Criticism
Several reviews criticized the film on scientific and political grounds. Journalist Ronald Bailey argued in the libertarian magazine Reason that although "Gore gets more right than wrong," he exaggerates the risks. Global warming skeptics were vocally critical of the film, such as MIT physicist Richard S. Lindzen, who wrote in a June 26, 2006 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Gore was using a biased presentation to exploit the fears of the public for his own political gain. Conservative political activist Christopher Monckton blogged what he describes is a point-by-point refutation of the documentary.
Some reviewers were also skeptical of Gore's intent, wondering whether he was setting himself for another Presidential run. Boston Globe writer Peter Canello criticized the "gauzy biographical material that seems to have been culled from old Gore campaign commercials." Phil Hall of Film Threat gave the film a negative review, saying "An Inconvenient Truth is something you rarely see in movies today: a blatant intellectual fraud." Conservative commentator Glenn Beck aired a one-hour special, Exposed: Climate of Fear, as a counterpoint to Gore's film with viewpoints of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming.
Read more about this topic: An Inconvenient Truth
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“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)