Oscars snub Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth sequel
Is climate change losing its luster as an issue for the Hollywood left? Or have so many "Inconvenient Truths" about global warming been debunked that it has forced Hollywood into an embarrassed silence?
The sequel to Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth released in 2017 and titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, failed to pick up a single Oscar nomination. The 2006 film won "Best Documentary" and "Best Song."
The first documentary grossed $24 million domestically and generated a fiercely loyal following, but the sequel did not fare so well; it earned a paltry $3.4 million and was widely panned.
Gore, who also won a Nobel Prize in 2007, crammed the film full of politically partisan scenes, such as when New York [a]ttorney [g]eneral Eric Schneiderman met with him to discuss the months-long investigation into ExxonMobil's climate research history.
He was an instrumental cog helping Schneiderman kick[-]start his probes, telling an audience at a press conference in March that the [A.G.] is going after companies "deceiving the American people, communicating in a fraudulent way, about the reality of the climate crisis and the dangers it poses."
The sequel dropped at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah the day President Donald Trump was sworn into office, a reality that was shoehorned into the film after the president beat former candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
The election's results clearly effected the film's editing [probably should be "affected," though it's possible the author means that the results brought about the particular way in which the film turned out to be edited –ed.], but even liberals trashed the sequel. Vox's Alissa Wilkinson, for example, called An Inconvenient Sequel a one-dimensional film about the highs and lows of the former [V.P.]'s political career.
"The movie was obviously hastily modified after Trump's win in November, and the film grimly forces viewers to remember that Trump has always dismissed the idea of climate change wholesale," Wilkinson wrote in a review shortly after the film's release.
In 2007, a British High Court judge ruled that there were nine basic errors in scientific fact in the film – and that was before the science community debunked numerous other errors and before several predictions about the effects of climate change failed to come to pass.
It was not banned from being shown in British schools, but the judge said it could be shown only with specific guidance in order to avoid political indoctrination.
But Judge Michael Burton ruled yesterday that errors had arisen "in the context of alarmism and exaggeration" in order to support Mr[.] Gore's thesis on global warming.
His criticism followed an unsuccessful attempt by Stewart Dimmock, a Kent school governor, to block the [g]overnment's plan to screen the documentary in more than 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales.
The father of two claimed [that] An Inconvenient Truth included "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda[,] and sentimental mush[."]
The film's distributor, Paramount, warns in its synopsis of the film: "If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail[]spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics[,] and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."
But the judge ruled that the "apocalyptic vision" presented in the film was politically partisan and thus not an impartial scientific analysis of climate change.
It is, he ruled, a "political film[."]
Um...yeah. What he said.
"Serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda, and sentimental mush" pretty much sums up Gore's original film. And while the U.K. may have required skepticism when using the film as a teaching aid, no such restraints were forced on American schools. A generation of kids has grown up being exposed to this propaganda, although polls today show widespread skepticism in the U.S. about climate change.
The sequel mostly abandoned the predictions made in the first film and pretended as if everything mentioned in An Inconvenient Truth was true. No mention was made of the laughable scientific errors that many climate scientists condemned in the years following the film's release.
While there are still climate hysterics like Al Gore pushing the notion that we are running out of time to save the planet, there has, in fact, been less emphasis on utter catastrophe in the near future by the IPCC and more attention paid to some of the contradictions discovered by the scientific community in climate science.
It was long thought that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead directly to an increase in temperature. This was a near religious belief among global warming advocates. But the most recent evidence shows that increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have not led to anywhere near the warming predicted in the models. This has caused several prominent scientists to back off their predictions of catastrophe while still identifying global warming as a serious problem.
The damage done by Gore's original film will be with us for a long time. The fact that the film academy refused to take a second bite of Gore's propaganda campaign may be a sign that Gore himself is losing credibility as a spokesman for the global warming hysterics.