NY Times Embraces Gore's Vision of Environmental Apocalypse: 'A Necessary Film'

As his environmental apocalypse "documentary" makes its debut in New York and Los Angeles today, there's nothing "inconvenient" standing in the way of Al Gore's crusade in the New York Times.

From the Cannes Film Festival, chief movie critic A.O. Scott reviews “An Inconvenient Truth” for Page 1 of Wednesday’s Arts page. Scott, the same critic who called left-wing “documentary”-maker Michael Moore “a credit to the republic,” predictably finds Al Gore’s view of environmental apocalypse to be “chilling” and “necessary.”

"‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.

“But when this does not happen -- and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't -- others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.

Scott admits to being “chilled” by Gore’s scary climate charts:

“I can't think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling. Photographs of receding ice fields and glaciers -- consequences of climate change that have already taken place -- are as disturbing as speculative maps of submerged coastlines. The news of increased hurricane activity and warming oceans is all the more alarming for being delivered in Mr. Gore's matter-of-fact, scholarly tone."

Scott concludes: ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a necessary film.”

Just as the paper's main movie critic embraces Al Gore's apocalyptic movie, chief book critic Michiko Kakutani applauds the book tie-in. The left-leaning Kakutani summarizes: “…as a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective.”

After taking all of Gore’s dubious data as fact, Kakutani concludes his book “could goad the public into reading more scholarly books on the subject, and it might even push awareness of global warming to a real tipping point -- and beyond.”

For more on this story and more New York Times bias, visit TimesWatch.