A Skeptic’s Primer on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth

Published March 15, 2007

Having won an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore is headed to Capitol Hill on March 21 to perform before an even more important crowd: lawmakers who could pass legislation that would make energy unaffordable for many Americans.

The film and its companion book purport to be a non-partisan, non-ideological exposition of climate science. In reality, the film is a computer-enhanced lawyer’s brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing. The only facts and studies Gore considers are those convenient to his scare-them-green agenda. And in numerous instances, he distorts the evidence he cites.

This On Point is organized as follows. Section I highlights some of the many distortions in AIT. Sections II, III, and IV examine Gore’s scariest claims. He blames the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on global warming and warns of a warming-triggered mini-Ice Age in Europe and of catastrophic sea-level rise. Section V challenges the moral bona fides of carbon-suppression schemes like the Kyoto Protocol. Sections II through V are referenced to the book version of An Inconvenient Truth.