As I said in my earlier post on the subject, there’s less than meets the eye to the story of the British judge that found nine "errors" in An Inconvenient Truth. Turns out they weren’t errors, just points the judge deemed different enough from the IPCC view to warrant explanatory materials — and the judge was off about most of them anyway.
That hasn’t stopped the media from making a total hash of it. Read Tim Lambert’s two posts on the Washington Post‘s war on Gore, and weep.
Anyway, some updates:
Shortly after Gore won the Nobel, the WaPo ran a hit piece on the movie that uncritically passed along the judge’s objections. Yesterday, Kalee Kreider — Gore’s spokesperson and environmental advisor — responded on Gore’s behalf. It’s pretty devastating, well worth reading.
The Guardian has now confirmed that Stewart Dimmock, the faux-concerned parent behind the lawsuit, was a pawn of the UK’s far-right New Party, which is funded almost entirely by fuel and mining interests.
A few days ago, the RealClimate crew weighed in on the brouhaha:
First of all, "An Inconvenient Truth" was a movie and people expecting the same depth from a movie as from a scientific paper are setting an impossible standard. Secondly, the judge’s characterisation of the 9 points is substantially flawed. He appears to have put words in Gore’s mouth that would indeed have been wrong had they been said (but they weren’t). Finally, the judge was really ruling on how "Guidance Notes" for teachers should be provided to allow for more in depth discussion of these points in the classroom. This is something we wholehearted support – AIT is probably best used as a jumping off point for informed discussion, but it is not the final word. Indeed, the fourth IPCC report has come out in the meantime, and that has much more up-to-date and comprehensive discussions on all these points.
Their overall verdict "is that the 9 points are not ‘errors’ at all (with possibly one unwise choice of tense on the island evacuation point)." They go on to provide their own set of guidance notes.
Lambert also has another comprehensive update with lots more reactions.
Serial distractions, on and on.
