After only a couple of years, the U.S. strategy on biofuels and climate change has a clear record: dramatically higher food prices and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Government programs have encouraged farmers to use marginal land to produce fuel crops, increasing carbon dioxide emissions in the process, in an effort to receive subsidies or the high prices such crops now fetch due to government mandates.

Now, this state is poised to follow those damaging policy footsteps. Washington legislators of both parties saw biofuel mandates and subsidies as a way to send taxpayer dollars to farming communities and to prove to environmental activists that they were serious about climate change.

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

"I don't want to pick on Al Gore," Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. "But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data."