LONDON — A British judge has ruled that Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” contains “nine errors.”
High Court Judge Michael Burton, deciding a lawsuit that questioned the film’s suitability for showing in British classrooms, said Wednesday that it builds a “powerful” case that global warming is caused by humans and that urgent means are needed to counter it.
But he also said Gore makes nine statements in the film that are not supported by current mainstream scientific consensus. Teachers, Burton concluded, could show the film but must alert students to what the judge called errors.
The judge said that, for instance, Gore’s script implies that Greenland or West Antarctica might melt in the near future, creating a sea level rise of up to 20 feet that would cause devastation from San Francisco to the Netherlands to Bangladesh. The judge called this “distinctly alarmist” and said the consensus view is that, if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, “but only after, and over, millennia.”
Burton also said Gore contends that inhabitants of low-lying Pacific atolls have had to evacuate to New Zealand because of global warming but that “but there is no such evidence of any such evacuation.”
Another error, according to the judge, is that Gore says “a new scientific study shows that for the first time they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find ice.” Burton said that perhaps in the future, polar bears will drown “by regression of pack-ice” but that the only study found on drowned polar bears attributed four deaths to a storm.
Kalee Kreider, a spokesman for Gore, said the former vice president is “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of `An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” She said that “of the thousands and thousands of facts presented in the film, the judge apparently took issue with a handful.”
Kreider also said that Gore believes the film will educate a generation of young people about the “climate crisis” and that the “debate has shifted from `Is the problem real?’ to `What can be done about it?’ “
A spokesman for the Department of Children, Schools and Families said the agency was “delighted” that students could continue to see the video. It has noted that the judge did not disagree with the film’s main point — that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are causing serious climate consequences.
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