I attended Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” movie last week (only one other person was in the audience; it’s already gone from that theater), for the express purpose of seeing how he chose to expand on an apparently hugely damaging accusation made within his 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” movie; specifically that skeptic climate scientists were comparable to shills employed by the tobacco industry to spread lies, as implied from a pair of leaked memos from both industries. How did Gore do on that in his sequel?

He didn’t.

What we first saw was a predictable alteration, not any really new updates, of imagery from his last movie about supposedly man-caused global warming: Greenland glaciers melting in runaway dramatic fashion, Miami sea level rise, “rain bombs,” fires, droughts, and other such events. Heaven forbid if anyone in the audience questioned how Greenland ice melt bypassed the city of Halifax and went straight on to Miami, and if Miami’s spotty flooded areas might instead be due to long-drained swamp areas subsiding. Same thing applies to his “rain bomb” event over Tucson, Arizona being something nobody actually calls rain bombs while also obviously being a time lapse video in which rain would not splash in real time liked a dropped water balloon. But Gore is Gore on that sort of ‘science.’

The balance of the movie went on to other matters, with its mid-length becoming really bogged down in an effort to ultimately conclude that Gore had facilitated a side agreement which led the Paris Climate Accord to its successful conclusion. Never mind reality telling us the whole thing is a non-binding agreement and not any sort of enforceable treaty. The movie wrapped up on a note about the necessity for us to do …… something. Contact politicians, write letters, or something to that effect, which wasn’t particularly memorable for me.

Throughout the movie were Gore’s occasional references to ‘industry denial efforts,’ but nothing building upon the line so famous in his last movie that it ended up widely dispersed and casually dropped years later to places like this 2011 letter-to-the-editor, and this Gore-trained Australian pastor’s “Climate Project Jakarta Summit” 2011 write-up.

Being as devastating as that accusation is when tied to that leaked “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” phrase, surely Gore’s sequel movie wouldn’t miss an opportunity to capitalize on it …. or at least clear up the way Gore himself went off-track about the phrase after original movie when he …

• stated in off-camera comments at the 2008 Davos conference (29:08 point) “Exxon Mobil has funded 40 different front groups that have all been a part of a strategic persuasion campaign to, in their own words ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact’“
• stated in his 2010 “The Crisis Comes Ashore” New Republic article that this was “a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’“
• stated in his 2011 epic-length “Climate of Denial” Rolling Stone article that this was “leaked to The New York Times as early as 1991. In an internal document, a consortium of the largest global-warming polluters spelled out their principal strategy: ‘Reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.‘”

Who could miss the situation in 2006? Gore didn’t say it was just some nameless ‘enterprising reporter’ at the New York Times who discovered the “reposition global warming” strategy phrase, he said Ross Gelbspan discovered it. Gelbspan, described as one of Al Gore’s key climate change advisers, unequivocally said on more than one occasion that the “reposition global warming” phrase was leaked out of a coal organization. What’s up with failing to name a beloved name and implying Exxon was behind all of this?

Gore muddied the water, and his sequel did worse than fail to clear up new ambiguity he created, it opened the door for deep, tough examination of why his ‘industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists’ accusation which relies on a single source for its support is neither consistent nor crystal clear about its origins.