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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“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)