Jennifer, as ever, offers some insightful observations, this time in her review of An Inconvenient Truth and on climate change.
We can quibble all we like about minor instances of massaging the data to make an emphatic point, but the underlying core message, and the science that supports it, is certainly very sound indeed. And frankly, maybe we need to be a bit more willing to use the tools of propaganda in such a crucial debate. After all, those tools have proved highly effective for those who have exploited them in the past, and our very survival may be at stake. The Gore film has attracted its share of critics, at least one of whom poked fun at the many meditative profile shots of Gore, claiming he looked like he was campaigning for Druid-In-Chief. (In all honesty, Jen-Luc could have done with a few less of those shots as well.)
And so the inevitable backlash begins. Is it merely coincidence that this past Sunday, the Washington Post ran a feature article about former NASA scientist Roy Spenser and his Web site spoofing the global warming “alarmists”? I’d say it’s about as much a coincidence as the fact that Spenser gets paid to write for TCS Daily, a Web site partially funded by ExxonMobil. (Interestingly, even Spenser, when pressed, admits that human activities have “likely” contributed to climate change, so he’s more honest than most naysayers.) Even more insidious is the onslaught of paid anti-climate-change advertisements that will be blanketing the airwaves this week, courtesy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of which makes the following ludicrous statement: “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” By now the entire blogosphere has probably seen both DarkSyde’s commentary on Daily Kos and Chris Mooney’s hilarious spoofs of that tagline, but far be it for me to buck the linkage trend. Per Mooney: “Water. They call it drowning. We call it life.”