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Sometimes an urban legend can become a “global legend.” The scare rhetoric of the global warming controversy is a case in point. John and Jane Doe can sometimes get lost in an ideological fog and accept a “truth” simply because it is being presented to the public in the loudest voice with the most glitz. After all if “most studies show” such-and-such, then who is John Doe to contradict the experts? Who has the time and the training to cross-examine ideas about glacier meltdown, El Nino, threatened species, ecological systems, and CO2 production? (“Heck, man, all I know is what I hear on the 6 o’clock news! Maybe my old Chevy really did help cause Hurricane Katrina.”) How can the general public choose sides about global warming? Is the majority always right? People in the sciences have a system of checks and balances called “peer review.” Researchers who wish to publish something must first submit a hypothesis and a record of experiments, observations, and conclusions to one or more of their colleagues in the same field. The submission may be successful, or it may be rejected, or it may be returned with the suggestion that results were inconclusive and that more data and more study is needed. Peer review would seem to be a good, objective method of pushing back the envelope of human ignorance, and it usually is; but it has failed at times in the past. It seems that even people in the sciences often get lost in what I call an “ideological fog,” when an idea can take on a life of its own, so that it becomes politically incorrect to speak against it, no matter how many of its flaws are exposed. Al Gore has produced a book which prompted a film of the same name: An Inconvenient Truth, which I consider to be an excellent example of this sort of thing. There are some very vocal, insistent, and scholarly voices speaking against Gore’s film, in very uncompromising language. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia calls Gore’s circumstantial arguments “so weak that they are pathetic.” He says that Gore is an “embarrassment to U.S. science” and that Gore’s crusade is based on “junk science.” In substantial agreement with Carter are others, such as the Carleton University paleoclimatologist professor Dr. Tim Patterson; University of Winnipeg’s climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball; Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology at the University of Helsinki; and Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden. Such men (and hundreds more), because they oppose a scare mentality, are being compared to Holocaust deniers, renegades who won’t submit. Let’s look at the credentials of the hundreds of experts like the stubborn scholars listed above, who oppose the alarmist thrust of AIT. They are qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby, climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing significant global climate change. “Climate experts” is the important term here. In stark contrast, only a very small fraction of the “majority of scientists” Gore cites in his film actually work as “climate experts.” Granted, the names Gore cites include skilled researchers, but “…they do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate changes,” says Tim Ball. “They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies.” That is, they are climate impact experts, not climate change cause experts. Studying the impact of a change, and studying the cause of the change, are two different disciplines. There are a few climate researchers cited by Gore, however, which we could indeed call climate change experts. However, these concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. Says Ball, “These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios.” That is, they are merely “what if” constructions, and they have a poor predictive record. Ball goes on to explain that these researchers admit that their computer outputs are not “predictions.” These so-called “predictions” have fostered a neat disaster movie (The Day After Tomorrow), along with heart-tugging TV documentaries that warn about the melting of ice flows from under polar bears and penguins; but they are “merely scenarios….,” says Ball. The problem is, such researchers go on to allow the public to think they are actually making meaningful forecasts! Simply put, the consensus of true climatologists is that, yes, the earth is warming; and that, yes, human civilization seem to have at least something to do with it. Where they disagree with Gore and his alarmist scholars is whether the warming is any different from the warming/cooling cycles that have been observed in the past. That is, they strongly oppose the current frenzy, and the junk science being used to support much of it. Marlo Lewis, a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (), has written an overview of AIT which enumerates over 100 distortions in the film, distortions he categorizes as one-sided statements, misleading statements, demonstrably wrong statements, exaggerations, and speculations, all woven into a scare-matrix. Steven Hayward, a Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, is busy working on a film as a rebuttal to AIT. His work, and those of other sober organizations, can perhaps rescue the man on the street from this sort of thing. There is no reason that citizens cannot make sure they have heard both sides, so as to distinguish sober science from Chicken Little scenarios.