Oscar Nights to Forget - Was Sunday's presentation more embarrassing than the 2007 event?

In the aftermath of an ugly spectacle on Sunday night, the members of the 
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may be tempted to count this 
year’s Oscar awards ceremony as their most embarrassing yet. But there is 
plenty of competition in this category, even if it’s not an honor just to be 
nominated.

Some may immediately think of the time in 2017 when presenters announced the 
wrong movie as the winner of the best picture award, but with the passage of 
time the smoother presentation of Oscars night in 2007 is looking harder to 
defend.

That was the year the film industry claimed that the best documentary of the 
year was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a frightening forecast of 
environmental doom. Conveniently for the world but inconveniently for the 
Academy’s reputation, some of the most hysterical predictions Mr. Gore has 
documented have not turned out to be true.

When Mr. Gore released a sequel in 2017, Bjorn Lomborg wrote in the Journal:

     They say the sequel is always worse than the original, but Al Gore’s 
     first film set the bar pretty low. Eleven years ago, “An Inconvenient 
     Truth” hyped global warming by relying more on scare tactics than 
     science. This weekend Mr. Gore is back with “An Inconvenient Sequel: 
     Truth to Power.” If the trailer is any indication, it promises to be 
     more of the same.

     The former vice president has a poor record. Over the past 11 years Mr. 
     Gore has suggested that global warming had caused an increase in 
     tornadoes, that Mount Kilimanjaro’s glacier would disappear by 2016, 
     and that the Arctic summers could be ice-free as soon as 2014. These 
     predictions and claims all proved wrong.

Many media folk have since written analyses seeking to give Mr. Gore credit 
for good intentions despite his botched predictions. These days Jon Miltimore 
at the Foundation for Economic Education notes that Mr. Gore’s misinformation 
has been treated as an excusable faux pas, rather than grounds for social-
media cancellation. To be clear, Mr. Miltimore is not arguing for a 
cancellation of the former vice president but rather for a commitment to the 
free exchange of ideas for everybody:

     Scientists and public officials will make mistakes—just ask Al Gore—but 
     purging ideas from the public square is a sign of a dogmatic society, 
     not a scientific one.

In 2009, the free exchange of ideas enabled an especially significant Gore 
error to be recognized. Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster and Philippe Naughton 
reported for The Times of London:

     Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the 
     latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in 
     five years.

     In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. 
     Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 
     per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer 
     months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

     However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped 
     the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

     “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. 
     “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

     Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one 
     used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a 
     conversation with Mr Gore.

     The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference. It 
     follows the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of 
     East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which some have suggested shows 
     scientists manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human 
     activities are causing global warming.

Thanks to the open exchange of ideas that has enabled Mr. Gore to avoid 
cancellation, he was free to make another bold but dubious declaration at 
another climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, last year. Bloomberg’s Tasneem 
Hanfi Brögger reported in November:

     Al Gore, the former vice president of the U.S. and the chairman of 
     Generation Investment Management LLP, said the world is witnessing a 
     sustainability revolution and warned that investors caught on the wrong 
     side of history will face losses.

     “We now have a subprime carbon bubble of $22 trillion, based on an 
     absurd assumption that all of those carbon fuels are going to be 
     burned,” Gore said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg Television’s 
     Francine Lacqua. “They’re not going to be, especially because the new 
     renewable sources of electricity are much cheaper now.”

     He said that once the risks are “internalized,” then “it’s going to 
     affect the value of all these assets.”

Time will tell how this forecast performs over the long term, but so far 
anyone who took Mr. Gore’s words to heart and shorted oil has gotten crushed. 
Let’s hope that given his track record, few investors were paying him any 
attention.

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Let's go Brandon!