Thursday, October 22, 2009

New movie tries to debunk 'An Inconvenient Truth'

A new film that claims to debunk many of the claims of former Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" played to a near-capacity crowd in Prescott, Ariz., Sunday. The film, "Not Evil, Just Wrong - The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria," created by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, quotes experts who claim the ice caps are melting due to natural causes, and carbon emissions regulations are an unnecessary financial burden to Americans, Ken Hedler of The Daily Courier in Prescott reports.

The Prescott Tea Party and Terry Lovell, a business professor at Yavapai College, hosted what Lovell called the "world premiere" of the film. Well, one of them, The film's Web site claims the movie set the U.S. record for the largest simultaneous film premiere with more than 400,000 viewers at 7,000 screens in 50 states. The film includes academics, a Greenpeace founder who recently had a falling out with the group, and working-class women from Vevay, Ind., who say closing the Kentucky Utilities coal-fired power plant in nearby Ghent, Ky., would devastate the Vevay economy, Hedler reports. The film paints Gore as a hypocrite and blames Rachel Carson, author of the 1962 book Silent Spring, for the increased malaria deaths in Africa from the DDT ban promped by the book.

The film was met with a largely enthusiastic response in Prescott, Hedler reports, but there was dissent. "Virtually none of the arguments in that movie are new in the global-science debate and virtually all of them are debunked," Ed Grumbine, chair of the graduate environmental studies program at Yavapai, told Hedler. Prescott College sophomore Sam Coodley, an aspiring filmmaker, told Hedler: "I feel that film is a very easy way to manipulate information, and stirring music with African babies with bloated bellies doesn't strike me as objective." (Read more)

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