Climate skeptics roast Al Gore on global warming

By Steve James

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his environmental advocacy, was the main target on Monday at a conference of dissident scientists skeptical of his views on global warming.

Several speakers at the conference on climate change whose theme was "Global warming is not a crisis," took pot-shots at the ex-vice president and his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won last year's Academy Award for best documentary.

"Whether we like it or not, it was extremely effective propaganda," said Timothy Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.

"It was appropriate that he got an Oscar from the land of make-believe," he joked.

The gathering was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a non-profit libertarian organization that studies environmental and other issues "from a free-market perspective" and argues that "property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies."

Attendees watched a movie, "A Climate of Fear," by conservative TV commentator Glenn Beck, who charged that anyone who opposes the view that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing the earth to warm up, are branded "heretics or Nazis."

"Al Gore's version of climate change has no longer become science. It's dogma. And if you question it, you are a heretic," Beck said in the film.

The conference challenged a strong majority of world scientific opinion that has concluded that greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming.