Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is opening one week from today, and if you live near a major city, you’ll have a good chance to see it (the rest of us will have to wait for the DVD).

But if you stay at home and watch T.V., you may get to see some "public issue" advertisements about “global warming alarmism and the call by some environmental groups and politicians to reduce fossil fuel and carbon dioxide emissions.”  The ads are put out by a group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which widely publicizes its belief that the earth is not warming cataclysmically because of the burning of coal and oil.

Not surprisingly, the big donors to the Competitive Enterprise Institute are Exxon Mobile and other major oil companies.

Think Progress adds more:

Exxon’s spokesperson Tom Cirigliano has explained why the company is so dedicated to funding CEI’s pushback on global warming:

We want to support organizations that are trying to broaden the debate. … There is this whole issue that no one should question the science of global climate change that is ludicrous. That’s the kind of dark-ages thinking that gets you in a lot of trouble.

The science is not questioned because the science behind global warming is indisputable. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions. And the EPA has said that the recent warming trend “is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years…due mostly to human activities.”

For the oil industry, Al Gore’s film exposing the truth is perceived as a threat, and they have no shortage of funds to try to distort it.