U.K. Judge OKs Gore Film For Schools

It's been a box office sensation, praised as a cinematic wake-up call about global warming.

The documentary won Al Gore a prize at Cannes and a couple of Oscars -- and it surely wasn't overlooked by the Nobel committee that just gave him the Peace Prize.

Now chalk up another award: a moment of celebrity for a British truck driver named Stewart Dimmock, and a day in court, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.

"My legal case was an attack on the government's decision to peddle his politically partisan film and viewpoints in the classroom," said Dimmock.

He charged it was "brainwashing" in the classroom when British officials launched a plan to use "An Inconvenient Truth" to teach students about climate change.

Dimmock sued to stop schools from showing the movie he called "sentimental mush."

While the judge who heard the case found that "An Inconvenient Truth" contains some awkward errors, he also found it was essentially true.

"I think the first thing to notice is that he did in fact accept the main thrust of the argument -- that global warming is happening, that it's real and that it's man-made," said Saleemul Hug of the International Institute for Environment and Development. "What he did was pick up nine what he called inaccuracies, which were more in the level of exaggerations, if you like."

Such claims as that the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting from global warming, or that that polar bears are drowning, searching for ice are "not proved," said the judge, who nevertheless called the documentary "powerful" and "broadly accurate," and cleared it for use in school -- as long as teachers now explain -- in effect -- that's it's only a movie.