{"id":483,"date":"2007-10-15T21:49:40","date_gmt":"2007-10-16T02:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2007\/10\/convenient-untruths\/"},"modified":"2007-12-26T17:20:03","modified_gmt":"2007-12-26T22:20:03","slug":"convenient-untruths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2007\/10\/convenient-untruths\/","title":{"rendered":"Convenient Untruths Bekv\u00e4ma osanningar<\/lang_sw> Mentiras Convenientes <\/lang_sp>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann<\/small><\/lang_all><\/p>\n


\nTranslated to Swedish by Paulina Essunger<\/small>
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\nTraducido por Mario Cuellar para Globalizate<\/a> y revisado por F\u00e9lix Nieto<\/small>
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Update 10\/18\/07:<\/b> We are very disappointed that the Washington Post<\/em> has declined to run an op-ed placing the alleged 9 ‘errors’ in a proper scientific context, despite having run an extremely misleading news article last week entitled “UK Judge Rules Gore’s Climate Film Has 9 Errors”<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n

Last week, a UK High Court judge rejected a call<\/a> to restrict the showing of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) in British schools. The judge, Justice Burton found that “Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate”<\/em> (which accords with our original assessment<\/a>). There has been a lot of comment and controversy over this decision because of the judges commentary on 9 alleged “errors” (note the quotation marks!) in the movie’s description of the science. The judge referred to these as ‘errors’ in quotations precisely to emphasize that, while these were points that could be contested, it was not clear that they were actually errors (see Deltoid<\/a> for more on that).<\/p>\n

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There are a number of points to be brought out here. First of all, “An Inconvenient Truth” was a movie and people expecting the same depth from a movie as from a scientific paper are setting an impossible standard. Secondly, the judge’s characterisation of the 9 points is substantially flawed. He appears to have put words in Gore’s mouth that would indeed have been wrong had they been said<\/em> (but they weren’t). Finally, the judge was really ruling on how “Guidance Notes” for teachers should be provided to allow for more in depth discussion of these points in the classroom. This is something we wholehearted support – AIT is probably best used as a jumping off point for informed discussion, but it is not the final word. Indeed, the fourth IPCC report<\/a> has come out in the meantime, and that has much more up-to-date and comprehensive discussions on all these points.<\/p>\n

A number of discussions of the 9 points have already been posted (particularly at New Scientist<\/a> and Michael Tobis’s wiki<\/a>), and it is clear that the purported ‘errors’ are nothing of the sort. The (unofficial) transcript<\/a> of the movie should be referred to if you have any doubts about this. It is however unsurprising that the usual climate change contrarians and critics would want to exploit this confusion for perhaps non-scientific reasons<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In the spirit of pushing forward the discussion, we have a brief set of guidance notes of our own for each of the 9 issues raised. These are not complete, and if additional pointers are noted in the comments, we’ll add them in here as we go along.<\/p>\n