[QUOTE=Laudenum]
I was watching a bit of Al Gore’s movie An Inconvienient truth, and I began to wonder about the reliability of it.
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soon followed by
[QUOTE=Laudenum]
Didn’t a British court find that [An Inconvienient truth] had several factual errors in it? I vaugely remember hearing something about that.
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[QUOTE=Laudenum]
I was watching a bit of Al Gore’s movie An Inconvienient truth, and I began to wonder about the reliability of it.
I’ve been told many times that the History channel isn’t too reliable, and I’ve always thought that the National Geographic magazine was a bit fishy.
Does anyone know how reliable the above are?
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The History Channel is the Wikipedia of history. Some of their shows contain some great information while others -not counting the UFO/Bigfoot shows- contains less than stellar information. I’d be happy to use the History Channel to learn about things but if I was really serious about the research I’d look in academic journals/books for the straight dope.
[QUOTE=jshore]
Yeah…horribly biased to be sure, perhaps “loosely based on a true story” would be a better description. To read a different account of the court decision, see here. Also, see here for a further summary (with links) of how some climate scientists weighed in in regards to these alleged errors.
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Ah now thats much better.
The link I gave was the first one I found on google that actually spelt out what the “errors” were.
@SherwoodAnderson: I’m not witnessing, and I wasn’t just asking about “An Inconvienient Truth”, I asked about two other publications too.
@BridgetBurke: Several friends of mine study History, and refer to the History Channel with contempt saying, and I quote “It’s a load a bollix”. These guys are fairly well up on history and are doing Masters in the field, so I trust them to know if something is wrong, but they would never elaborate on what exactly they disliked about it.
Well, I’ve seen the History Channel casually refer to Richard the Third as having murdered the Princes in the Tower, which is by no means clearly established. So I sure wouldn’t use them as a source for footnotes.
I’d say that if you watch the History Channel or other such programming, you’ll come away with a fairly accurate idea of over-arching concepts or events, but the details may be controversial or at least arguable. The kinds of documentaries we see there (and even Nova can do this) tend to take one or two theories on a topic and present them as factual. This isn’t bad when it’s a broadly accepted theory, but sometimes it’s not. And although they will present somone with an opposing viewpoing, the problem can be, the documentary will then speculate and extrapolate from the theory. And the next thing you know, you’re seeing ‘re-enactments’ of stuff so utterly unlikely that it’s suprising monkeys aren’t flying out of their butts.
The thing is, unless you’re quite familiar with the field, you won’t know which theories are which, unless you race to your computer during commercials and look up the name of the person who’s presenting it and the theory in general. If you find out that the person presenting it has postulated that aliens from planet Jibaz landed here 3000 years ago and built the pyramids, or that no one but the presenter believes the theory but that guy, then that tends to lessen the credibility.
ETA: The upshot is, you’ve got to follow up with your own research.
