The Counterbalance to Al Gore's Propaganda

THE tormentors of Al Gore, who last week won a legal victory against his film, An Inconvenient Truth, are to step up their battle by sending British secondary schools a documentary attacking the science of global warming.

Channel 4’s The Great Global Warming Swindle has become one of the most notorious documentaries of the year, attracting complaints from dozens of scientists and viewers.

This weekend, however, the campaigners behind the High Court case said they planned to send copies to 3,400 secondary schools “to counter Gore’s flagrant propaganda”.

Gore is a joint winner of the Nobel peace prize for his efforts to educate the world about climate change. An Inconvenient Truth has also won two Oscars.

The distribution of The Great Global Warming Swindle is being funded by Viscount Monckton, who is part of a counter-campaign to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

Monckton was one of the backers of Stewart Dimmock, the Kent lorry driver and school governor who took the government to court for sending copies of Gore’s film to schools.

The two are connected through the New party, a right-wing group whose manifesto was written by Monckton and of which Dimmock is a member.

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Monckton has obtained funding from a right-wing Washington think tank, the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), to create a second film that will also be sent to schools. Entitled Apocalypse No, it parodies Gore, showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science.

Much as I applaud anyone who takes on the ridiculous puffball of pomposity that is Al Gore, and while I believe that the introduction of his film into secondary schools is nothing short of flagrant brainwashing, I have mixed feelings about the decision to send these two films to schools. The first reason for this is that I imagine that it will, in the main, simply be a waste of good money. After all, what, realistically, is the chance that either film will be shown to pupils when it arrives at the school, and, more specifically falls into the hands of the overwhelmingly left-wing members of the teaching profession? My guess is that in most cases the DVDs will go straight into the bin. Surely the money would be better spent on challenging Gore's propaganda in other ways: an advertising campaign to publicise the criticisms that Mr Justice Burton made of his film, for example.

My second problem is that, whatever the merits of The Great Global Warming Swindle, it is, like An Inconvenient Truth, intended less as an impartial analysis of the science of global warming, and more as a tool for the promotion of a certain viewpoint. As such, it is hardly the ideal viewing matter for children in schools. Of course, this problem is not so much the fault of Viscount Monckton and his supporters, as of the government, since it was they who decided to transform science classes into brainwashing sessions, when they chose to send Gore's film to every secondary school in England. As such, one could perhaps say that showing the children The Great Global Warming Swindle would simply have the effect of achieving balance. But it would be preferable if neither film were shown to children, and if they were simply given an objective introduction to the scientific issues.

Shock of the Year!

"An Inconvenient Truth" is one-sided, exaggerated, alarmist, and scientifically inaccurate, rules High Court judge.

In other news: Pope not a Presbyterian.

The climate change debate is not over

Global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon and its effects can even be beneficial, according to two leading researchers.

Recent climate change is not caused by man-made pollution, but is instead part of a 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling that has happened for the last million years, say the authors of a controversial study.

Dennis Avery, an environmental economist, and Professor Fred Singer, a physicist, have looked at the work of more than 500 scientists and concluded that it is very doubtful that man-made global warming exists.

Since I am not a scientist, and, indeed, have little interest in most areas of science, I do not tend to write about climate change a great deal, nor do I tend to espouse any particular position on the issue. However, I am interested in seeing that impartial debate takes place, and desire that the public in general, and schoolchildren in particular, are not brainwashed into accepting as absolute fact a theory which is, in truth, not generally accepted as true by those who do know about these things.
As it is, the government and the MSM has unquestioningly accepted the claim that man-made global warming is a proven fact, and treat those who oppose it as dangerous heretics. Some readers may recall that in February it was announced that every secondary school in England was to be sent a copy of Al Gore's propaganda film, "An Inconvenient Truth". The then Environment Secretary David Miliband claimed then that "the debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over". When I recently had occasion to visit a primary school, I found a vast wall display at the centre of the school telling children that they were killing the Earth. Meanwhile Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and former Greenpeace activist who is sceptical of the existence of man-made climate change, was physically assaulted by an environmental activist, for daring to suggest that, actually, we aren't all doomed. And last week, Greenpeace released a video which came rather close to threatening similar (or worse) action against those who oppose its ends.

The existence of man-made global warming is increasingly treated as an article of faith by those on the left, and those who, like Mr Avery and Professor Singer, dissent from it, are increasingly regarded as, not just wrong, but actually evil. And this is what our schools brainwash the nation's children into believing. After all, since Al Gore is in no way a scientist, and since his film can in no way be said to represent a balanced assessment of the subject, it is simply brainwashing to show it as representing some form of scientific truth universally acknowledged. Contra Miliband, the debate appears to be far from over, and adults and schoolchildren alike deserve rather rather better than to have politicians and the media attempt to brainwash them: we deserve a continued debate on this issue, and we deserve the real, rather than the politically-correct, truth.