Oscar Nights to Forget Was Sunday’s presentation more embarrassing than the 2007 event? James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oscar-nights-to-forget-11648502654?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
In the aftermath of an ugly spectacle on Sunday night, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may be tempted to count this year’s Oscar awards ceremony as their most embarrassing yet. But there is plenty of competition in this category, even if it’s not an honor just to be nominated.
Some may immediately think of the time in 2017 when presenters announced the wrong movie as the winner of the best picture award, but with the passage of time the smoother presentation of Oscars night in 2007 is looking harder to defend.
That was the year the film industry claimed that the best documentary of the year was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a frightening forecast of environmental doom. Conveniently for the world but inconveniently for the Academy’s reputation, some of the most hysterical predictions Mr. Gore has documented have not turned out to be true.
When Mr. Gore released a sequel in 2017, Bjorn Lomborg wrote in the Journal:
They say the sequel is always worse than the original, but Al Gore’s first film set the bar pretty low. Eleven years ago, “An Inconvenient Truth” hyped global warming by relying more on scare tactics than science. This weekend Mr. Gore is back with “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” If the trailer is any indication, it promises to be more of the same.
The former vice president has a poor record. Over the past 11 years Mr. Gore has suggested that global warming had caused an increase in tornadoes, that Mount Kilimanjaro’s glacier would disappear by 2016, and that the Arctic summers could be ice-free as soon as 2014. These predictions and claims all proved wrong.
Many media folk have since written analyses seeking to give Mr. Gore credit for good intentions despite his botched predictions. These days Jon Miltimore at the Foundation for Economic Education notes that Mr. Gore’s misinformation has been treated as an excusable faux pas, rather than grounds for social-media cancellation. To be clear, Mr. Miltimore is not arguing for a cancellation of the former vice president but rather for a commitment to the free exchange of ideas for everybody:
Scientists and public officials will make mistakes—just ask Al Gore—but purging ideas from the public square is a sign of a dogmatic society, not a scientific one.
In 2009, the free exchange of ideas enabled an especially significant Gore error to be recognized. Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster and Philippe Naughton reported for The Times of London:
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference. It follows the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which some have suggested shows scientists manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities are causing global warming.
Thanks to the open exchange of ideas that has enabled Mr. Gore to avoid cancellation, he was free to make another bold but dubious declaration at another climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, last year. Bloomberg’s Tasneem Hanfi Brögger reported in November:
Al Gore, the former vice president of the U.S. and the chairman of Generation Investment Management LLP, said the world is witnessing a sustainability revolution and warned that investors caught on the wrong side of history will face losses.
“We now have a subprime carbon bubble of $22 trillion, based on an absurd assumption that all of those carbon fuels are going to be burned,” Gore said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua. “They’re not going to be, especially because the new renewable sources of electricity are much cheaper now.”
He said that once the risks are “internalized,” then “it’s going to affect the value of all these assets.”
Time will tell how this forecast performs over the long term, but so far anyone who took Mr. Gore’s words to heart and shorted oil has gotten crushed. Let’s hope that given his track record, few investors were paying him any attention.
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