Last week the Irish filmmakers who produced a documentary to counter Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” came to Alaska at their own expense to talk about their film “Not Evil Just Wrong.” Their visit to Anchorage and Juneau came at an interesting time.

Remember, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in equal part to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former vice-president Al Gore for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Well, it’s been a tough few months for Al Gore and the climate change crowd. It all started two months ago when leaked e-mails from Britain’s Climatic Research Unit showed that at least some of the IPCC’s best-known contributors had been rigging their research for years to demonstrate more severe warming in the 20th century than has actually occurred.

“Climategate” was followed just two weeks ago by “Glaciergate,” the revelation that the IPCC had relied on speculation by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), rather than peer-reviewed science, when it claimed that there was a 90 percent chance that all 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas would be melted by 2035. Worse, the agency’s lead glacier scientist admitted he knew the data was faulty when he included it in the UN’s last official report.

The third embarrassing episode, “Amazongate,” was reported a few days ago. Apparently the IPCC‘s 2007 forecast about the loss of the Amazon rainforests (due to global warming) came not from scientists but, again, from activists working for the WWF.

So it’s not surprising that when Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney came to Juneau last week to discuss their documentary challenging Al Gore’s much ballyhooed “An Inconvenient Truth,” the response from the left was predictably prickly.

The Irish filmmakers’ main point in “Not Evil Just Wrong” is simply that the science proving anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is not settled - in part because the science has been hijacked by politicians and radical advocacy groups. McAleer & McElhinney caution that global warming hysteria could harm the global economy and by extension the world’s poorest people who have much more immediate problems than the distant prospect of becoming “climate refugees.”

The documentary also reminds viewers that a British High Court judge ruled that Gore’s film contained nine significant errors “in the context of alarmism and exaggeration.” It’s that alarmism and exaggeration that the mass media and many educators have embraced in their characterization of the subject.

In Juneau, representatives from the Washington, DC-based environmental group Oceana expressed disagreement with “Not Evil Just Wrong’s” message and said they were disappointed that the Juneau Chamber of Commerce provided a forum for McAleer & McElhinney to present their opposing view. The Chamber of Commerce supports business and free enterprise. If global warming hysteria causes the government to impose job-killing taxes and regulations on an economy already in recession, that’s not exactly good for business or the Alaska economy. (Oceana, by the way, was one of the groups that recently filed a legal challenge in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Minerals Management Service’s approval of Shell‘s proposed exploration drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. They cited among other reasons, of course, climate change. )

That the left in Juneau got defensive is curious especially since “Not Evil Just Wrong” featured not just a single politician’s voice but seventeen different voices, including Alaska’s own highly regarded Arctic scientist, Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr. Akasofu has published hundreds of professional journal articles and has authored and co-authored ten books.

Dr. Akasofu retired in 2007 but has continued to pursue the idea that the current warming of the climate might be more due to the planet's natural recovery from the last cold period, the “Little Ice Age,” than from our pumping of greenhouse gases into the air. Akasofu is also one of the 700+ scientists listed in a report who are said to dispute the theory of man-made global warming.

Most of us, like Al Gore, are not scientists. No scientists know to a certainty the extent to which human activity has contributed to global warming. In light of the recent revelations, though, there’s enough information to justify healthy skepticism about the IPCC reports.

This kind of conversation often invites angry criticisms from those who would call it a denial of the science of global warming. But none of the revelations about the IPCC’s science fiction disprove the man-made global warming theory. What the revelations do prove, however, is that the science here was susceptible to politics and special interests. If the underlying theory is correct, then the people who have done it the greatest disservice are alarmists like Al Gore - not skeptics like McAleer and McElhinney.