Environmental Talk

“Class, today’s lesson is why you don’t trust strangers with candy or ex-politicians….”

Note to Blockbuster employees: Please remember to move An Inconvenient Truth into the same “documentary” section as Best In Show, The Blair Witch Project and This is Spinal Tap.

The recent ruling by a London judge that the British government can still distribute copies of An Inconvenient Truth to schools but teachers must accompany any showing of the film with a warning and an explanation of the film’s inaccuracies seemed to be an attempt to placate global warming skeptics.

In fact, the court’s findings should leave even the slowest grade-school kids asking, “Why are we watching this crap, anyway?”

The court ruled that:

“In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.”

And by “inaccuracies” the court really means “total B.S.”

One of the big problems with trying to come to a reasonable grasp of the whole global warming issue is the distortion of facts and claims that are constantly being bandied about.

The real story behind this ruling is that an impartial court of law came to the conclusion that the most commonly accepted claims of Al Gore’s film are blatantly false.

The court found 11 specific inaccuracies in the film. This doesn’t even begin to address other implicit falsehoods and deliberate biases which Gore and producer Laurie David inserted into the movie.

The 11 inaccuracies the judge found were (my emphasis added):

There’s not a whole lot of equivocation on the issues that were addressed. Hell, even the judge in the BALCO steroid case didn’t find that Barry Bonds lied that much.

We should all learn something from the judges ruling.

The next time we’re tempted to ignore scientific evidence and sacrifice individual choice in the face of the fear-mongering of a politically-motivated mob, we should think back on the events of the past few years.

We should think back and remember the vitriol with which critics of An Inconvenient Truth were attacked and disparaged.

We should think back to how strident the claims were that climate change was a “moral issue” and that we were at a “tipping point” and how these claims were substituted for reasonable debate and a rational approach to the subject.

We should think back at how corporations and individuals who didn’t accept the “consensus” were threatened with taxes, sanctions and the specter of being “tried” and punished for crimes against the environment.

We should remember that, the next time a politician tells us that the world is coming to an end and we need to act like he (or she) tells us, we should treat him like the hysterical, petulant child he is and put him in a corner somewhere until he calms down.

The rest of us should go on enjoying our lives and work together to solve real problems.

global warming, climate change, Stewart Dimmock, Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, falsehoods, inaccuracies, biases, oh my, consensus, tipping point, polar bears, Barry Bonds,