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Posts Tagged ‘gore’

A basic question of judgment

Posted by Richard on June 25, 2011

Walter Russell Meade's latest is entitled The Failure of Al Gore: Part One. Part One? Really? This calm, measured essay utterly destroys any credibility the Goracle had and leaves him a wretched, quivering mass of inconsequential protoplasm, something from which one quickly looks away. A Part Two strikes me as completely unnecessary. Although I look forward to it with pleasure; I can be somewhat mean-spirited at times, and besides, Meade's wordsmithing is simply a delight.

By all means, read the whole thing. Here's just a smidgeon to whet your appetite: 

A fawning establishment press spares the former vice president the vitriol and schadenfreude it pours over the preachers and priests whose personal conduct compromised the core tenets of their mission; Gore is not mocked as others have been.  This gentle treatment hurts both Gore and the greens; he does not know just how disabling, how crippling the gap between conduct and message truly is.  The greens do not know that his presence as the visible head of the movement helps ensure its political failure.

Consider how Gore looks to the skeptics.  The peril is imminent, he says.  It is desperate.  The hands of the clock point to twelve.  The seas rise, the coral dies, the fires burn and the great droughts have already begun.  The hounds of Hell have slipped the huntsman’s leash and even now they rush upon us, mouths agape and fangs afoam.

But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world.  He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry.  A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation.  Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption.  This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.

Marvelous.

(HT: Instapundit)

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Everything is a symptom of global warming

Posted by Richard on February 3, 2011

The blogosphere is abuzz about Al Gore's claim that recent heavy snowstorms are a symptom of global warming. But this is nothing new. Gore made the same claim in a New York Times op-ed last February.

This time, Gore quoted noted scientist Clarence Paige: 

Last week on his show Bill O’Reilly asked, “Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?” and then said he had a call into me. I appreciate the question.

As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming:

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”

Eleven years ago, scientists at East Anglia's Hadley CRU (yes, the epicenter of ClimateGate) warned that global warming would make snowfalls a thing of the past

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

… According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

To the true believers in anthropogenic global warming, everything fits their theory: droughts or floods; warm, dry winters or cold, snowy ones; more hurricanes or fewer. As Paige put it, "all sorts of havoc" are consistent with global warming. Nothing that happens can ever cast doubt on their "settled science." Nothing can serve as evidence against their claims.

A claim that isn't falsifiable isn't science. It's religion.

UPDATE: More evidence of global warming. Instapundit wondered if it's time to "Party like it’s 1046?"

Last Thursday, Denver hit 70°. Since then, we've had a record low high of -1°, followed by a low of -17° and wind chills of -25° to -40°. Those cheap homes in Phoenix are starting to look more appealing.

Although, if another Little Ice Age is about to begin (and some people, including reputable scientists, think it is), Tucson might be a better bet. Or, better yet, Costa Rica or Belize. Maybe I should look into Rosetta Stone and learn some Español. 

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Climategate: the Jon Stewart episode

Posted by Richard on December 5, 2009

I understand that a growing number of young people rely on comedy news like The Daily Show to keep them up on current events. That's generally a bit troubling. But in the case of Climategate, it may be good news. Because while all the broadcast networks are basically ignoring the story, Jon Stewart is doing a terrific job of covering it. Enjoy:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Scientists Hide Global Warming Data
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

 HT: Black & Right

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Media fact-checking priorities

Posted by Richard on November 21, 2009

It's a tough time in the news business, with lots of layoffs and red ink. So it's especially important for an organization like the Associated Press, which is cutting 10% of its staff, to allocate its limited investigative and reporting resources carefully, based on well-chosen priorities. James Taranto provided an excellent example:

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
   • ObamaCare bills: 2
   • Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:
   • ObamaCare bills: 4,064
   • Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
   • ObamaCare bill: 2,032
   • Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.

I suppose that kind of prioritization of journalistic resources is why the evening news, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, etc., haven't dug into the many examples of bogus math and fiscal sleight-of-hand in the ObamaCare bills, like delaying most of the expenditures until 2013 (after the election) so that the CBO's 10-year projection includes only seven years' worth of costs. And they've been too busy with the Palin investigations to notice that both the House and Senate bills contain the regulatory framework that will eventually transform government panels' suggested standards of care, like those much-criticized mammogram and Pap smear recommendations, into the tools for rationing health care

I suppose it's also why you'll have a hard time finding any in-depth coverage of the bogus accounting and reporting of the "stimulus" bill's spending and job creation

This is nothing new. During the campaign last fall, the big media organizations sent scores of reporters to scour Alaska in search of dirt on Gov. Palin. But hardly anyone had time to investigate Obama's relationships with Tony Rezko, the Daley brothers, ACORN, Rod Blagojevich, Emil Jones, and other elements of the Chicago machine (well, to be fair, I think one reporter each from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times and a couple of semi-pros from Newsmax doggedly dug into these things). 

But some journalists still have the courage to hammer interviewees with challenging, aggressive, well-researched, adversarial questions — at least when the interviewee is a 17-year-old Sarah Palin fan. Speaking Truth to Teenager. (By all means, take Finkelstein's advice and read the blog entry by interviewee Jackie Seals. Fascinating.)

Maybe the courageous Norah O'Donnell's next assignment will be to confront supporters of ObamaCare with tough questions like, "Do you realize that if this passes, you could be sent to jail for not buying an approved health care plan?" And then she'll go to some "Save the Planet" rally and challenge a Gore supporter with, "Are you aware that the Earth's core is 4000°, not a million degrees as Mr. Gore has claimed, and that many of his other claims are equally outlandish and unsubstantiated?"

Somehow, I doubt it. And I'm not holding my breath waiting for 60 Minutes reporters to ambush the perpetrators of the latest climate fraud, either.

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Stossel on global warming

Posted by Richard on October 31, 2007

ABC's 20/20 recently featured another great segment by John Stossel. This time, Stossel had some questions about global warming and Al Gore's claim that "the debate's over." In a related column available at The Atlasphere, Stossel noted:

If you must declare a debate over, then maybe it’s not. And if you have to gussy up your agenda as “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level,” then it deserves some skeptical examination.

Stossel pointed out that Gore's film overstates the predicted sea level rise by an order of magnitude or more, that polar bear populations aren't threatened, as Gore claims, but stable or increasing, and that Gore's dramatic picture of an historic correlation between CO2 levels and temperature concealed the fact that warming always came before a rise in CO2 levels. He had other questions, too:

If it’s all man’s fault, why did the Arctic go through a warm period early last century? Why did Greenland’s temperatures rise 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they are rising now?

The media rarely ask such questions.

Stossel wanted to ask Gore these and other questions, but the Goracle refused.  

Stossel also spoke with some of the scientists who've been marginalized by Gore and his acolytes, ignored by the press, and in some cases even threatened. They made it clear that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) isn't the impartial body of scientists that it's portrayed to be by the media. Members were carefully selected by the governments involved, and many aren't even scientists, they're activists.

If you've looked into this issue as I have, none of this is news to you. But Stossel does a fine job of briefly and clearly raising these issues in a way that may cause open-minded viewers to question some of the conventional wisdom. The 8-minute video is well worth watching and sharing with your friends and family: 

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The Goracle’s prize

Posted by Richard on October 15, 2007

My thoughts about Al Gore getting the Nobel Peace Prize? Well, I wasn't surprised. I wondered idly which was more inappropriate, Arafat getting the Peace Prize or Gore. For all his faults, Al Gore is not a murderous, corrupt, and depraved monster. On the other hand, Arafat was at least associated with something called a peace process (albeit perversely).

I suppose it comes down to this: awarding the Peace Prize to Arafat was an outrage; awarding it to Gore is merely a non sequitur.  

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Convenient falsehoods

Posted by Richard on October 11, 2007

A British judge identified 11 specific ways in which Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is inaccurate or misleading and ruled that the government (which wants the film shown in every school in the country) can distribute the film only if it complies with certain restrictions (emphasis added):

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The High Court decision was only a partial victory for truck driver and New Party member Stewart Dimmock, who sued to have the film banned from schools completely as "irremediable" propaganda, but Justice Burton's ruling left no doubt that it was a victory (emphasis added):

Awarding Mr Dimmock two thirds of his estimated legal costs of more than £200,000 against the government, the judge said: "I conclude that the claimant substantially won this case by virtue of my finding that, but for the new guidance note, the film would have been distributed in breach of sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Education Act."

These sections ban the political indoctrination of schoolchildren and require political views to be presented in a balanced way.

Of course, that didn't keep two of Britain's most prestigious news organizations from putting a somewhat different spin on it. Here are a couple of the results from a Google News search (emphasis added):

Guardian Unlimited, UK – 5 hours ago
A parent has failed in his legal action to prevent Al Gore's climate-change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, being shown in schools in England.
Judge backs Gore film in schools
BBC News, UK – 6 hours ago
Secondary schools in England are free to show the climate change film by former US Vice-President Al Gore, a High Court judge has confirmed.

If you follow the link to the BBC story, you'll see that they've subsequently retitled it to the more neutral, but nonsensical "Judge rules on Gore schools film" — what's a "Gore schools film"? The Guardian story is the source of the quote saying Dimmock "substantially won," but you don't learn that Dimmock hasn't really "failed" until you're 13 paragraphs in. 

At least British mainstream media reported the story. The only major U.S. outlet to mention it, according to Google News, was Fox News. The New York Times mentioned it, but only in their "notes on the news" blog, The Lede

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More climate change chicanery

Posted by Richard on October 3, 2007

Let's say you're writing a children's book about global warming and you want to scare them with your good friend Al Gore's impending doom scenario. A graph showing that increased CO2 levels caused global temperature increases would help, wouldn't it? But what do you do if the graph shows exactly the opposite — that for the past 650,000 years, increases in temperature have always preceded increases in CO2 levels? Well, you could just mislabel the graph and misrepresent the data:

Sept. 1 saw the release of "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," co-authored by Al Gore acolyte and "Inconvenient Truth" co-producer Laurie David and former advertising copywriter and environmental activist Cambria Gordon.

On page 18 of the David-Gordon book, the authors present a graph of the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures for the last 650,000 years.

The graph is accompanied by text that reads, "The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the lower the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph on the left …

"What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising carbon dioxide to rising temperature, scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse gas pollution and global warming."

"What really makes [the David-Gordon] graph 'amazing' is that it's dead wrong," says a new report from the Science and Public Policy Institute.

"In order to contrive a visual representation for their false claim that carbon dioxide controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and carbon dioxide graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature," says the SPPI report.

"The actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual carbon dioxide curve. That is, the authors mislabeled the blue curve as temperature and the red curve as carbon dioxide concentration."

The publisher, Scholastic, acknowledged the "error" and agreed to correct the graph — but only the graph, not the accompanying text. Because correcting the text would destroy the whole premise that our CO2 emissions are driving global warming, and would thus undermine their agenda. So they'll leave the youngsters bewildered by a graph that doesn't seem to match the words accompanying it (encouraging them to conclude, erroneously, that the corrected graph is actually mislabeled). 

Fortunately, as Steve Milloy noted in the above story, there's another book about climate change for children, The Sky's Not Falling! Why It's OK to Chill About Global Warming, that could help calm kids who are increasingly fearful about the future. Unfortunately, it's written by an academic, not by the wife of a big-shot Hollywood producer and a former ad writer and "activist." And it's not going to be promoted to a fare-thee-well by its publisher, the media, and the education establishment, like the David-Gordon book. 

So — like Michael Mann's bogus "hockey stick" graph, which manipulated out of existence the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in order to persuade people that 20th-century warming was unprecedented — the false claim that atmospheric CO2 increases precede global warming will no doubt remain something that "everybody knows" among the cognoscenti.

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Cashing in on carbon credit scam

Posted by Richard on March 15, 2007

It's long been obvious to me that the environmental fear-mongers are chiefly interested in power — their solution to every perceived problem, whether it's overpopulation, pollution, cooling, warming, or whatever, is always less freedom and more government compulsion. And it's been equally clear that many of them are hypocrites, lecturing us for not being green enough while they live in humongous mansions and jet to their second and third homes in their private Gulfstreams.

It turns out that some of them are also greedy money-grubbers using climate-change hysteria to enrich themselves (emphasis added):

The two cherub like choirboys singing loudest in the Holier Than Thou Global Warming Cathedral are Maurice Strong and Al Gore.

This duo has done more than anyone else to advance the alarmism of man-made global warming.

With little media monitoring, both Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as "the world's first and North America's only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil."

Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, "an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C." of which he is both chairman and founding partner.

There's a fine compendium of information about Gore, Knight, and the GIM carbon credit scam at The Global Warming Hoax. Interest in Gore's carbon credit firm grew after the Tennessee Center for Policy Research discovered that Gore's 10,000-square-foot mansion near Nashville used $30,000 worth of electricity and natural gas in 2006. Here's a photoshop picture of the mansion (from FreakingNews.com; used with permission):

Al Gore's mansion, per FreakingNews.com

This isn't the first time Gore and Strong have cashed in on the environment. Back when Gore was Veep, he praised and promoted Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI), which supposedly was developing innovative recycling technology. MMTI got over $30 million in DOE grants, and its stock soared to $35. The company was largely owned and run by Maurice Strong and several Gore associates. Just before news that the technology didn't exist and that the DOE was cutting off funding, Strong and his pals cashed out to the tune of $15 million.

Strong is a piece of work. A wealthy Canadian businessman, U.N. diplomat, and father of the Kyoto Protocol, he was lined up to become U.N. Secretary General before being implicated in the Oil for Food scandal. In 2002, Canadian papers carried a book excerpt profiling Strong and his desire to change the world:

He told Maclean's magazine in 1976 that he was "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology." He warns that if we don't heed his environmentalist warnings, the Earth will collapse into chaos.

Strong has always courted power – but not through any shabby election campaign. He was a Liberal candidate in the 1979 federal election, but pulled out a month before the vote.

How could a mere MP wield the kind of international control he had tasted in Stockholm? Journalist Elaine Dewar, who interviewed Strong, described why he loved the UN.

"He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda," wrote Dewar.

"He told me he had more unfettered power than a cabinet minister in Ottawa. He was right: He didn't have to run for re-election, yet he could profoundly affect lives."

Strong prefers power extracted from democracies, and kept from unenlightened voters. Most power-crazed men would stop at calling for a one world Earth Charter to replace the U.S. Constitution, or the UN Charter.

But in an interview with his own Earth Charter Commission, Strong said "the real goal of the Earth Charter is it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments. It will become a symbol of the aspirations and commitments of people everywhere." Sounds like Maurice was hanging out at his spirit ranch without his sunhat on.

In 1990, Strong told a reporter a fantasy scenario for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland – where 1,000 diplomats, CEOs and politicians gather "to address global issues."

Strong, naturally, is on the board of the World Economic Forum. "What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?…

In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?"

Strong may still want to bring down the rich Western industrial democracies. He and George Soros, with whom he's worked on both political goals and business ventures, are pouring money into the Chinese automobile industry, with the goal of flooding the U.S. market with cheap Chinese cars. Strong lives in China these days, and he wants to help China overtake the U.S. economically and become the world's dominant superpower. Never mind what that does to China's "carbon footprint." 

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Ice age

Posted by Richard on February 16, 2007

They’re having fun at Al Gore’s expense over at NewsMax.com:

Gore claims that global warming is an immediate problem facing the United States and the world, and places like New York and Chicago could feel like Caribbean haunts.

If there is any doubt that God has a sense of humor, it has to be dispelled by a headline in Wednesday’s Drudge Report: "House hearing on ‘warming of the planet’ canceled after ice storm."

He followed up with this: "Save it for a sunny day: Maryville Univ. in St. Louis area canceling screening of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ because of a snowstorm."

Author Phil Brennan went on to critique Gore’s climate-change thesis at length. He brought up some things I knew and some that were new to me. For instance, I knew that the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, and that we’re about due for another. But I didn’t know about the correlation between ice ages and CO2 levels:

As for that dreaded greenhouse gas, CO2, atmospheric levels of which now exceed 400 parts per million (ppm), it is important to note that paleological records show that every time CO2 levels have exceeded 300 ppm there has been an ice age. Every time — without exception.

I also didn’t know that the current interglacial warm period might end quite suddenly:

In 1979, Genevieve Woillard, a pollen specialist in France, concluded from detailed studies that the shift from a warm, interglacial climate to ice age conditions at the beginning of the last ice age, some 100,000 years ago, took "less than 20 years."  …


If the unchallenged results of the work of Woillard and others who studied past ice ages are any indication of the pace of glaciation, once it starts, the transition period is a mere 20 years or so. And we may be well into that 20-year period now. Woillard estimated that the period before that final 20 years — when the earth began gearing up for an end to the interglacial period — could be as long as 150 years and as short as 75 years.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that correlation does not imply causation, and past performance does not guarantee future results. But what if we’re about to freeze, not bake or drown? Robert Felix, author of Not by Fire but by Ice, thinks so, and he’s got a ton of links to supporting evidence and studies. I’ve barely begun to poke around, but the information about dropping sea levels alone is fascinating. Check it out.
 

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