in 2000, and leans towards Michael Moore-style visual tricks with misleading assertions. At its worst, the documentary is a classic example of liberal science, rife with manipulated data, intellectual dishonesty, and outright lies. As could be expected, Gore’s solution of spreading "awareness" is as logically lame as his assertions, so I’ll review each and present the actual conclusions in ways liberal scientists won’t let you catch them saying out loud.

Gore puts forth the claim that a recent warming trend is correlated to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions and bases this assertion on a "consensus" of scientific thought. This "consensus" comes from a sample of scientific articles written in the last ten years. In the documentary he states that 10 percent of the sample, 928 articles, unanimously favored the "established theory" of global warming and extrapolates that to the whole. It is useful to point out here that he is by no means correct. Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute managed to name 22 scientists with P.h.D.s around the world who don’t agree with Gore. Even if we did know the sampling method, it is extremely misleading and unscientific to assume that the sample represents the opinions of 9,280 papers. Conclusion: There is no room for dissent in liberal science.

The cornerstone of Gore’s thesis is that there is an obvious correlation between carbon dioxide levels and global temperature. He adoringly presents this in an animated graph to the audience, who "ooh" and "ahh" right on cue at his pet project. However, his basis for this is a single, somewhat dubious source. This data was taken from ice core samples which are analyzed to give C02 levels and temperatures throughout history. Gore displays them in the visually appealing but insubstantial chart, triumphant at finally proving man to be the cause of climate change. He uses the recent upward trend in carbon levels to predict a disastrously imminent rise in temperature, but this is a faulty conclusion. His wonder-graph cited no source, had no scale, and no numerical basis for his alarmist conclusions.

Finally, it failed to show that a rise in carbon dioxide levels precedes a change in temperature, a crucial precedent in establishing a cause and effect relationship. This scientific manipulation is in addition to the fact that basing a major conclusion on data from a single source is sketchy at best. Conclusion: Cherry-picking and manipulating evidence is alright to support a liberal agenda.

Amidst the misinformation and faulty analysis lay the utter falsehoods; information presented in blind faith and without fact-checking. Much like Dan Rather jumped on the Bush memos without bothering to determine their credibility, Al Gore jumped on bogus data when he traveled to the North Pole on a nuclear submarine to study the ice pack. The sub operators used radar to measure the ice’s thickness, so Gore wanted to get his hands on the military’s data. He was successful, and presents this data linearly on a scale from 1900 to the present day. The catch? No submarine had operational radar until 1941, and it was not used to measure the ice pack until 1958. To present data before any existed shows utter disregard for scientific and intellectual honesty, but that might be giving Gore too much credit. Conclusion: To someone like Gore, there is no such thing as a lie, merely varying degrees of equivocation.

Gore very clearly identifies his liberal agenda concerning global warming when he states, "This is ultimately not a political issue but a moral one". Throughout the documentary he uses disingenuous technique to prove a point: juxtaposing footage of the wreckage and victims left by hurricane Katrina, with a voice-over describing general climate change. This subtly suggests a causal relationship, another dubious conclusion. In a second, Gore narrates the idyllic history of his family ranch in a rural town: as "change" begins to descend on the world, the grainy home-movie footage of the ranch shows cattle fleeing the camera to scary music.

The attempt here is to show how global warming destroys lives, to convince viewers that their lives are at risk by a mere placement of photos and music rather than facts. Gore, like so many alarmist proponents of liberal science, will never pass on an opportunity to let emotions speak in place of rational discussion. Conclusion: It doesn’t matter what the facts of global warming are are, as long as we care.

While Gore bills "An Inconvenient Truth" as a documentary, it is little more than a glorified power point presentation spliced with heavily edited television footage and home movies.

Gore adds more unintentional comedy when he takes one of his many tearful tangents to describe the unfortunate death of his sister Nancy. Living on a ranch that grew tobacco, she started smoking young, and died of cancer. The folly follows as he blames losing family to smoking on missed warnings, and intones that global warming has the same grave consequences if we ignore the signs. Not only does Gore suggest that contribution to global warming is solely a personal choice, he suggests that it will kill us all. This kind of dramatic and tear-jerking storytelling is fitting for summer viewers seeing real movies with real heroes. Unfortunately, this film can’t supply enough plot to be a blockbuster, the jokes are too flat to be a comedy, and it lacks enough hard science to be a credible documentary.

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