Ann McElhinney's low-budget documentary refuting the global warming hype and hysteria arrives in Washington just in time to break Al Gore's crystal ball. "Not Evil Just Wrong," the feature-length film she made with her husband Phelim McAleer, coolly reveals how Al's disguise of hot fanaticism as cold fact arrives as the Senate begins to gear up for debate on "climate change" legislation.
"We know you can't teach religion in school," McElhinney says. "But there is a religion being enforced, a green religion."
Her film illustrates just how schoolchildren have been indoctrinated with fear, loathing and foreboding, as Al's film attempts to recruit them as tiny prophets of doom. Her camera shows children in Northern Ireland describing how the sea level rises when the ice caps melt and polar bears drown. "It may (happen) here, and we will all die," says a little girl on the verge of tears, trying hard to look as though she understands what she has been taught. Pipes up an earnest little boy: "And most of us can't even swim."
 The emotional abuse of the children in the film, first shown to an audience the other night at the Heritage Foundation, illustrates the frightening tactics employed by certain environmental groups.
President Obama joins the hysteria from time to time, as in his doomsday remarks in September at the economic summit in Pittsburgh: "Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent droughts and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees ... the time we have to reverse this tide is running out."
But lately even some environmentalists think the facts, like the children, have been abused by the politics of what now must be called "climate change," since the globe is inconveniently cooling, not warming. Gerd Leipold, a leader of Greenpeace, defends the tactic of "emotionalizing issues" to get public attention, but concedes that mistakes were made, as in the claim that Arctic ice will disappear by 2030.
Al and his like-minded cohorts insist that the argument is over, but it isn't. The mistreated facts have been resisting Al's disguise and occasionally get a little relief. In 2006, a British court characterized Al's Oscar-winning documentary as riddled with exaggeration and error, and said the film could not be shown to schoolchildren without counter arguments and balancing evidence. The judge cited nine significant errors and misleading statements. Polar bears, for example, hardly face extinction, as Al suggested, and their numbers have actually increased five-fold over the last half-century.
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