The convient fiction about global warming

Fred Barnes:

STEVE HAYWARD is no Al Gore. The former vice president's film about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, delighted environmentalists and won an Academy Award. Hayward's rebuttal of Gore's warning about a coming climate catastrophe won't thrill either the environmental crowd or Hollywood's liberal elite. And you won't find his film, "An Inconvenient Truth or Convenient Fiction," in 600 movie theaters either, as Gore's was last summer. To see Hayward's 50-minute film, your best bet is to go to the website, aconvenientfiction.com. It is well worth watching, maybe more than once.

Hayward, as a global warming skeptic, has an advantage over Gore. Unlike Gore, he is calm and reasonable, avoids hyperbole, and sticks to the facts, some of which are confusing or contradictory. The result is that he is closer to what he calls "the general consensus" among scientists about global warming than Gore is.

It's important to note than Hayward, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is not a global warming denier. "Much of what Vice President Gore says about climate change is correct," Hayward says in the film. "The planet is warming. Human beings are playing a substantial role in that warming." Beyond that, however, he disagrees sharply with Gore.

"The problem with Vice President Gore and other global warming extremists is that they distort the science, grossly exaggerate the risks, argue that anyone who disagrees with them is corrupt, and suggest that solutions are easy and cheap," Hayward says. "And that's an all too convenient fiction."

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There is much more.

See also this Jerome Schmidt article about scientific consensus in 1632 when Galileo was accused of heresy for challenging Aristotle's vision of the universe. What is consistent in both cases is an attempt to shut down debate on the issue. It comes from the Stalinist intolerance of the left to different points of view.