To Err is... profitable?

When I first found The Great Global Warming Swindle online, I was impressed to see a movie that actually showed many of the things I'd been finding myself over the years, and challenged claims made by AGW proponents with actual... you know... facts. I'd sent a link to a couple of email lists where the subject had been discussed before. I promptly got all sorts of people making derogatory comments about the movie, dismissing it out of hand. There were the usual Big Oil claims (because if it's skeptical of AGW, then it's controlled by Big Oil, don't you know...) and a few comments that the movie's facts were simply wrong.

Well, no. In this recent news, the UK regulator did find that they broke a few rules when making the movie - namely "the documentary violated rules on impartiality, and made significant allegations against individuals without giving them a chance to respond." However, the movie "did not mislead viewers..."

Compare this to the ruling by a judge that An Inconvenient Truth had 9 'exaggerations' in it.

A British High Court judge this week exposed nine inaccuracies in former U.S. vicepresident Al Gore's award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, labelling it "a political film" and calling many of its claims about climate change "alarmist" and "exaggerated."

The judge was being overly cautious. There are actually 35 factual errors in AIT, though I wouldn't be surprised if more are found. Visit the link for more details, but here's a list of the errors themselves. Every single one of these claims are false or falsely being blamed on AGW.

1. Sea levels rising six meters
2. Pacific islands "drowning"
3. Thermohaline circulation "stopping"
4. CO2 "driving temperature"
5. Snows of Kilimanjaro "melting"
6. Lake Chad "drying up"
7. Hurricane Katrina "man made"
8. Polar bear "dying"
9. Coral reefs "bleaching"
10. 100ppm of CO2 "melting mile-thick ice"
11. Hurricane Catarina "man made"
12. Japanese typhoons "new record"
13. Hurricanes "getting stronger"
14. Big storm insurance losses "increasing"
15. Mumbai "flooding"
16. Severe tornado's "more frequent"
17. The sun "heats the Arctic Ocean"
18. Arctic "warming fastest"
19. Greenland ice sheet "unstable"
20. Himalayan glacial melt waters "failing"
21. Peruvian glaciers "disappearing"
22. Mountain glaciers worldwide "disappearing"
23. Sahara desert "drying"
24. West Antarctic ice sheet "unstable"
25. Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves "breaking up"
26. Larson B Ice Shelf broke up "because of 'global warming'"
27. Mosquitoes "climbing to higher altitudes"
28. Many tropical diseases "spread through 'global warming'"
29. West Nile Virus in the US "spread through 'global warming'"
30. Carbon Dioxide is a "pollution"
31. The European heat wave of 2003 that "killed 35,000"
32. Pied flycatchers "cannot feed their young"
33. Gore's bogus pictures and film footage
34. The Thames Barrier "closing more frequently"
35. "No fact... in dispute by anybody."

Now, with so many factual errors, gross exaggerations and misleading implications, you'd think Gore and his movie would've been relegated to the trash heap long ago. Instead, AIT has become required viewing in schools (often repeatedly), he's been receiving rewards and making money off it hand over fist.

Clearly, one doesn't need to be honest or accurate to make money off AGW scares.