[Chi-townChief]

As the old Staples Singers number went:

"If you're walking around thinking that the world owes you something 'cause you're here
You're going out the world backward like you did when you first came here.
Keep talking about the president won't stop air pollution.
Put your hand over your mouth when you cough, that'll help the solution."

Not to mention the line they included about democrats like Bobby Byrd and the late Al Gore Sr.:

"You the kind of gentleman that want everything your way
Take the sheet off your face, boy, its a brand new day."

[Chi-townChief]

CHICAGOLAND PING

[Socratic]

"liberal propaganda." What I fail to understand is why global warming should be a liberal or conservative issue.

That's why you're just a movie critic.

[the invisib1e hand]

What I fail to understand is why global warming should be a liberal or conservative issue. It is either happening or is not, and we can either take action to try to slow it, or we cannot.

Or, it is not happening, and so the second proposition becomes spurious. That would be an inconvenient truth, as opposed weird Al's convenient myth.

[digger48]

If Gore has spent six years studying it, aren't his findings worthy of attention?

No, because he spent the first 4 of the last 6 years mumbling to himself in a closet made to look like the Oval Office.

[wvobiwan]

Hello Mr. I'm-an-Economically-Ignorant-crappy-movie-critic. Global warming is a world wide socialist scam to take from rich nations and give to poor ones. This is what happens with idiots have a public platform, they are easily fooled into promoting BS like global warming.

[finnman69]

The Farenheit 9/11 of Global Warming

GLOBAL WARMING PRIMER
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/land/global/climchng.html
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/historical_CO2.htm
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

These two figures show former temperatures with major periods of glaciation labeled. The dashed lines are the present global average temperature of about 15° C (59° F). Thus the solid curves show small changes from this average; note that the temperature drops only about 5° C during a glaciation. This has occurred about every 100,000 years, with smaller wiggles in between. That is, there has been a 100,000 year glaciation cycle for the past million years or so, and there may be shorter cycles as well.

The most recent glaciation, 20,000 years ago, is called the Laurentide, and Earth is still recovering from it. This map from the The Illinois State Museum exhibit on ice ages shows the extent of that ice.

The most recent small drop in average temperature caused the Little Ice Age of 1500-1700 AD, which history describes. Mountain glaciers advanced in Europe and rivers like the Thames in England froze solid, which doesn't happen now.

Click image for animation

The growth of the ice sheets began about 120,000 years ago as ice built up on the continents in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Canada and Europe. The largest extent of these ice sheets occurred 18,000 years ago. At that time the largest ice sheets were between 3.5 and 4 km thick. In North America the largest ice sheet was the Laurentide Ice Sheet centered on Hudson Bay with other sheets centered on Greenland and in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. As these ice sheets expanded they grew together, covering Baffin Bay and eventually the Great Lakes and New England. In northwestern Europe the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet began to grow and expand south to cover what is now Norway and Sweden and north to cover the exposed continental shelf. Over time the ice sheet grew to cover Finland and the United Kingdom. This ice sheet extended east to the Ural Mountains where it met the Siberian Ice Sheet. Before the last ice age ice sheets already existed on Antarctica and on Greenland.

Most people seem surprised when we say current levels are relatively low, at least from a long-term perspective - understandable considering the constant media/activist bleat about current levels being allegedly "catastrophically high." Even more express surprise that Earth is currently suffering one of its chilliest episodes in about six hundred million (600,000,000) years. Given that the late Ordovician suffered an ice age (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that's a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current 'guesstimations' of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last skerrick of ice should have been melted off the planet, we admit significant scepticism over simplistic claims of small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol's irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now?

[Bommer]

I cannot get into a scientific discussion here.

Thats because you majored in WATCHING MOVIES FOR A LIVING! What kind of mental giant does it take to get that gig? No Ebert, you lack the intellectual ability to get into any discussion beyond how great the lighting and makeup was in the latest Hollywood POS movie or that there's too much butter in your popcorn!

[johnny7]

What a country! Ebert proves a point... you can make it being fat, ugly... AND stupid.

[Ma3lst0rm]

Ebert like most liberals don't seem to understand that no matter how long someone studies something with the intent to justify wrong conclusions the conclusions will still be wrong regardless how long they spend cutting a pasting facts and trimming the truth to fit those conclusions as is the case with most liberal truths. They are not interested in finding the truth or understanding the dynamic nature of things but instead like Arabs justifying the acts of their suicide brothers find all kinds of circuitous routes and spurious details to support their cause.

[FreedomNeocon]

I have some suggestions of where he can stick that thumb of his...

[HalleysFifth]

"An Incoherent Goof"

[Dionysius]

If Ebert is fer it, I'm agin it!

[crashthe24]

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is a compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader. He comes across as a shallow, inarticulate man, simplistic in speech and inauthentic in manner. If the film is not quite as electrifying as Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," that may be because Moore has toned down his usual exuberance and was sobered by attacks on the factual accuracy of elements of "Columbine"; playing with larger stakes, he is more cautious here, and we get an op-ed piece, not a stand-up routine. But he remains one of the most valuable figures on the political landscape, a populist rabble-rouser, humorous and effective; the outrage and incredulity in his film are an exhilarating response to Bush's determined repetition of the same stubborn sound bites.

I wonder why people think you are just "being political"
YOU HACK!

[MrCruncher]

Who is Roger Ebert?

[ExtremeUnction]

What Ebert is really saying is that his email server is crashing and it's screwing up his prissy "Answer Man" feature. I suggest we go to his site and add a comment.

[WOSG]

"I cannot get into a scientific discussion here. There will be no end to it."

Er, that's the POINT.

Ebert is no scientist.
Gore is no scientist.

For non-scientist Ebert to review a film by non-scientist Gore and his non-scientist Hollywood buddies tells us something about filmography but nothing about science.

I am sure it's a worthless film, because Gore has said irresponsible and false things that we've heard about without having to pay $7 to find out what it is.

[Savage Beast]

Perhaps unawares, Roger zeros in on the basic reason that people of good will have such contempt for the "Newsmedia":

To a representative government such as ours, which is cherished by the American people, an informed electorate is vital.

The people have every reason to expect scrupulous truth from the "Free Press", for this reason alone, though there are others.

When the "Free Press" and its "journalists" deteriorate into a propaganda machine, as ours has, providing the people not truth but propaganda, disinformation, distortions, mendacity, sensationalism, et al., the people cannot depend upon it for information.

If Global Warming should prove to be a fact and the dire predictions of those such as Al Gore come to pass, the blame for the American public's not believing them in advance shall belong to those in the "Free Press" who fed the public propaganda, destroyed the public trust in them, and made it impossible for the American people to rely upon them to speak the truth.

In other words, if Roger wants to serve the public good, he should join the voices demanding scrupulous truth and not propaganda from the newsmedia so that we will know what to believe and what not to believe.

[hgro]

Ebert is no more of an authority on climatic conditions that Al "I drank too much tea and had to rush to the restroom" Gore.

Old reliable Al found a horse to ride and lets hope the global warming he predicts burns him and his buddy Slick BJ Clinton.

[EyeGuy]

"Many are supportive. More are opposed to the movie and just about everything in it, and are written by people who have not seen the movie"

Best to cut these people off at the knees which means at the root of their bias.

BigLip Roger, throws out the qualifier that those that are opposed to the movie have not seen it, but TroutFace makes no such modification for those that are "supportive".

[staytrue]

If Gore has spent six years studying it, aren't his findings worthy of attention?

No they do not because Gore has a political agenda and is not a scientist, and is very biased on this issue and reached a conclusion about global warming long before making this movie.

GLOBAL WARMING MAY OR MAY NOT BE OCCURING, MAY BE GOOD OR BAD FOR HUMANITY, MAY BE HAPPENING BECAUSE OF HUMANS, BUT AL GORE IS NOT THE PERSON TO MAKE THE DEFINITIVE STUDY.