Topic: NewsBusters
In an Aug. 21 NewsBusters post, Kevin Mooney touts a new "documentary" purporting to claim that "Scientifically unsound claims about global warming are being used to seduce young students and to cajole lawmakers into accepting the legitimacy of regulatory schemes that restrict the use of fossils fuels." Mooney writes:
Although the British High Court recently ruled in favor of parents who objected to the distribution of Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” in the school system, its message of pending man-made climate catastrophe continues to hold sway with students who are interviewed in“Not Evil, Just Wrong."
John Day, the lawyer for British parents who sued the British Department of Education over Gore’s film, discusses the court ruling in the film and compares actual scientific estimates of climate change contained in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with the assertions made in “An Inconvenient Truth.”
“The judge identified nine aspects of `An Inconvenient Truth,’ nine core errors, where Al Gore either misstated the IPCC or prejudicially exaggerated what they found,” Day said. “For example in relation to the sea level rises which is perhaps the starkest error in Al Gore's film arguably. Al Gore is giving an impression that the sea level is going to rise by 20 feet in a very near future. The IPCC talks about 20 feet sea level rises over millennia, over thousands of years, thousands and thousands of years. And sea level rises by a matter of inches by the end of the century. Now that is a very disturbing misstatement of the science.”
Mooney fails to mention that, as we've detailed, the judge also said many of the claims made by the film were fully backed up by the weight of science. He identified “four main scientific hypotheses, each of which is very well supported by research published in respected, peer-reviewed journals and accords with the latest conclusions of the IPCC.”
Further, Gore never claimed that "the sea level is going to rise by 20 feet in a very near future." What he did say is that there would be a 20-foot rise in sea levels if the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets were to melt completely or collapse at an indefinite point in the future.
