Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power opened in theaters last weekend. The documentary by the world’s most famous spokesman for climate Armageddon, in a world in which Pew Research Center says people consider climate change tied with the Islamic State as the greatest threat to their nations, had a mixed performance at the box office.

On the one hand, it ranked #2 for average revenue per theater ($31,206, behind The Battleship Island, which averaged $59,344). On the other hand, it opened in just 4 theaters, raising some speculation that the studio (Paramount) isn’t really behind it. But then, Battleship Island opened in just one theater, and two of the next five opened in only 3, so perhaps that speculation is mistaken. We’ll see how it does in coming weeks. (The first clip below shows its performance in terms of average per theater, the second in terms of overall ranking.)

 

Meanwhile, reviewers not of its movie quality or political correctness (It got a standing ovation at the ever-so-politically-correct Sundance Film Festival.) but of its scientific credibility aren’t very impressed.

After rehearsing a few of the factual errors in Gore’s original film, An Inconvenient Truth, Bjorn Lomborg comments:

In the trailer, Mr. Gore addresses “the most criticized scene” of his previous documentary, which suggested that “the combination of sea-level rise and storm surge would flood the 9/11 Memorial site.” Then viewers are shown footage of Manhattan taking on water in 2012 after superstorm Sandy, apparently vindicating Mr. Gore’s claims. Never mind that what he actually predicted was flooding caused by melting ice in Greenland.

More important is that Mr. Gore’s prescriptions—for New York and the globe—won’t work. He claims the answer to warming lies in agreements to cut carbon that would cost trillions of dollars. That would not have stopped Sandy. What New York really needs is better infrastructure: sea walls, storm doors for the subway, porous pavement. These fixes could cost around $100 million a year, a bargain compared with the price of international climate treaties.

An editorial in The Australian republished at WattsUpwithThat.com was positively scathing. Here’s a taste:

The movie shamelessly promotes green tech, a field in which Gore is a successful investor. His advocacy and political access are believed to have made him the world’s first “carbon billionaire”. But that’s the self-serving nature of climate-change politics. It confers wealth and privilege on its boosters. Doubters are banished.

Take the generous financial rewards and status showered on scientists who discover human links to global warming. Under the cloak of academic authority, junk science regularly passes uncritically into the mainstream as credible research. School and university students are indoctrinated with the catastrophic warming faith “so that science can ­advance” (and sceptics can be ­silenced).

Crony capitalists are encouraged to invest in renewable energy through attractive taxpayer subsidies. We are told the crippling costs of renewable energy targets are the price we must pay to save the planet. Energy poverty and the premature death of the elderly through lack of affordable heating are downplayed or accepted as collateral damage.

Much of the media volunteered as propagandists, refusing to report fully and accurately, or even to report at all. Extreme weather events continue to be hyped as proof of reckless human activity when no causation is proved. Against predictions and record human emissions, the decline during the past decade in the frequency and intensity of storms and other natural catastrophes goes largely unreported. And there has been no measurable warming for the past 19 years. Who knew?

But catastrophic climate change is about political power. Using Malthusian environmental ideology, the climate movement is aimed at what can loosely be called the Western way of life. How else to explain the Paris Agreement under which, for their sins, rich nations must hobble their economies and compensate poor countries so that the largest emitters, China, India and Russia, can emit freely? Donald Trump spotted this idiocy and quit the agreement.

But even the thuggishness of the climate establishment can’t hide the intellectual corruption behind it all or the willingness of scientists to compromise their work for generous grants and political influence. We’ve had access to thousands of emails and computer files from leading scientists revealing data manipulation, collusion to keep raw data from independent examination and scientific journals pressured to reject contradictory studies.

Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy recently outed the Bureau of Meteorology for limiting the lowest temperature that an individual weather station can record. If this is accepted practice, no wonder American physicist Charles Anderson declares “it is now perfectly clear that there are no reliable worldwide temperature records”.

And on it goes. John Theon, retired chief of NASA’s Climate Processes Research Program and responsible for all weather and climate research, testified that “scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results”. Then, politically inspired to have the maximum possible impact on world leaders attending the 2015 Paris climate conference, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an exaggerated report based on unverified data. Esteemed scientist Hal Lewis resigned in disgust from the American Physical Society, saying climate change “is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long career”.

Despite it all, climate science is defended to the death. Invalidate it and “the greatest moral challenge of our generation” unravels and, with it, a compelling reason to meddle in others’ lives.

While publicly politicians refuse to discuss the science, they feast on its alarmism. But they cannot forever feign ignorance of the scientific fraud deeply embedded in its core. Australians are waking up. They are growing suspicious of Labor premiers genuflecting to Gore, promising zero net emissions by 2050 and questioning the Turnbull government’s virtue signalling for staying with the Paris Agreement. Slowly it is dawning on them that they and future generations are being played for fools, paying a horrifying price and enduring pointless pain, for spurious “save the planet” propaganda.

Undoubtedly, critics will begin publishing analyses showing a repetition in An Inconvenient Sequel like those in An Inconvenient Truth. But the mainstream media won’t tell the story. We’ll try to pass it on as we get the chance.

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.