Given their almost pathological hatred for Al Gore, it’s no surprise that deniers have attacked An Inconvenient Sequel at every turn. Well, at every fake news turn anyway. From those like Lomborg who didn’t even wait to see the film to use it for self-promotion, to Heartland’s president writing in the Washington Examiner to James Delingpole at Breitbart, deniers are rejoicing in the fact that the movie hasn’t performed as well as they perhaps feared, given the original’s success. As of yesterday, for example, a search for “Gore” on Climate Depot’s home page returns an impressive 56 results.
But not all these blatant attempts to insert themselves into Gore’s pseudo-celebrity news cycle is working out well for the deniers. GWPF, for example, reluctantly admitted that a graph used in Lord Lawson’s BBC interview purportedly showing temperatures are cooler now than in 2007 when the original movie was released, is erroneous.
That embarrassment wasn’t enough for GWPF to “recall” the graph though. Given the timing, what seemed to be the final straw for them to admit deceit was the fact that the graph, and general storyline of temps cooling since Gore’s first movie, was spotted on the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, which quoted from Climate Depot’s use of the graph.
While we are always keen to reject climate deniers’ insinuations that the term “denier” is a direct reference to Holocaust denial and not a psychological term coined by Freud, the post in question did apparently say that global warming is “almost a bigger hoax” than the Holocaust. As Dr. Michael Mann pointed out, this intertwining of anti-semitism and climate denial is not a new development.
Deniers have made themselves relevant to the news cycle, but probably not in the way they wanted.
It looks as though Hollywood has been underperforming writ large this summer, with revenue down significantly from this time last summer. The challenge is even greater for Gore, because how could you possibly top a movie that won a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Nobel Peace Prize?
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