The Science & Public Policy Institute identifies and discusses 35 errors in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. You can read about it here in detail. The 35 errors are:

  1. Sea level “rising 6 m”
  2. Pacific islands “drowning”
  3. Thermohaline circulation “stopping”
  4. CO2 “driving temperature”
  5. Snows of Kilimanjaro “melting”
  6. Lake Chad “drying up”
  7. Hurricane Katrina “man made”
  8. Polar bears “dying”
  9. Coral reefs “bleaching”
  10. 100 ppmv of CO2 “melting mile-thick ice”
  11. Hurricane Caterina “man made”
  12. Japanese typhoons “a new record”
  13. Hurricanes “getting stronger”
  14. Big storm insurance losses “increasing”
  15. Mumbai “flooding”
  16. Severe tornadoes “more frequent”
  17. The sun “heats the Arctic Ocean”
  18. Arctic “warming fastest”
  19. Greenland ice sheet “unstable”
  20. Himalayan glacier melt waters “failing”
  21. Peruvian glaciers “disappearing”
  22. Mountain glaciers worldwide “disappearing”
  23. Sahara desert “drying”
  24. West Antarctic ice sheet “unstable”
  25. Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves “breaking up”
  26. Larsen B Ice Shelf “broke up because of ‘global warming’”
  27. Mosquitoes “climbing to higher altitudes”
  28. Many tropical diseases “spread through ‘global warming’”
  29. West Nile virus in the US “spread through ‘global warming’”
  30. Carbon dioxide is “pollution”
  31. The European heat wave of 2003 “killed 35,000″
  32. Pied flycatchers “cannot feed their young”
  33. Gore’s bogus pictures and film footage
  34. The Thames Barrier “closing more frequently”
  35. “No fact… in dispute by anybody”

The Institute concludes the movie is a gross exaggeration of reality, is unsuitable for showing to children, and provides no basis from which policy decisions should be made. They urge schools who have shown this movie to children to also inform the children of these errors in the movie.

Unfortunately I can find little background information on this “Science & Public Policy Institute” other than what can I can read under their “About” link. One of the personnel is a former Republican staffer, and another is a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher; the remaining seven appear to be highly credentialed scientists and researchers. Their agenda seems to be: (a) to head off global warming alarmism, to prevent the unnecessary expenditures that would result from costly remedial measures being proposed; and (b) to move the focus of current debate from climate change to alternative energy sources. While I certainly applaud anyone who espouses a rational approach to the global warming issue, and while I also agree that a much stronger focus on alternative energy research is warranted, I’m going to put a mental question mark in the “pedigree” column next to this Science & Public Policy Institute. It could be the case that there’s some politically motivated bias at work here.