Last night I went with Yglesias and most of the folks from work to go see Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. And it was good! The built-in advantage to a movie like this is that , since it consists of Al Gore showing charts for two hours, everyone automatically assumes it has to be "better than you'd think". And, somewhat paradoxically, it is.

At times it's touching; near the end it's inspiring. Above all it's convincing and well-executed. Still, I'm kind of dreading the popular reaction to it. I'd say it's a toss-up at this point — a lot of folks really want to dislike Al Gore, yet they're running out of ways to plausibly say he was wrong about, well, pretty much anything. I think any potential backlash would have to run more on wingnut vitriol than on the doubt-inducing pseudoscience that's been the global warming debate's chief currency up to this point.

We've seen the basic conservative playbook for this applied to Michael Moore. And while I'm sure this movie is more carefully constructed and vetted, the unfair criticisms of Moore worked just as well, if not better, than the substantive ones — and they could work here, too. Potential Gore-belittling strategies: freeze frames of what could be a bald spot; the segment with Gore as leader of the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, in which he gets a phone call and blows this whole oil-company-conspiracy thing wide open; or the fact that he kind of looks like he's wearing somebody else's skin, like that alien cockroach in Men In Black. And of course there are the deadly, deadly snails.

Worst of all would be if somebody found a problem with one of his slides. Climate science is complex, and I have no doubt that some caveats were elided for simplicity's sake (or maybe that's just Exxon's pernicious influence talking). I'm pretty optimistic on this score, though. He's a smart dude, right? Right.

Overall: four carbon-neutral switchgrass farms out of five. Definitely the best-produced educational video that high school science classes will see during the '06/'07 school year.