 Al Gore's apocalyptic take on global warming has increasingly become the accepted orthodoxy. Now, though, the former US vice-president's film An Inconvenient Truth has a rival.
An Inconvenient Truth or Convenient Fiction, starring Californian academic Steven Hayward, is a celluloid challenge to what many see as Mr Gore's hyperbolic interpretation of the world's endangered future. Dr Hayward's film has been promoted primarily by word of mouth. But thousands of Americans have bought DVDs or downloaded it from the internet. Dr Hayward, a senior fellow with the free market Californian think tank Pacific Research Institute (PRI), initially intended to attach the DVD to his annual environmental report. But a groundswell of complaints about students being forced to watch Mr Gore's documentary encouraged the PRI to make the 50-minute film more widely available. Dr Hayward does not deny that global warming is occurring or that human activity is contributing to it. But he believes Mr Gore has exaggerated the scale and threat. "The language of 'sceptics versus alarmists' has put the issue of climate change into a straitjacket, leaving little room for a reasonable middle ground," he said. With a budget of just £12,000, Dr Hayward deliberately modelled his film on the style of Mr Gore's original. He addresses claims made by Mr Gore - and facts that the former vice-president omits. For example, while ice is melting in parts of Antarctica and Greenland, it is growing in others. And while, as Mr Gore observes, Mt Kilimanjaro is indeed in danger of losing its snow-capped peak, this is probably due to slash and burn farming techniques and deforestation rather than global warming. As Mr Gore prepared for the Live Earth extravaganza in New Jersey yesterday, Dr Hayward was showing his film at the FreedomFest libertarian meeting in Las Vegas. | 
