“You can fool all the people half the time, and half the people all the time.” That quote has been attributed to everyone from Abe Lincoln to P.T. Barnum. Whoever said it doesn’t matter. It’s true. Polls show that about half the people still believe in man-made global warming, despite Climategate and despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary.

What we found in our movie “An Inconsistent Truth” is that belief in man-made global warming is wide but very shallow. Ask people on the street, as we did, if they believe in global warming and you’re likely to get a confident affirmation. Ask them why they believe it and you’re likely to get the dull stare of a dairy cow or the puzzled and confused gaze of Edith Bunker.

The trouble is most people have been spoon-fed only half the story and as Thomas B. Macaulay once said, “Half knowledge is worse than ignorance.” Indeed. People have taken Al Gore’s claims of global calamity at face value despite his propensity to lie. Remember, he’s the man who once claimed to have created the Internet.

It’s a shame but most people are simply incurious creatures. Some may call it intellectual laziness but the fact is people are just too busy living their own lives to devote any serious study to global warming. Being a talk radio host I do nothing but study the issues, and we spent two-and-a-half years researching and filming “An Inconsistent Truth.” We learned there was actually more time spent by the global warming alarmists trying to scare away the curious than actually cementing their argument. Phrases like “settled science” and “consensus” are the parlance of
politicians and political hacks, not scientists.

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Of tyrannies large and small, irritating me the most is the rise of the Green Police. They’ve reached heights previously held only by the subject of excessive taxation.

First of all, the entire basis for green ideology and the ideologues following and enforcing it is based on a sham of a lie. Global cooling led to global warming led to climate change, but the earth hasn’t burned up yet and the Eastern Seaboard hasn’t been swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean.

Yes, there are weather patterns and hot years and cold years and wet years and dry years. But yet, we persevere. Anything out of the ordinary is treated as, well, completely out of the ordinary, when the fact remains “average” meteorological behavior all the time would itself be highly unusual.

The so-called “scientists” at East Anglia who provide data to the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change can cook their books, “lose” facts running counter to their templates and cherry-pick data best supporting their statist diagnoses, but no matter. Their theories and ideas have become so ingrained in the minds of a guilt-ridden public it’s to the point where we must now live under these assumptions, whether or not they have any basis in reality. Their solutions are always the same: tax oil companies, tax the rest of us and force everyone to do with less.

These assumptions are enforced in the office I personally work in (it’s a television show), that proudly proclaims itself a “Green Office”. What makes the office green? Email is used whenever possible in place of memos, scripts are printed double-sided, and other paper-related material is sometimes printed on the backsides of the discarded scripts. This is all well and good, but the office kitchen run by the little green tyrannists seems to offend mostly everyone across the ideological spectrum (and being a television show in New York City, this would consist almost entirely of liberals). There are no paper plates or cups, only porcelain dishes and glasses, all of which require washing by hand upon their return to the kitchen after use.

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So David Evans is a scientist who worked for the Australian Greenhouse Office, as one of the country’s leading climate change experts.

But once a global warming alarmist, he’s now a skeptic.

He now believes that “The debate about global warming…is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings.”

And he blames it all on greed, vanity and careerism.

Because, he says, “the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome.”

So rather than admit exaggeration, the alarmists chose the path to hysteria.

This reveals a truth I’ve tried to explain to my global warming pals. That the only experts you can trust are the ones who keep their traps shut.

As a health journalist – I learned that the good doctors were the quiet ones. And those guys always viewed the blabbermouths as opportunists who sacrificed science in favor of ego and influence.

And this is why two decent people can read the same article, and reach two different conclusions.

For a person unfamiliar with the professional and personal motives behind the science, you will buy into the dire predictions.

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(Warning: Spoilers abound)

Politics make strange bedfellows and movies can make strange politics…

They might not necessarily further the political ideology of the filmmakers because, when good filmmakers do their jobs and serve their story, agendas you wouldn’t anticipate crop up. How else to explain The Dark Knight’s alleged defense of Bush II era terror fighting tactics or what appeared to be a subtle stay-the-course-in-Iraq-so-we-don’t-duplicate-our-past-mistake-in-Afghanistan epilogue in Charlie Wilson’s War?

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But no example (even the ol’ “The Yellow Brick Road” in The Wizard of Oz is a metaphor for the gold standard!) is more bizarre and unexpected than the politics of Rango, opening this weekend.

Yes, I’m talking about the computer animated flick from Paramount and Nickelodeon about a domesticated chameleon who gets lost in the wild wild west of the Mojave Desert, directed by Gore Verbinski (the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) and featuring the voice of Johnny Depp.

Much of the plot is unabashedly borrowed from Chinatown, from the pipe mysteriously dumping water in the middle of nowhere, to the character found dead from drowning out in the desert, to the seemingly innocuous old man in a wheelchair (in this case, a turtle voiced by Ned Beatty, channeling John Huston) who is clearly up to no good. If you want to know what he’s up to, well, just see Chinatown. (more…)

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Via Elizabeth Snead at The Dish Rag, who got the video, story and transcript:

“Go home, get online and find out the facts about climate change. And then the next time you hear some crap on talk radio or Fox News, you’ll know the truth. Don’t get your science from demagogues. Get your science from scientists.”

Does James Cameron mean we should get our science from … these scientists?

See, if I’m going to get my Global Warming science from anyone it’s going to be a troop-smearing, anti-Christian, chicken little, environmental hypocrite of epic proportions, cuz that’s how I roll.

But first…

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If we’ve learned anything from the Huffington Post, it’s that celebrity’ attempts at political eloquence almost always ends in disaster.  A recent op-ed by Canadian singer Raffi was no exception; while God dumped enough snow on America to collapse the Superdome and Floridians tried to make sense of their temperatures dipping into the low 20s for a few weeks, the man had the tone-deaf gall to say we really need to refocus on this global warming thing.   And, attempting eloquence, he quickly made it the most embarrassing statement about global warming since… well…

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Quoth the Raffi:

In a well known Greek myth, the very rich King Midas, who loves gold above all else, is granted his singular wish that everything he touches turn into gold. The gift becomes a curse when his golden touch kills plants, food, and even his daughter, who is turned into a statue. Bereft and repentant, forsaking greed, the king begs for deliverance. His curse is lifted by a wash in the river. All he holds truly precious is restored.

The modern version of the story is about a gold rush called globalization, a monetized world order that commodifies everything and poisons all that it touches: air, water, soil, whales, indigenous cultures, mothers’ milk, and babies, now born with a body burden of toxic chemicals. Money, as symbolic reward for goods and services, when elevated above all else, becomes a curse. The symbol turns tyrant and casts a plague on the living. We’re currently in the atonement chapter of the tragedy, praying we have time to write a happier ending.

Just… where does one begin?

Short answer:  penguins. They’re not worried about global warming.  Just take a look at this little guy…! (more…)

So, it was like a sequel to a Rob Schneider movie, and not even Rob Schneider bothered to return.

I speak of the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change that annoyed Cancun, Mexico earlier this month. Mind you, over ten thousand people have been murdered over drugs in that country this year -so this confab seemed about as relevant as a pimple on a griffen’s butt.

It was only a year ago that the Copenhagen Summit was kind of a big deal, but that faded faster than my Ed Hardy denim underwear. So it’s no surprise that the experts here have turned to the gods for help. Christian Figuera, the executive secretary, desperately invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel – for she’s not only goddess of the moon, but also “reason, creativity and weaving.”

Yes, weaving. Because, “you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change…” blah blah..time for a break:

Uganda’s First Action Movie Trailer – Watch more Funny Videos

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So climate change experts having finally got the message. And the message is: their message sucks. In fact, their “Scare the hell out of us” screed was so awful, researchers claim, that it actually undermined their mission.

Which, I always thought, was to scare the hell out of us.

Yep, according to Cal-Berkeley shrinks, dire predictions about global warming can “backfire if presented too negatively.” Of course that raises one question: how to do present dire predictions, positively?

“Hey, were all gunna die. LOL.”

Which leads me to a theory: these Berkeley researchers are dopes.

Look the fact is, people like me questioned global warming evidence because we’d seen this hysteria before – with emotional warnings about the coming ice age, the dangers of nuclear power, artificial sweeteners and DDT.

And this caused us to grow cold to such crap, and overlook real threats like terrorism, the resurgence of malaria, and of course, the rise of Ed Hardy t-shirts. (more…)

For nearly two decades now, people have been arguing about climate change and getting nowhere. Right-wingers argue that global warming is a hoax based on unsubstantiated science, while left-wingers insist that not only is it real but unless we spend everything we have and more trying to stop it, the world will end tomorrow.

To which I say, “Stop—you’re both wrong!”

This, in a nutshell, is the message of the new documentary about me and my work that opens nationwide on Nov. 12. It’s called “Cool It” and, yes, the title is meant to be clever. The idea is that we do need to cool down the planet, but in order to do it sensibly we first need to cool it ourselves. That is, we need to dispense with both the anti-scientific denialism and the Al Gore-ish fear-mongering. Instead, what we should be doing is facing facts—and responding to them not with rhetoric but with smarter, more rational policies.

The first fact we need to acknowledge is the reality of global warming. Like it or not, the data is abundantly clear that man-made greenhouse gases have been building up in the atmosphere for decades if not centuries, with the result that global temperatures are rising. Yes, the “Climate-gate” emails and the disclosure of funny business at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change exposed some deeply disturbing academic chicanery and prejudice at some supposedly prestigious institutions. However, these revelations did nothing to undermine the fundamental scientific basis of global warming. What they did call into question were many of the more extreme predictions about global warming’s likely impact—such as the idea that all the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear (they’re not) or that half the Amazon rain forest would soon be destroyed (not likely).

Of course, these extreme predictions are at the heart of the mainstream environmental movement’s position on climate policy. And this brings us to another set of facts we need to face: that while global warming is real, it is not quite the imminent catastrophe so many climate activists would have us believe. There may be some truth to the notion that in order to get people to focus on a problem, you need to scare the pants off them. But while worst-case scenarios may be a great way to get the public’s attention, they are a terrible basis for making public policy. If you believe that the southwest U.S. is about to become another dustbowl (as Paul Krugman has insisted) or that Greenland and Antarctica are on the verge of becoming huge piles of slush (as Al Gore would have us believe), of course you’re going to argue that we should do everything we can to eliminate carbon emissions as quickly as possible—even if that means amazingly costly and ineffective government policies. (more…)

So.  Is “fired up” to be the defining signature phrase of our time?  The ghastly aptness that it has to many settings now may help shield President Obama from history’s judgment for his over-dependency upon it, but he’s still bandying it about almost daily.  Right now it’s providing him “hope” in needed doses, I guess.

I’m remembering his 2008 campaign litany “Y’all fired up? Ready ta go? …Fired up?”

Call and response does energize a crowd.  Obama wasn’t the first to deploy it, only the first to deploy it with such momentous success.  In the unknown future of our constitutional republic, call n’ response is as here to stay as rock n’ roll.  Crowds still matter, even in the cyberspace age.  Acting together physically is still how the homo sapiens do it, and any ruling class of the species still takes heed.

The method of call and response and of group chanting or singing may be powerful, even dignified, as in “We Shall Overcome.”  Or may be lame, even embarrassing, as in “Whadya want?”… “When d’ya want it?” and the like.  People participating in call and response or in sing-along reveal things about their character:  Faith?  Anxiousness?  Selfishness?  Opportunism?

What did you experience in the character of the last throng you got next to?  Mine would have sneered back at Obama’s call “Fired Up?” with the response “Hell, yeah!!”  And yet there was gloom.  Not always competing well against the gloom were joy, faith, or any of the quite rational exuberance or lightness of being with a just cause. 

C’mon!  The issues may be solemn, but that’s not what we’re entitled to be.  For your consideration, for your next throng—a little lightness for your jumbo-tron! 

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“We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.” – Pogo 

Walt Kelly’s propaganda poster premiered on Earth Day I, 1970. 

It now conjures a circular firing squad of misanthropes in light of Franny Armstrong & co’s radical environmentalist 10:10 campaign’s evil, child-snuff fantasy film “No Pressure.” 

Revealed by the film is the wicked heart beating within the apocalyptic religion of environmentalism; a self-loathing, anti-capitalist, anti-Western-civilization political haven for deracinated communists, anarchists and their useful idiots after the fall of the Bolshevik utopia. 

The anti-scientific wave of contempt and rage cresting within these totalitarians since the revelation of the infamous East Anglia University Climate Research Unit’s “Hide the Decline” e-mails now crashes, Humpty-Dumpty, shattered and exposed on the rocks of their great Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change fraud.   (more…)

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

What kind of people blow up children?

White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.

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Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.

There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.

A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind. (more…)

Few franchises have had a steeper fall than the Alien series. In 1992 Alien³ appeared to near-universal derision. James Cameron nailed the essential problem when he said, “[director David] Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, essentially trashing the entire ending of Aliens in the first few minutes of Alien³.” Absolutely correct. In the place of Cameron’s great characters, Fincher’s film substituted Sigourney Weaver’s wacky desire to have her character die, use no guns, and (in effect) “make love” to the aliens. The result was catastrophic.

And yet is that very different from the disastrous decisions Cameron himself has made since Aliens appeared in 1986? Take his Terminator franchise — the director’s initial script note when first conceiving of the sequel read, “Young John Connor and the Terminator who comes back to befriend him.” Cameron’s buddy and fellow Terminator scribe Bill Wisher remembers that “The idea of a boy and the Terminator seemed real funny to me, and we both had a good laugh about it. But after we finished laughing, Jim looked at me seriously and said this was the story we ought to do.”

For those of us who thought that a Cameron-helmed Terminator 2 would build on the space marine look-and-feel introduced in the first film and perfected in Aliens — in the process bringing the story into that way-cool dystopian future, perhaps with Sarah Connor traveling forward in time to somehow reunite with a still-living Reese and change history for the better — Cameron’s decision to make Arnold the good guy and build the movie around a Hollywoodized moppet was the worst possible outcome.

It wasn’t just the decision to make one of the greatest villains in movie history into a joke that ruined Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was the simplistic preachiness underlying the plot. Joe Morton, the actor who portrayed the doomed Miles Dyson in the film, recalls that, “[Cameron] told me how Terminator 2 was going to be an anti-nuclear film and that it would show authority figures as the real Terminators. I had read the script and so I remember laughing and telling him ‘Sure Jim. I think kids are going to walk out of the theater after seeing this movie, saying ‘Did you see the way the Terminator shot that guy in the knees?’ But Jim insisted that it would be much more than that.” (more…)

At a gut level most left-wing environmentalists know that they’re liars. Intellectually they might have somehow convinced themselves that Mother Earth is in some sort of man-made peril, but deep down inside where the truth won’t be denied, these liars know they’re lying — know that the “green movement” is all about a sinister political agenda to put them in the position of insect overlords in charge of we rubes who stubbornly refuse to let go of the idea that Marxism is a bad thing.

This isn’t true for all of them. Ed Begley Jr. walks the walk, and there are everyday tree-huggers scattered throughout America quietly attempting to make work a sustainable lifestyle. You can smell them from here. But most environmentalists are lying liars who know they’re lying. Because if you honestly believe man is destroying the planet, that the apocalypse is nigh, you prepare for it. Most coastal elites are Global Warming believers and yet Global Warming, we’re told, will make the oceans rise to the point that will someday put much of the coast, especially Manhattan underwater. So why aren’t coastal elites moving inland? Why aren’t they pulling a Lex Luthor and buying up all that cheap property that will someday be the new coast? And why do they continue to burn fossil fuels, enjoy air conditioning, and otherwise consume? Because deep down inside they know what we know: it’s all bull shit Socialism disguised as nonsense.

People who believe, truly believe that an environmental apocalypse – be it through increased temperatures, a rise in sea levels, or super-hurricanes — is imminent, act as though it’s imminent. They don’t live in big, fancy, air-conditioned homes propped precariously on the side of the Hollywood Hills and purchased through the dividends of an unnecessary energy-burning, landfill-filling industry. They don’t run up incredible electric bills. They don’t purchase second homes large enough to house Michelle Obama’s entourage.

However, after an “awakening,” courtesy of former Vice President Al Gore’s wildly inaccurate propaganda-horror film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” James J. Lee believed. (more…)

Here’s a handy-dandy guide to help track the excuses James Cameron’s used to cluck-cluck-cluck his way out of two (that we know of) global cooling global warming climate change debates – debates the director himself requested (through his proxy Richard Green) with name conservatives, including talk radio host Rusty Humphries, documentary filmmaker Ann McElhinney, Marc Morano, and our own Andrew Breitbart: 

1. Sorry Rusty, but I have to jet off to an “eco-emergency” in Brazil.

2. Sorry Andrew and company, but after 10 days of negotiating, Mr. Cameron would prefer to debate Glenn Beck. 

Does anyone honestly believe Cameron has the stones to debate Man-Made Climate Change with Glenn Beck? I’m not sure how you debate something that doesn’t exist, but there’s still no way in hell Cameron would debate it with Beck. Yes, that excuse is just Chicken Little doubling down on the phony swagger. 

After reading through the 10 days of tortured negotiations between Cameron’s camp and ours – where we agreed to one ludicrous demand of theirs after another — and then learning that Rusty Humphries was run through this same disingenuous eco-mill, the game Cameron’s playing becomes pretty obvious.  If I learned nothing in my 17 years of corporate bill collecting, I learned that when someone adamantly refuses to take “yes” for answer, the only conclusion you can come to is that they entered the negotiation in bad faith and with no intention of ever closing a deal.    (more…)

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Hard to blame Cameron for not showing up to the gunfight he asked for. After all, he has no ammunition; just cooked numbers, lies, hysteria, emotion, and the inability to scream “cut” and ask for another take when things don’t roll out the way he wants.

We here at Big Hollywood are still trying to figure out which is more fun, Cameron getting his clock cleaned at a global cooling global warming climate change debate, or the ongoing ridicule that can be mined from his running like a punk from his own challenge.

Six of one, really.

A mere week after director James Cameron won a Chicken Award for running away from a climate change debate challenge he had made to Andrew Breitbart, filmmaker Ann McElhinney and Marc Morano, it has been confirmed that the Oscar-winner now deserves  a second Chicken Award for similarly refusing to take “yes” for an answer regarding an earlier climate change debate he had demanded with syndicated radio talk host Rusty Humphries.

You’ll recall that Cameron hectored to the world, “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” and then just last week through a proxy, invited Breitbart & Co. to battle him before an audience of committed global warming believers in Aspen.

I have just learned that an earlier challenge to Humphries made by this same proxy, environmental activist Richard Greene, followed the same nonsensical pattern that involves Cameron inviting you, encouraging you to incur costs, and then finding an absurd reason to cancel at the last minute. Humphries tells his story: (more…)

One of the downsides of having been the victim of a classical education is that events often trigger unconventional connections. So when I heard that film director James Cameron, a man whose well known intolerance, arrogance and profane bullying equal his cinematic brilliance, had chickened out of a highly publicized debate about human contributions to global warming he had demanded with a film director and two others lacking his immense wealth and power, I thought of  Fellipe Argenti, the wealthy, arrogant, intolerant bully in Dante Alighieri’s hell.

I warned you it was unconventional — but fitting.

Argenti resides in that portion of Dante’s perdition reserved for pimps, seducers and hypocrites. The available evidence indicates that all three terms apply to Cameron in this matter.

He is pimping as fact the notion that human beings cause global warming despite contrary scientific opinion and revelations that researchers may have concocted that view for political and funding reasons. Cameron’s opinion of those who disagree with him: “I think they’re swine.”

He is seducing others to believe in human caused global warming by the sheer intimidating force of his prominence, power and wealth:  “Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their a–,  I’m not sure they could hear me.” (more…)

According to the website CNN.com, some of the criticism of first lady Michelle Obama is driven by partisan politics. However, “others say the attacks are rooted in white resentment of the “uppity Negro.” Two things quickly come to mind. The first is that no one other than Harry Reid uses the word “Negro” anymore. Second, that it is the 21st century and yet there are those who continue to talk about race as if it were 1955.

Last February, in a speech to honor Black History Month, Attorney General Eric Holder remarked that Americans of all colors should stop avoiding an honest discussion of race in America. Said Holder: “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

I disagreed with Holder at the time and still do. Americans are not cowards when it comes to discussions of race, neither are they dishonest. Rather, I believe Americans are simply bone-tired.

The American conversation on race began more than two centuries ago and frankly, we have talked of little else. The topic permeated the discussions during the drafting of both our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and continues today, with a black man sitting in the white house. (more…)

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Actor Ryan Reynolds at HuffPo:

I didn’t grow up in Louisiana, and I can imagine those who did are even more passionate about cleaning up this mess than the rest of us. I grew up in Canada, where we have a similar tragedy being carried out right now: the ancient boreal forest in Northern Alberta is being destroyed to collect dirty tar sands oil. Oil that generates three times the global warming pollution as regular crude. As a result, entire ecosystems and indigenous communities are being devastated.

When you see what’s happening in the Gulf and the boreal, you realize we’re willing to stop at absolutely nothing in order to get our fix. And it seems to me like it’s time we recognize we have a problem. A major, major problem. (more…)