Science teachers’ group rejects Gore’s Inconvenient Truthiness

posted at 10:53 pm on November 27, 2006 by Bryan
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Hollywood activist Laurie David doesn’t like this:

At hundreds of screenings this year of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore’s film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film; and they saw “little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs.

Which are all good reasons to reject political propaganda, which Gore’s film is, as classroom material.

David goes on from there to wonder if ExxonMobil’s support for NSTA has anything to do with the group’s decision to reject the DVDs. In fairness, it probably does have something to do with it. But also in fairness, ExxonMobil isn’t giving millions to NSTA just so the organization can turn around and promote a very questionable political film as classroom material.

Fwiw, here’s a good debunking of the film. My favorite takeaway:

Gore’s credibility is damaged early in the film when he tells the audience that, by simply looking at Antarctic ice cores with the naked eye, one can see when the American Clean Air Act was passed. Dr. Ian Clark, professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa (U of O) responds, “This is pure fantasy unless the reporter is able to detect parts per billion changes to chemicals in ice.” Air over the United States doesn’t even circulate to the Antarctic before mixing with most of the northern, then the southern, hemisphere air, and this process takes decades. Clark explains that even far more significant events, such as the settling of dust arising from the scouring of continental shelves at the end of ice ages, are undetectable in ice cores by an untrained eye.

As for ExxonMobil’s motivations to give to the NSTA, it’s simple. First, it’s a tax writeoff. Second, it’s one way to help inspire the next generation of scientists, some of whom will grow up and end up working at ExxonMobil. Third, it’s good corporate citizenship.

Rejecting An Inconvenient Truth is just good sense.

As for the scientific case for global warming, well, let’s just say that in my old job I sat in on a couple of meetings with a high-ranking NASA earth scientist, and his biggest complaint was that his public affairs people were jamming global warming scares into science reports where global warming wasn’t even a factor.

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