Phony Paris Climate Accord

If the promises made in Paris were pretty tepid, the performance of nations in meeting them has been equally bad. From New York Magazine:

Remember Paris? It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed — defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it — and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.

This week, the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions grew 1.7 percent in 2017, after an ambiguous couple of years optimists hoped represented a leveling off, or peak; instead, we’re climbing again. Even before the new spike, not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfill the commitments it made in the Paris treaty. To keep the planet under two degrees of warming — a level that was, not all that long ago, defined as the threshold of climate catastrophe — all signatory nations have to match or better those commitments. There are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines. This puts Donald Trump’s commitment to withdraw from the treaty in a useful perspective; in fact, his spite may ultimately prove perversely productive, since the evacuation of American leadership on climate seems to have mobilized China, eager to claim the mantle and far more consequential to the future of the planet because of its size and relative poverty, to adopt a much more aggressive posture toward climate. Of course those renewed Chinese commitments are, at this point, just rhetorical, too.

Of course, if the Paris Accord are something between a “farce” and a “fraud,” that doesn’t mean that a strong accord that works would be a bad idea.

But it does mean that the media and politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama have been, either through ignorance or mendacity or ideological bias, lying to the American people.

Twelve Days of Global Warming

Where Did the Global Warming Go?

From Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:

Jacoby lays out a fanciful scenario, and asks how it would play out in the media.

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were entirely ice-free. Last December 25th, not a single Canadian province had woken to a white Christmas. There was a new scientific study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures — a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists were admitting that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

Of course, there would be a huge media hue and cry. There would be flat out hysteria.

But what has really happened?

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On December 25th, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea to keep them warm. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes — Erie, Superior, and Huron — almost completely frozen over. In Washington, DC, what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which all but shut down the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice to the tune of 193,000 square miles — an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade — average global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as compelling as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot.

Of course, the religious zealotry isn’t merely the result of some arcane theology. It’s the result of the class interests of the New Class — liberals and leftists who can use it to extend their control over the economy.

Thus, in the past generation, we have had the DDT scare, the result of a book called Silent Spring by Rachael Carson (1962). We have had The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (1968). We have had Club of Rome The Limits to Growth in 1972. We had the “coming ice age” which dominated the media in the middle 70s.

All of these environmental scare eposodes turned out to be wrong, but all had one thing in common. They all justified a massive government intervention in the economy.

And that, of course, has always been the point of the environmental movement.

Yet More Bogus “Global Warming” Data

From the Telegraph:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever.” In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet

EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

“I tried to warn them, but the Elders of this planet would not listen,” said Gore, who in 2000 was nearly banished to a featureless realm of nonexistence for promoting his unpopular message. “They called me foolish and laughed at my predictions. Yet even now, the Midwest is flooded, the ice caps are melting, and the cities are rocked with tremors, just as I foretold. Fools! Why didn’t they heed me before it was too late?”

As the rocket soared through the Gore estate’s retractable solar-paneled roof—installed three years ago to save energy and provide emergency rocket-launch capability in the event that Gore’s campaign to save Earth was unsuccessful—the onetime presidential candidate and his wife, Tipper, stood arm-in-arm, nobly facing their end while gazing up in stoic dignity at the receding rocket, the ecosystem already beginning to collapse around them.

This, of course, from The Onion.

The Joke is Not Funny

Gore Supporters’ Energy Hypocrisy

This has been all over conservative talk radio, but we can’t resist including it here.



It’s not just cheap fun at the expense of the energy nannies.

It points to the reality of environmentalism.

Affluent environmentalists expect to have plenty of energy themselves in the Green utopia they are trying to bring about.

They can afford $8.00 per gallon gas.

They will often make minor and symbolic sacrifices in support of their claim of righteousness. They may live on the East Side of Milwaukee, and bike to work downtown. But that’s not difficult if you have enough money to pay the inflated real-estate prices on the East Side.

They may drive a hybrid auto. After all, they can afford one, while working class Americans can’t.

But they will never forego the opportunity to jet off to some exotic location for a vacation.

Being affluent and elitist, they expect all their privileges and prerogatives to continue just fine in their Green utopia. That less affluent people will be harmed is something they don’t much care about. Indeed, they view it as their proper role to tutor “lessor breeds” on how to live their lives -- and to use coercion, if necessary, to do it.

Global Warming Skepticism from ABC

But of course, it’s from John Stossel.

Stossel goes through some of the now standard (but usually unheard of in the Mainstream Media) criticisms of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.”

The movie has been seen by millions, won an an Academy Award and earned Gore widespread praise in the media. People have proclaimed him a “prophet,” a “cultural icon” and a “conquering hero.” Just last week, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. With all this news coverage, it’s no surprise that 86 percent of Americans think global warming is a serious problem and 70 percent want the government to do something now.

But is it a crisis? The globe is warming, but is it really all our fault? And is it true the debate is over? No. What you think you know may not be so.

In the movie, for example, Gore says that if we allow the globe to warm, “sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet.” Then he shows his audience terrifying maps of Florida and San Francisco submerged under rising sea levels. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared last week’s Nobel Prize with Gore, said that would probably take thousands of years to happen. Over the next 100 years, sea levels are expected to rise seven to 24 inches, not 20 feet.

Gore also implies that polar bears are dying off, because receding Arctic ice has forced them to swim longer distances. The kids I interviewed were especially worried about the fate of the polar bears. But the polar bears appear to be doing all right. Future warming may hurt them, but right now data from the World Conservation Union and the U.S. Geological Survey show most populations of polar bears are stable or increasing.

The Debate Is Over?

The most impressive demonstration in Gore’s movie is that big graph of temperature and carbon dioxide levels stretching back 650,000 years. Carbon dioxide is thought to amplify temperature increases, but his graph seemed to show clear cause and effect: When carbon dioxide levels rose, so did temperature. It suggested that carbon levels controlled temperature. But a real inconvenient truth is that the carbon increase came after temperatures rose, usually hundreds of years later. Temperature went up first.

But Stossel is perhaps most interesting when he discusses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The fact is, when climate changes, there are gains and there are losses,” said Tim Ball, who studies the history of climate change. But, he points out, all we generally hear about is the bad news from the IPCC — that massive group of climate scientists.

Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute participated in one of the IPCC drafts and Christy was a contributing author. Both say that this Nobel Prize-winning group is not what people think it is.

“The IPCC is the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change,” Reiter said. “It is governments who nominate people. You’ll find in many chapters that there are people who are not scientists at all.” Reiter claims that some of these scientists are “essentially activists” and there are some members with affiliations to groups like Greenpeace.

Birds of a Feather

Global Warming: Debate Over?

From Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, a review of some of the evidence on “global warming” that Al Gore would want you to ignore.

If there’s anything climate-change crusaders are adamant about, it is that the science of the matter is settled. That greenhouse gases emitted through human activity are causing the planet to warm dangerously, they say, is an established fact; only a charlatan would claim otherwise. In the words of Al Gore, America’s leading global warming apostle: “The debate among the scientists is over. There’s no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. . . . There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the evidence.”

But as with other claims Gore has made over the years (“I took the initiative in creating the Internet”), this one doesn’t quite mesh with reality.

Scientists and other “serious people” who question the global warming disaster narrative are not hard to find. Last year 60 of them sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, urging him to undertake “a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science” and disputing the contention that “a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause.” The letter cautioned that “observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models” and warned that since the study of climate change is relatively new, “it may be many years yet before we properly understand the earth’s climate system.”

Among those signing the letter to Harper were Fred Singer, the former director of the US Weather Satellite Service; Ian Clark, hydrogeology and paleoclimatology specialist at the University of Ottawa; Hendrik Tennekes, the former director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer, formerly senior scientist in climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. -- plus 55 other specialists in climate science and related disciplines.

The debate among the scientists is over?

NASA administrator Michael Griffin told National Public Radio in May that while the general trend of global warming exists, that doesn’t make it “a problem we must wrestle with.” To insist that any change in climate must be bad news “is to assume that the . . . earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have.” The planet’s temperature has been fluctuating for millennia, he added. “I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change.”

In 2003, environmental scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch surveyed 530 of their peers in 27 countries on topics related to global warming. One question asked: “To what extent do you agree or disagree that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes?” On a scale of 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree), the average score was 3.62, reflecting no clear consensus.

Asked whether abrupt climate changes will wreak devastation in some areas of the world, the percentage of scientists strongly agreeing (9.1) was nearly identical to the percentage strongly disagreeing (9.0). Another question asked: To what degree might global warming prove beneficial for some societies? A striking 34 percent of the scientists answered 1 or 2 (a great degree of benefit); just 8.3 percent answered 6 or 7 (very little/no benefit).

Plainly, the science isn’t settled. It changes all the time.

Take the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Unlike its previous report in 2001, which foresaw a possible rise in sea levels over the next century of around 3 feet, the new report cuts that figure in half, to about 17 inches. Why the revision? “Mainly because of improved information,” the IPCC notes in the fine print. It goes on to note that even its latest estimate involves some guesswork: “Understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood.” The science is getting better, but it’s far from settled.

Or take the discovery just this month that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in the continental United States since record-keeping began in 1880. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies quietly changed its ranking after a Canadian statistician discovered an error in the official calculations. Under the new data, five of the 10 hottest US years on record occurred before 1940; just three were in the past decade.

Climate scientists are still trying to get the basics right. The Aug. 10 issue of Science magazine notes that many researchers are only beginning to factor the planet’s natural -- i.e., not anthropogenic -- climate variations into their calculations. “Until now,” reports Science, “climate forecasters who worry about what greenhouse gases could be doing to climate have ignored what’s happening naturally. . . . In this issue, researchers take their first stab at forecasting climate a decade ahead with current conditions in mind.”

Their first stab, please note, not their last. The science of climate change is still young and unsettled. Years of trial and error are still to come. Al Gore notwithstanding, the debate is hardly over.

Gore Wedding Guests Feast on Endangered Species of Fish

Via Real Debate Wisconsin, another bit of hypocrisy from the elite, affluent but oh-so-inconsistent environmentalists.

ONLY one week after Live Earth, Al Gore’s green credentials slipped while hosting his daughter’s wedding in Beverly Hills.

Gore and his guests at the weekend ceremony dined on Chilean sea bass - arguably one of the world’s most threatened fish species.

Also known as Patagonian toothfish, the species is under pressure from illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing activities in the Southern Ocean, jeopardising the sustainability of remaining stocks.

The species is currently managed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources, the body which introduced a catch and trade documentation scheme as an attempt to tackle illegal poaching of this species.

Working with non-government organisations, the Humane Society International’s focus is now on pursuit of illegal fishing operators who, in the rush to cash in on the highly valued species, plunder stocks with no regard for sustainability.

It has been estimated that more than 50 per cent of toothfish traded is illegally caught, and includes juveniles vital to the ongoing toothfish population.

Of course, the sea bass served at the Gore wedding may have been caught perfectly legally. But that doesn’t change the fact that the more people eat, the greater the demand, and the greater the incentive to over-fish.

Al Gore Caught Using Bogus Lincoln Quote

Via Shack Sounds Off, a bit of information about former Vice President (and now anti-global warming crusader) Al Gore, and how he is less than careful about getting his facts straight.

As reported by the Washington Post:

You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” It’s a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I’d love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

In a chapter entitled “The Politics of Wealth,” Gore argues that the ancient threat to democracy posed by rich people run amok has finally been realized under the man who beat him in the 2000 presidential race. Even Lincoln, Gore says, saw the age of Bush coming in 1864: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

The quote is a favorite of liberal bloggers, which is probably how Gore came across it. And as a description of how many on the left see the country seven years into their Bush nightmare, it’s pretty much perfect.

Too perfect, in fact. If you’re familiar with Lincoln’s distinctive way of expressing himself, you’ll hear the false notes the passage strikes. For one thing, Lincoln just wasn’t the “trembling” kind -- or if he was, he kept his trembling to himself. Words such as “enthroned” and “aggregated” are a bit too fancy for his plain, unclotted prose, and the phrase “money power” suggests a conspiratorial turn of mind that would have been foreign to him. Indeed, these words don’t show up anywhere else in “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln” (which, thanks to Gore’s Internet, are now searchable at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/).

Moreover, the point of the passage is very un-Lincolnian. A corporate lawyer whose long and cunning labor on behalf of the railroads earned him a comfortable income, Lincoln was a vigorous champion of market capitalism, even when it drifted (as it tends to do) toward large concentrations of wealth. Many of his administration’s signal initiatives -- the transcontinental railroad, for example -- amounted to what liberals today would condemn as “corporate welfare.” Lots of speculators got rich under Lincoln, as Gore notes. As Gore does not note, Lincoln seemed not to have minded.

Unless, of course, Gore’s quote from a trembling Abe was evidence of his real thinking.

It isn’t, though. It’s a fake.

But maybe this is such a tough historical call that we can’t really expect Gore to get it straight, right?

No, it’s been debunked on Snopes.com (the first place any savvy person will turn to check out anything found on the Internet) since at least July, 2002.

To ask the obvious question: if we can’t trust Gore to get easily checked historical facts right, how reliable is he on a technical issue like global warming?

The answer: even some liberal global warming believers like Gregg Easterbrook have taken Gore to task for slipshod handing of the facts.

Even more questionable, however, is Gore’s use of anti-business demagoguery.

The Eco-Pretensions of the Rich

Via Shack Sounds Off, an article by Charles Krauthammer in Time Magazine (which does tolerate some dissent from its insipid liberal bias) on the Hollywood environmentalists.

Goldman Sachs has been one of the most aggressive firms on Wall Street about taking action on climate change; the company sends its bankers home at night in hybrid limousines.

--The New York Times, Feb. 25

Written without a hint of irony--if only your neighborhood dry cleaner sent his employees home by hybrid limousine--this front-page dispatch captured perfectly the eco-pretensions of the rich and the stupefying gullibility with which they are received.

Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore global-warming pitch at the Academy Awards? Before they spoke, the screen at the back of the stage flashed not-so-subliminal messages about how to save the planet. My personal favorite was “Ride mass transit.” This to a conclave of Hollywood plutocrats who have not seen the inside of a subway since the moon landing and for whom mass transit means a stretch limo seating no fewer than 10.

Leo and Al then portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening’s “carbon footprint” by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a “carbon broker,” who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

What is wrong with this scam? First, purchasing carbon credits is an incentive to burn even more fossil fuels, since now it is done under the illusion that it’s really cost-free to the atmosphere.

Second, it is a way for the rich to export the real costs and sacrifices of pollution control to the poorer segments of humanity in the Third World. (Apparently, Hollywood’s plan is to make up for that by adopting every last one of their children.) For example, GreenSeat, a Dutch carbon-trading outfit, buys offsets from a foundation that plants trees in Uganda’s Mount Elgon National Park to soak up the carbon emissions of its rich Western patrons. Small problem: expanding the park encroaches on land traditionally used by local farmers. As a result, reports the New York Times, “villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, and their livestock has been confiscated by armed park rangers.” All this so that swimming pools can be heated and Maseratis driven with a clear conscience in the fattest parts of the world.

If Gore really wants to save the planet, he can try this: Turn off the lights. Ditch the heated pool. Ride the subway. And spare us the carbon-trading piety.

We differ just a bit from Krauthammer on this. Favoring free markets, we see nothing wrong with buying and selling the right to pollute. Not only are the affluent polluters better off, the people who produce those “pollution rights” are better off too -- unless some form of thuggery like that of the Mount Elgon park rangers is involved.

But then, how can people who are not free marketeers endorse such a scheme? Are they big government liberals (or even socialists) when it’s convenient to be, but then turn free marketeers when their lavish lifestyle requires it?

So the hypocrisy charge sticks.

Add to that the fact that we are not convinced that global warming has a human cause, nor that the effects are particularly dire.

Then there is the practical reality, which Krauthammer explains.

The other form of carbon trading is to get Third World companies to cut their emissions to offset Western pollution. The reason this doesn’t work--and why the carbon racket is a farce--is that you need a cap for cap-and-trade to work. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S. were capped, and the trading system succeeded in reducing acid rain by half. But even the Kyoto treaty doesn’t put any cap on greenhouse gases in China and India, where billions of these carbon credits are traded. Sure, you can pretend you’re offsetting Western greenhouse pollution by supposedly cleaning up a dirty coal plant in China. But China is adding a new coal plant every week. You could build a particularly dirty “uncapped” power plant, then sell hundreds of millions in carbon credits to reduce it to a normal rate of pollution. The result? The polluter gets very rich. The planet continues to cook. And the Gores of the world can feel virtuous as they burn up the local power grid.

Thus the Hollywood crowd is not morally serious and not intellectually serious.

But we knew that already, didn’t we?

Very Inconvenient Indeed

Reporters Call Al Gore “Mr. President”

How does one interpret this?

Al Gore has been out of politics for nearly eight years, but you wouldn’t have known it backstage at the Oscars.

Some journalists addressed him as Mr. President, although Gore lost the closely contested 2000 election to President Bush. Others called him Mr. Vice President.

Gore, whose film “An Inconvenient Truth” captured the Oscar for documentary, pretended at one point during the awards show to be announcing his candidacy for president, but backstage he sang a different tune.

“I do not have plans to become a candidate for office again,” the former vice president told reporters.

Another source says:

Hands shot up all over for Al Gore when he came backstage. What did the international press want to know? Maybe something about how it was to star in an Oscar-winning film? Or how they can help stop global warming? Or how can they fix the wipers on their Priuses? Um, no. Two questioners addressed him as “Mr. President,” and it continued from there, with journalists imploring him to take on Clinton, Obama, and Edwards. For the record, Gore said: “I do not have plans to become a candidate for office again.” Pretty clear in any language.

So do we have a Freudian slip? A slap at the 2000 election process, that gave the presidency to Bush in spite of the fact that Gore won the popular vote? An encouragement to run in 2008?

Al Gore: Mansion Consumes 20 Times More Energy Than Average House

From the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, via Hot Air, how global warming guru Al Gore is an energy glutton.

Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

Of course, just because one is a hypocrite does not mean one is wrong on a particular issue.

If we find that a conservative Christian minister is engaged in an adulterous affair, that doesn’t make adultery a good idea.

But on issues like this, unsophisticated people tend to look for the “moral” side, and assume that, since one side is more “moral” than the other, it must be right.

Thus a little cynicism is a good logical tonic. Once you decide that no group is particularly moral, you can examine an issue on its merits.

And while we are at it, consider John Edward’s six million dollar mansion.

Al, Don’t You Think You Should Lay Low For a While?

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More Global Warming Fascism

We’ve already blogged about the increasingly hysterical tone of those who believe that global warming is the result of human activity, and their intolerance of alternative views.

There is still more evidence on this point. First, Al Gore attacks those who disagree with him.

MADRID , SPAIN (CNN) -- Former Vice President Al Gore said in an interview on Tuesday the Bush administration is now paying scientists to dispute global warming since the administration can no longer argue against it.

During an interview with CNN affiliate Cuatro in Madrid, Gore said, “they’ve lost the argument and they don’t want to stop dumping all this pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere. The only thing they have left is cash and now they’re offering cash for so-called skeptics who will try to confuse people about what the science really say. But it’s unethical because now the time has come when we have to act.”

Gore was the Democratic nominee against Bush in the 2004 presidential election. His film, An Inconvenient Truth, is up for the best documentary Oscar.

But global warming skeptics are not only being derided, they are being fired from their positions.

In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm. He does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change.

Taylor also holds a unique title: State Climatologist.

Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet on global warming saying humans are “very likely” the cause.

“Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations,” Taylor asserts.

His opinions conflict not only with many other scientists, but with the state of Oregon’s policies.

In other words, scientists whose views conflict with the government’s policies need to be shut up and silenced.

Politics determines science.

Note that Taylor would not lose his job as a professor. Only the title State Climatologist.

But people trying to make rational policy -- rather than wage a moralistic crusade -- want to hear competing opinions, and welcome challenges to the conventional wisdom.