Four decades before Al Gore made the cover of Vanity Fair this past April, he ran for a body decidedly less chic than geek: Harvard’s blessedly impotent Student Council. Four out of five undergraduates (I among them) ignored the election, leaving the young statesman-to-be to find solace in Roger Revelle’s lectures on the then-infant science of ecology. These lectures so filled him with environmental foreboding that soon-to-be freshman Senator Gore took to hectoring the National Academy of Science on the fate of the earth.

A stint at divinity school and extensive postgraduate study of the works of Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich and Captain Planet turned Gore ’69 into a fine stump preacher, but at great cost in what the French call deformation professionelle. The case for climatic catastrophe he expounds in his recent award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, is impassioned enough as a slideshow presentation, but as a science final it just goes thud. Gore has blotted his blue book with too many agenda-driven factoids to earn more than a gentleman’s C.

Yet despite his marginal academic performance, Gore’s impersonation of the Daily Planet’s science editor may prevail, because as complex as climate change is, for decades most No Spin Zone personalities have done nothing but deny it—which isn’t complex at all. This leaves them ill-prepared to respond to a solid hour of high-quality hype that is Aspen chic and slick as Wile E. Coyote. An Inconvenient Truth is scripted by prose stylists of New Yorker quality, storyboarded by Hollywood and Madison Avenue’s finest, and computer animated by übergeeks able to earn their residuals the old-fashioned way—by scaring the hell out of the audience.

Conservative attempts to field the film tend to drift into exemplifying the denial it decries. The joke was on Soapy Wilberforce when the Victorian bishop tried to lampoon Charles Darwin at an 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—Thomas Huxley lay in wait to make a monkey’s uncle of him instead. But Gore can deploy his considerable gifts of hyperbole with impunity, for history’s tables have been turned: This film by Sagan’s bulldog was produced with the advice and consent of the chief executives and editors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.