A recently published special issue of GeoJournal (70:1) features a forum on the scientific accuracy of former U.S. vice president Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Atmospheric Sciences Professor and State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon was one of four experts invited to submit an opinion piece, and Distinguished Professor Gerald North contributed a synthesis paper responding to the commentaries and discussing the current state of climate change science. Steven Quiring, assistant professor in the Department of Geography, was guest editor for the special issue and wrote the introduction titled “Science and Hollywood: a discussion of the scientific accuracy of An Inconvenient Truth.”

In his introduction, Quiring noted that although the authors’ perspectives varied, the four papers shared some common themes. Contributors to the forum agreed that An Inconvenient Truth does “an excellent job of raising public awareness of anthropogenic global warming and explaining why increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases leads to warming,” but Quiring said that they also felt a key weakness of the documentary was its use of individual events like Hurricane Katrina as evidence that global warming is occurring.

Other contributors to the forum were Eric Steig from Washington University, David Legates from the University of Delaware, and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama, Huntsville. GeoJournal is available online at http://www.springerlink.com/content/102895.