January 23, 2017 by CFACT
Undercover,
An Inconvenient Sequel to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth premiered
Thursday night at Sundance.
I joined the crowd at the film festival’s Eccles theater where my
reaction ranged from bored, to emotional, to appalled that I let this
film manipulate my emotions even for a moment.
The film is not aimed at thinking people. If there’s a legitimate case
to be made for global warming, this is not it. It doesn’t even try.
Instead Gore abandons science in favor of tired global warming talking
points that have long been debunked. It’s shameless.
It’s also all about Gore, whom the film portrays as someone anyone can
walk up to and chat with in depth. He tries to come off as an average
person with a heroic passion. Sadly for Gore, whenever his climate
advocacy gets momentum he hits barriers: A satellite he didn’t get to
launch, the Bush administration, the terrorist attacks at Paris’s
Bataclan, India abandoning renewables for coal, and now Trump. If
you’re not careful you actually feel sorry for him.
Gore blames fires, droughts, tornadoes,
etc. on “climate change,” but for much of the film remains fixated on
floods, the solution to which he tells us, is converting to one hundred
percent renewable energy.
The film did a good job of taking the famously stiff Gore and (when
he’s not showing PowerPoint slides) presenting him as likable, funny
and tireless. Not, however, humble. Gore is the hero of his own film,
which works hard to chalk up any gains the warming campaign has made to
Gore himself. We see Gore after the UN adopted its Paris climate
agreement walking down a hall alone in a way that implies that he has
just accomplished the great feat of his life. He loosens his tie as if
to say, “I did it and now I’m going home.”
In scenes where Gore’s eyes start to water, you could hear and see
sniffling and tears in the audience. A man of at least 6 foot 3 sitting
in front of me began to cry while his lady partner rubbed his
back. Of
course (excepting me and few others) this was an audience of true
believers. It remains to be seen whether this film can gain a
mainstream audience and whether they will be similarly affected.
In scenes where Gore whips outs his iPhone and starts talking to
various people in an attempt to coax India away from from coal, you can
clearly see that his phone’s screen is black. I’ve had an
iPhone for
six years and my phone’s face is never black unless it’s off. Those
scenes appeared fudged and poked a few little holes for me in their
credibility.
In a scene at Gore Farms, where Gore looks at photos in a house built
by his parents, I was surprised that the “farm” is decorated with white
carpets, white furniture and white bedspreads. None of my friends’
working farms would go all-in for white.
These are nothing, however, to the whoppers the film tells about the
climate.
The film shamelessly exploits examples of extreme natural weather (as
climate campaigners are wont to do) and the human suffering that comes
with them. When the science doesn’t support the warming campaign’s
argument they scare, scare, scare. “Every night on the news,” Gore
tells us, “is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.”
In a scene Gore is so proud of that he released it on the internet, he
somberly opines that, “ten years ago when the movie An Inconvenient
Truth came out, the single most criticized scene in that movie was an
animated scene showing that the combination of sea level rise and storm
surge would put the ocean water into the 911 memorial site which was
then under construction. And people said, ‘that’s ridiculous, what a
terrible exaggeration.’” They then cut to scenes of water from
Hurricane Sandy inundating the subway station near the memorial.
Next
we see New York Governor Andrew Cuomo loudly attributing this to
“climate change” and proclaiming that this makes the warming argument
“undeniable.”
Gore shows us crosses in the Philippines marking the graves of those
who succumbed to Typhoon Haiyan. He shows us melting ice in Greenland
and asks his audience where all the water went; Miami of course, as he
predicted in his first film. If Gore has an explanation for how the
water made it from Greenland to Miami while bypassing the rest of the
Eastern Seaboard, he doesn’t share it. Nor does he tell the audience
that Antarctica, Earth’s serious ice chest, has inconveniently failed
to melt with southern ice hitting record highs.
Gore blames fires, droughts, tornadoes, etc. on “climate change,” but
for much of the film remains fixated on floods, the solution to which
he tells us, is converting to one hundred percent renewable energy. The
fact that sea level is only rising a tiny one to three millimeters per
year, as it has since before the industrial revolution, is not the sort
of thing Gore feels a need to share with his audience. Nor will you
come away from the film informed that climate computer models have been
predicting warming that hasn’t occurred since their creation.
I had a chance to question Gore himself. As the former
Vice-President
and Nobel Prize winner was trudging through the snow to his oversized
Chevy Suburban SUV, I asked him an inconvenient question.
“Hey Al,” I asked, “I just saw your sequel ‘Inconvenient’.”
Gore: “Oh great, thank you!”
Question: “My friends make fun of me about the 10-year tipping point,
what do I tell them?”
Gore: “Well, we gotta keep working.” Gore then gave me a momentary
stare, ignored the question, entered his “Executive Car Service” Chevy
Suburban and drove off.
An Inconvenient Sequel aims for your heart, not your brain. If
you’re
prepared to unquestionably accept what the climate establishment tells
you on faith, or the kind of person ready to believe that windmills and
solar panels could have protected Miami from king tides, ground
subsidence and plate tectonics, Al Gore made this film for you.
If you’d like a deeper understanding of the techniques Gore’s film
employs to manipulate the facts and its audience give CFACTs Climate
Hustle, available on disc or to stream immediately, a try.
SOURCE
- C-Fact
