So I've generally been into the idea behind the Fact Checker column over at the Washington Post. Until today, when they decided to take Al Gore's winning the Nobel Prize as an opportunity to do a "fact check" on An Inconvenient Truth, and … not actually check any facts. Instead, they publish portions of a court decision in the U.K. where a judge decided that there were portions of the movie that exaggerated reality. Note: This is a legal decision, not a comprehensive scientific study; the Post actually does no fact-checking; there is no actual science involved here; and the conclusion they reach is that "There are good arguments on either side."
Then for more information, they point you to the official An Inconvenient Truth site, the website of the widely debunked counter film The Great Global Warming Swindle (which has even been disavowed by one of the main scientists featured in it), a broadly criticized counter article from the New York Times, and a site supporting the guy who brought the lawsuit to court. If you're counting, that's three sites that aim to take down the movie and ... the movie's own site. Which equals zero independent scientific evaluation. Thanks, Washington Post, for this significant contribution to the conversation.
--Kate Sheppard
