Unspinning The UK High Court on Inconvenient Truth

[UPDATED – see the end of the entry]
As the course I’ve just finished tutoring spent some time using Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as a resource, I was interested when I was linked to this from the NZ Centre for Political Research:

“Politics in Schools on Trial: Schools around New Zealand that are using Al Gore’s controversial film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to promote the Government’s climate change agenda should be warned that a High Court ruling in Britain has just found that the film is unfit for schools.”

Well, no, actually. The “NZ Centre for Political Research” is (cod-libertarian) ACT MP Muriel Newman and her friends. (See previous post on spam-mistress Muriel.) She has close ties to the extremely dubious neoliberal policy thinktank the Maxim Institute, who are quoted in the article, and who I’d wager forwarded it on to her in the first place. The message stands apart from its bearers, of course, but the provenance of this piece is *extremely* dubious. So lets do some digging.
A quick google on the name of the protagonist here, Stewart Dimmock, shows that the first half of Muriel’s NZCPR piece on this was a straight cut-and-paste that has been circling around the right-wing blogs.
A crucial piece of spin right away: Stewart Dimmock is described as “a lorry driver and school governor from Kent”, but there is no mention that he’s also a member of UK neo-liberal political party The New Party (http://newparty.co.uk/index.html). Characterised as a man of the people standing up for common sense, he is in fact deeply partisan himself. Notice that the substance of his attack is that the film is “political spin” – typical new-Right strategy, framing a scientific argument as a political (and therefore opinion-driven) one.
The New Party’s press release is the source of Muriel’s article. I note that it turned up on the Reuters wire and ran in NZ newspapers without reflection or further investigation.
So we have a classic new-Right attack on climate change, by the same people that attack the IPCC report and think it’s all just scaremongering. (I note with bitter amusement that the New Party’s policy page on “Fair trade” is about getting rid of farmer subsidies in France so the UK could compete fairly. No kidding.)
But, of course, that’s just attacking the messenger. What about the content of the story? Well, check out the rather differently-weighted version of events on the BBC. Key section:

Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan had earlier said: “It is important to be clear that the central arguments put forward in An Inconvenient Truth, that climate change is mainly caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases and will have serious adverse consequences, are supported by the vast weight of scientific opinion. “Nothing in the judge’s comments today detract from that.”

Okay, that’s all secondary stuff – reportage and opinion. Let’s go to the source. Here’s the actual judgement.
There’s lots I could say about this. Of special note for me is how Justice Burton accepts that “partisan” can mean “having an agenda” and “political” can mean “serves as evidence that would affect public decision-making”. For whatever reason, the education dept. doesn’t challenge this, so we end up with a definition of “partisan political” that seems to me absurdly broad. The terms become nearly meaningless, and quite divorced from the usage in Muriel Newman’s article.
(Basically, Burton confounds the premise with the response. A film about the risk of an earthquake in Wellington and implying that we should take steps to prepare would be “political” and “partisan” by this measure.)
Justice Burton does better later on when he’s talking about the duty of ‘balanced presentation’, which he takes to mean “fair and dispassionate” – not as a requirement to counterpoint Gore’s flick with climate change denial films.
Note paragraph 17, in which Justice Burton, and both the claimant and defendant, accept the IPCC report as a good representation of the scientific consensus, and that the four main hypotheses of the film represent this consensus. In other words, the fundamental message of the film is explicitly supported in the judgement.
Justice Burton’s nine “errors” (he even puts the word in speech marks in his judgement) are thus not material to the core of the film – although, as they all push in Gore’s “partisan political” direction, Burton finds that they should be noted as not mainstream.
It’s worth reading the judgement for these errors, because they’ve almost all been misquoted by Muriel Newman and the right-wing bloggers. The one that threatens the validity of the film the most addresses a 650,000 year graph. Newman’s article says:

“The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.”

But when you actually look, the judgement says:

“In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.”

So Newman’s source – the New Party – outright lied about what the Court found. Justice Burton doesn’t say a word about CO2 lagging behind temperature rises. Burton said, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”, which isn’t much of a condemnation. They certainly suggest what Mr Gore asserts! In any case, this point is something to dig into in future – Gore’s stuff could be shonky here.
Overall, the Court found that Inconvenient Truth needs a bit more guidance to point out the dodgy bits that we already knew were in there; but that its role as a teaching tool is clear and not in dispute.
The Muriel Newman article was almost entirely hype and spin. Go away, Muriel. Go away, Maxim. You’ve already lost this argument. Cope.
[NOTE: actual lawyers are invited to weigh in with criticism of my reading of Burton’s judgement.]
***UPDATE*** Check out this for more on the “errors”.