The Zong

And don’t believe anything you read on Drudge, especially when it comes from the British tabloids. They’re a little loony out there, and they love to mess with America’s political innards. Because they’re jealous. Why don’t you go fuck with bloody Parliament, mate?

So the headline “Gore Campaign Team Assembles in Secret” gave way to “Gore Camp Denies Report of Secret Campaign.” God DAMN it!

Speaking of deflating stuff, I got an email from a conservative (gasp!) reader whom I’ve never met personally, but who took the time to compliment the Zong (mostly for the sports stuff) and directed me to a film seeking to rebut “An Inconvenient Truth,” which she claims does an excellent job of just that. Thanks for the e-mail, by the way.

The film, which I’ve read a few murmurs about, certainly wasn’t produced by the liberal elite, whom I think might have come up with a better title. It’s called “An Inconvenient Truth…Or Convenient Fiction?” and I’m generally not one to watch any film with an ellipsis in its title, but I thought about it for a moment and figured what the hell, it’s only 1:32 in the morning.

One thing I really hate is that people will come out and criticize the Goreumentary when they haven’t seen it, so I watched this rebuttal in it’s entirety. It is hosted by a guy named Steven Hayward, and all I can say about him personally is “What a nice guy.” His calm, even gentle demeanor makes it pretty easy to listen to him. While he isn’t particularly clever, witty or easy on the eyes, I can certainly say he comes off as honest. The film itself is pretty dry, and low-budget in the way that makes you think of a training video for office safety. It was screened here in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, and given it’s unapologetic political bent and presentation, I’m not really surprised that it has garnered very little attention in the media here or nationally.

Naturally, as a Giants fan, I love the underdog, and though I’m a big fan of environmentalists in general, I really wanted to learn something from this film. What I came away with after around an hour was that the scientific facts that Al Gore presents in his movie are pretty much all undisputed, but those who disagree with his political ideology are desperate to find something they can continue to dispute. In this case, it’s a rather feeble attempt to assail his predictions as alarmist and exploitative, and it predictably hints at a hidden agenda that Gore and his supporters are trying to force on America. The film is on the website in its entirety, and you’re free to watch it. In a minute.

You should know if you choose to watch it that, Hayward’s earnest presentation notwithstanding, the film was funded and produced by a conservative think tank based here in San Francisco called “The Pacific Research Institute,” an organization many folks around here know all too well. They publish a yearly study on Earth Day called the Index of Environmental Indicators which uses “anecdotal evidence” to complement environmental data which somehow suggests that air quality and carbon emissions are actually improving as the years go by. (One of the assertions Hayward makes in the film is “anecdotal” in that he says the smog in Los Angeles looked a lot worse when he was growing up there than it does now.) PRI is closely associated with The American Enterprise Institute, which in addition to being well-connected with the Bush Administration’s foreign policy (they rent and share space to the Project for the New American Century) has also recently mounted a campaign to discredit the IPCC’s recent report on climate change by offering $10,000 to scientists willing to challenge the report.

I don’t really need to sit and try to dispute anything Hayward says. As he himself states, most of what Gore says about global warming is essentially true, and yet much of the same old conservative bullshit is ever-so-politely present in his arguments. The agenda that I think Al Gore is all about isn’t really a secret, is it? I think his agenda involves getting you to go buy some fluorescent light bulbs and ride your bike to work when it’s nice out. (Scary!) I want my conservative reader to pay close attention here, especially if you haven’t seen the Gore flick for yourself:

• “An Inconvenient Truth” isn’t Al Gore’s documentary on global warming. It’s a documentary about Al Gore’s campaign to fight global warming, and the stuff he says isn’t just his opinion; it’s the opinion of a plurality of actual, real-live scientists. Not political science professors at Georgetown or Senior Fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. (Hayward is both!)
• From now on, every time someone says this, they get fined a million fucking dollars:

“Gore predicts when polar ice and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise 20 feet, yet the latest UN report predicts a worst-case scenario of 23 inches,” says Hayward.

Gore doesn’t predict shit, the scientists do, and this was a scenario that is considered part of “catastrophic climate change,” which, while possible, isn’t even addressed in the stated 23-inch prediction of the U.N. report! I mean, Steve, you seem like you might be a nice guy, don’t start being an asshole right when I was starting to like you.

Anyhow, maybe I wasted a bunch of time watching this stuff, but it’s nice to know that this is the best that Neo-Conservatives can muster in the face of the Climate Change-Fighting Juggernaut that is the Al Gore Army.

- M.G.