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

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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 ther

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 look

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

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

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 Ta

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

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Let's go Brandon!