Experts agree… Al Gore is full of it. But then again, is anyone really surprised?

“Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it,” Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film “An Inconvenient Truth”, showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: “Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.”

The theme of the article amounts to this: Most of the events that Gore cites as evidence of his global warming theories are nothing more than regular, predictable environmental cycles.

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and “hundreds of other studies” reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth’s temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

But what about those shocking videos of glaciers breaking apart?

“The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier,” says Winterhalter. “In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form.” - Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki

But what about the studies Gore cites in his movie? Surely those are proof that we’re all going to die in a massive flood in 132 hours, right?

Gore tells us in the film, “Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap.” This is misleading, according to [former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim] Ball: “The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology.”

But if the flood doesn’t kill us, the heat will! Surely Gore can’t be wrong about that, too!

Gore’s point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records,” he says. “The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual.”

So what do real scientists think about the founder of the Internet who can’t let the public forget he lost the 2000 election?

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore’s activism, “The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science.”

And that, my friends is the real inconvenient truth.

Update:  Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works tells Gore to stick it.