Al Gore's Movie Fakery

It turns out that one of the more dramatic video clips from Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" was a computer-generated sequence pirated from another alarmist movie - "The Day After Tomorrow."

SAM CHAMPION (ABC NEWS)

(Voiceover) Al Gore's 2006 documentary, 'An Inconvenient Truth," makes the same point with actual video of ice shelves calving. Which shots have more impact?

AL GORE (FORMER UNITED STATES VICE PRESIDENT)

And if you were flying over it in a helicopter, you'd see it's 700 feet tall. They are so majestic.

SAM CHAMPION (ABC NEWS)

(Voiceover) Wait a minute, that shot looks just like the one in the opening credits of "The Day After Tomorrow."

KAREN GOULEKAS (VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR)

Yeah, that's, that's our shot. That's a fully computer generated shot. There's nothing real in there.

SAM CHAMPION (ABC NEWS)

(Voiceover) Audiences expect Hollywood to twist fact into fiction. But Gore's documentary does the opposite, using a fake shot to make a real point, that ice shelves are disappearing, and vanishing ice means global warming.

Apparently, ABC tried to get a comment from Gore concerning the matter, but none was forthcoming:

Happy Earth Day Al!

Happy Earth Day Al Gore

Investor's Business Daily really hits the nail on the head with its Earth Day editorial today.

Shortage: Al Gore sees no climate improvement since he made "An Inconvenient Truth." Actually, things have gotten worse. As the environmentalists celebrate Earth Day, the rush to replace fossil fuels threatens global famine.

A week after Tax Day, April 15, we are forced to endure another indignity, Earth Day, April 22. This Earth Day finds the world threatened not by rising sea levels, but by rising food prices. Many on the planet are more likely to starve than drown, and we have only Gore's disciples to blame.

In an interview with the British paper The Sun, the jolly green giant whined: "I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006." The polar bears, he says, are still going to drown, and boats will soon be moored to the top of the Washington Monument.

To be sure, we're setting weather records, but they're not what Gore has in mind. Record cold temperatures have occurred over the globe this winter, and the only concern about flooding is from record snowfalls across the planet.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently warned of a more imminent threat, one ironically created by the rush to save the planet. Speaking in Accra, Ghana, the U.N. chief said the world must drastically increase food production to ease skyrocketing prices that have caused food riots in countries like Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Haiti.

The production of food grains has increased. But it is being diverted to empty gas tanks, not empty stomachs. Gore and others have warned that climate change is an imminent threat to the world. We would argue that climate-friendly policies are more of a threat.

The Gore-induced rush to biofuels has diverted crops such as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. Vast swaths of rain forest in places like Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to provide farmland not to feed the hungry but to fuel our cars. Our own grain belt has been increasingly diverted to ethanol over corn flakes.

This has pressured food prices while damaging the environment. In the U.S., more cultivation has increased runoff from pesticides and fertilizer, creating dead zones for aquatic life from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

As Indur M. Goklany of the Cato Institute reports, agricultural expansion leads to higher releases of carbon from biomass and soil above and below ground. Fertilizers that increase yields also increase nitrogen discharge into waters and emissions of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas that heats the atmosphere 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide.

According to World Bank data, as of March, world grain prices had tripled and fertilizer prices had quadrupled since 2000. Food prices have risen an astounding 65% just since the beginning of this year.

"Climate-change remedies can lead to greater poverty, starvation and disease, as well as widespread ecological destruction — some of the very misfortunes that they're supposed to prevent," Goklany wrote in the New York Post. "In our haste to address global warming, we have yet to think seriously about our policies' unintended effects."

In his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich warned of famine and mass starvation from overpopulation. Ironically, that might yet occur, not from overpopulation, but from overzealousness in trying to save Earth from a nonexistent threat.

Happy Earth Day, Al.

Quote of the Day

He still hasn’t gotten over 2000.

- State Senator Mark Schoesler (R- Ritzville) on State Senator Eric Oemig (D- Kirkland). Oemig proposed awarding Washington's 11 Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide, versus the winner of the popular vote statewide. The proposal passed in the Senate and is on the way to the House for a vote.