'An Inconvenient Truth': climate change is indeed a moral issue

Indeed. And the intellectual dishonesty involved in this is not restricted to Mr Gore’s film, but has become all pervasive.

For example, professional sociologists at the London-based Institute for Policy Research urge that “the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument. ... Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. ... The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken”.

And the same authors then calmly advise: “Ultimately, positive climate behaviours need to be approached in the same way as marketeers approach acts of buying and consuming. ... It amounts to treating climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is, we believe, the route to mass behaviour change”.

Add to these astonishing, Orwellesque statements the fact that Gore and his Australian acolyte Phillip Adams urge that the public should take global warming seriously because “more and more corporations see a quid in the climate” and the crack in moral integrity becomes a yawning chasm.

The moral issue with An Inconvenient Truth is that of a person of talent, born into a privileged family, and given opportunities to rise to the position of vice-president of the United States, who then uses his privileged position to lead a campaign of misinformation. Conviction politics is doubtless needed to rise to the top of the political ladder in any country; conviction science, in contrast, is a contradiction in terms that should be anathema to any democratic society.

Professor Hubert Lamb, doyen of 20th century climatologists, remarked in his classic book, Climate History and the Modern World that: “The possibility of global warming, even drastic warming with dislocation of other elements of the climate pattern as a consequence, has to be balanced against the possibility of cooling, even drastic cooling, as the natural climate develops over the same period. Neither side of the balance is yet adequately known and understood.”

Precisely. Professor Lamb’s wise words were accurate in 1982 and they remain accurate today. The task of climate policy, therefore, is to ensure society’s capability to react appropriately to the full range of modern natural weather events, and to prepare adaptive plans equally for both future climatic warmings and the much more dangerous coolings.

Would that Mr Gore’s army of supporters were able to comprehend this simple advice. With respect to which, it is noteworthy that global temperature has not risen since 1998, and that scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences have recently issued a warning that the next 20 years are likely to see the development of a Little Ice Age, similar to the one documented from Europe during the Middle Ages.

And what about the final piece of advice that is found in most reviews - should you go to see this film, or not? Well, yes, if you like majestic photography of dynamic earth phenomena and understand that the changes depicted will always be with us. And no, if you dislike sanctimonious propaganda.