Here's most of the story, but click the title and scroll down for a ton of cartoons on the Goron.
THE environmental campaigner Al Gore may have won over Hollywood with his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But the scientific world is proving a much tougher audience for his relentless campaign to raise public awareness of climate change.
There is a rising chorus of concern, extending even to "moderate" scientists with no political axe to grind, over the former US vice-president's tactics and advocacy.
The nub of their concern is a belief that he has over-egged his case. That, in trying to sell to the public the dangers of complacency in combating global warming, he is guilty of a number of convenient untruths or distortions.
The main charges are that he has skated over the Earth's history of climate change and that his talk of impending doom ignores that change is a slow-motion process.
Even a top adviser to Mr Gore, the environmental scientist James Hansen, admits the former vice-president's work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws".
The creeping unease among scientists has emerged in talks, articles and blog entries over the past few months. Among the critics is Robert Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University, Queensland. In a blog late last year, Dr Carter joined other geologists in ticking off Mr Gore over his perceived failure to acknowledge the globe's long history of climate change.
"Nowhere does Mr Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet," Dr Carter wrote. "Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change."
"But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data."
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