"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Monday, March 19, 2007

Comprehensive Reply to AIT

Spent some time yesterday looking for transcript of "An Inconvenient Truth", without success other than a book that apparently matches closely.
This AM a friend alerted me to this : CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute) critique of Gore's movie.


I'd been bothered by Gore's highly selective use of data and presentation.
Take the following with a grain of salt, same as when viewing AIT.
Judge for ourself about Competitive Enterprise Institute: Advancing Liberty, Public Policy Research, CEI

It's about 150 pages, but does a good job of addressing, what I view as, flaws, extremely selective use of data and misleading images/impressions.

Author Marlo Lewis takes AIT on point by point.

Intro:
"More people will see the movie, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), than will read the book. However, the two are so close in verbal content and visual imagery that, if you’ve seen the movie, you’ve practically read the book, and vice versa.

Because it is much easier to reference pages in a book than scenes from a movie,
the Skeptic’s Guide comments on the book version of AIT.

To minimize redundancy, the Skeptic’s Guide skips over introductory material that Vice President Gore develops in greater detail later in AIT. In most cases, passages from AIT are reproduced verbatim. In cases where passages are summarized, this will be clear from the context.

AIT does not have distinct chapters. To help the reader follow the sequence of topics under discussion, I divide the Skeptic’s Guide into several sections. My commentary mostly follows the running order of Gore’s presentation. However, to keep each section of the commentary focused on the same or similar topics, I have—in some instances—grouped together thematically similar but non-consecutive passages
from AIT.

Some readers may wonder why I comment on almost every substantive statement Gore makes rather than just the key points or the dozen or so most egregious distortions. Why cover so many seemingly minor details?

Two considerations impelled me to take a comprehensive approach. First, anything less than a point-by- point examination of AIT is too easy to dismiss as cherry picking. After all, any non-technical treatment of complex scientific and economic issues is bound to be distorting to some degree. Confronted with a list of a dozen errors, or even two dozen, critics could accuse me of quibbling and plausibly claim that Gore’s most important points (whichever ones I did not comment on) were correct.

Second, AIT makes a powerful impression on audiences chiefly by the sheer number of assertions it makes and images it presents. A typical audience reaction is to conclude that if even half of what Gore says is true, then the planet is in serious trouble.

So I decided to take a leaf out of Gore’s playbook. By the sheer number of errors and distortions I have uncovered, I hope to foster a healthy skepticism about global warming alarmism and the energy suppression agenda it allegedly justifies."

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