This year’s Tribeca Film Festival is featuring some very interesting films, and I was looking forward to attending some of the theatrical previews until I learned that Al Gore would be opening the festival on April 25. I’m sorry, but the more I hear the former vice president sound the alarm of global warming, the more I ponder whether he is a shyster or simply certifiable. What I find truly frightening are the masses of people who’ve swallowed his carbon footprint scam without questioning what it has to do with lessening global warming. I can’t be the only person who’s figured out how ludicrous this concept is, and yet every day I read about more and more intelligent individuals succumbing to the scheme. Apparently, the organizers of the Tribeca Film festival are among those under Mr. Gore’s spell. This was made obvious in a press release announcing details of the opening night festivities.

“The global climate crisis is the paramount challenge facing humanity, and the goal of the SOS campaign and Live Earth concerts is to trigger a groundswell of people worldwide who will make solving the climate crisis a priority and make meaningful changes in their lives,” the founder of the SOS campaign and producer of Live Earth, Kevin Wall, said. “… and here I was worrying about terrorists.

SOS’s Live Earth global concert series is set for July 7 this year and rock celebrities, like Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, will be flying in from all from corners of the globe, emitting massive greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to perform in London. According to the recent press release, the mission of the SOS Short Film program is to create educational and compelling films that highlight the problems of the global climate crisis. Ay there’s the rub, folks. Is it indeed a crisis or just a way to scare us all to death while some enterprising hucksters make money off the hysteria?

I discovered that global warming advocates can be far more vicious than the usual pro-choice or gay rights critics of my columns. When I wrote about Bob Murray — the CEO of Murray Energy as a CEO with a Spine for daring to question the issue of climate control proposals in Congress — the hate mail was filled with vile personal invectives rather than substantive debate. There is no possible way to repeat what I was actually called by these eco-maniacs (colon blow being the mildest) but the gist of their complaints was that I was an idiot to deny global warming. Considering that I never denied that the planet is getting warmer just indicates that deep thinking is obviously not my correspondents’ forte. After these unseasonably cold past weeks, warming would have felt rather pleasant, but calling it a crisis that threatens our very existence is to reduce science to an Irwin Allen disaster movie.

Why is it so easy to convince people that shrinking glaciers will drown the coastal cities? What’s even more amazing is making them believe that the danger is imminent. The truth is that while parts of the glaciers are receding, other parts are growing. “An Inconvenient Truth” showed glaciers in Antarctica melting and falling into the sea. That’s the normal process of creating other glaciers. The film didn’t mention that the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is advancing so rapidly, it threatens to close off a major inlet. That would be too inconvenient. Instead let the affluent pay a company to offset their carbon footprint so they can continue with their greedy energy consumptive lifestyles. What’s that you say? Mr. Gore founded such a carbon footprint removal company in 2004? How convenient. Meanwhile, the rest of us must change how we live or else.

Here in New York, Con Edison has started a program offering free compact fluorescent light bulbs to replace the incandescent ones, as Mr. Gore recommended. But scientists have been worried about how to dispose of these special bulbs because they contain mercury which is poisonous. So has anyone wondered about the impact of millions of these bulbs leaching mercury into landfills? Common sense would be nice once in a while. Human beings can do a lot to clean up the environment by not polluting the air and water, but the climate is controlled by Mother Nature.

Sadly, I probably won’t be getting any special press passes to the red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival, and I would have enjoyed seeing “Spiderman 3.” But as for Al Gore, I think we dodged a bullet in 2000. Let the hate mail begin.