The Foundry

Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, which premiered last Sunday at The Heritage Foundation and 6,000 other locations in 27 countries, asks some tough questions of Al Gore and his film, An Inconvenient Truth. The title of Gore’s film is telling because it implies that its content is “the truth”: it plays into mainstream environmental rhetoric which claims that the debate as to whether human-created Co2 is warming the planet to a dangerous degree is over and the science is settled. The trailer for Gore’s film even ends with the phrase: “This summer, nothing is scarier than the truth.”

At a hearing on the House climate change bill in April, Gore said that industries that are resistant to climate change legislation are guilty of duping the public on a scale similar to Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme. As he said, “Polluters are the Bernie Madoffs of global warming.”

While Gore accuses global warming skeptics of large-scale deception, Not Evil Just Wrong exposes that An Inconvenient Truth is not as “truthful” as it claims to be. The film addresses the fact, often overlooked, that the British High Court ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contains nine significant errors. One of the errors that Justice Burton identified was Gore’s assertion that sea levels will rise up to twenty feet in a matter of years, whereas the science predicts that this could happen over millennia. Gore also stated that Co2 emissions can be blamed for Hurricane Katrina, but this is pure speculation as there is no evidence to back up this claim. One error that resonates with school children is Gore’s claim that polar bears are drowning because they have to swim long distances to find ice. This is not the case: four polar bears were found drowned directly after a strong storm. According to Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a leading expert on polar bears, the number of polar bears has increased over the past thirty years. As he has said, “It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.”

Not Evil Just Wrong asks Gore to be responsible for those errors and for his assertion that the world is in grave danger; it brings the debate about global warming back into the cultural arena with full force. The emergence of this film comes at a time when the American public is becoming more skeptical of Gore’s version of truth. According to Ben Lieberman, a Senior Analyst at The Heritage Foundation,

Polling shows that the public does not buy global warming, [and] certainly doesn’t buy it as a crisis justifying a blank check expensive response in the midst of a recession and ten percent unemployment.”

So contrary to the Obama Administration and Al Gore’s assertions that the debate is over, this may just be the beginning.