Hot topic leaves you cold

In "An Inconvenient Truth," director David Guggenheim features one-time presidential candidate Al Gore giving his presentation on global warming that Gore has, by his own admission, given almost 1,000 times since the late 1980s.

Most of this rather dull documentary features the former senator and vice president lecturing a group of students in a classroom situation. Gore believes that the current state of global warming is to be blamed on the large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that we as a civilization have been pumping into the atmosphere.

Gore trots out the usual footage of smoke-belching factories and highways clogged with idling automobiles to further his point. But all of the alarming statistics and doomsday claims aside, this film is a bit of a yawn.

After the first few frames, it is more like a campaign documentary, the sort of thing that TV stations used to show in the middle of the night when they had run out of stock "B" westerns. Perhaps Gore is heating up a presidential campaign by drumming up a renewed interest in the environmental movement.

Gore presses his tedious argument via the use of charts and graphs, film clips and anecdotes leaving virtually no room for any counter argument. He claims that in 2004, 900 peer-reviewed scientific papers reached 100% agreement on global warming and, by implication, that the overload of carbon dioxide is the culprit for the warming trend.

The authorship of the papers wasn't credited but it would have been helpful to know if the papers were the work of students or not. But regardless, it is difficult to believe that lock-step unanimity exists in the scientific community, especially when touchy egos are involved and that any properly presented counter view could find space in the scientific arena.

The issue of global warming is certainly nothing new and may not be such a terrible thing after all. There were 500 very warm years between the 9th and the 14th centuries when European crop harvests set records, populations increased and the public was, for a change, very well fed.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a one-sided argument presented as a political polemic with all of the dryness one should expect from that sort of thing.