The Failure Of Al Gore: Part One.
It must be as perplexing to his many admirers as it is frustrating to himself that a man of Vice President Gore’s many talents, great skills and strong beliefs is one of the most consistent losers in American politics. . . . Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch. Few celebrity cause leaders have had more or better publicity than Gore has had for his climate advocacy. Hailed by the world press, lionized by the entertainment community and the Global Assemblage of the Great and the Good as incarnated in the Nobel Peace Prize committee, he has nevertheless seen the movement he led flounder from one inglorious defeat to the next. The most recent, failed global climate meeting passed almost unnoticed last week in Bonn; the world has turned its eyes away from the expiring anguish of the Copenhagen agenda.
The state of the global green movement is shambolic. The Kyoto Protocol is withering on the vine; it will almost certainly die with no successor in place. There is no chance of cap and trade legislation in the US under Obama, and even the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon dioxide is under threat. Brazil is debating a forestry law that critics charge will open the floodgates to a new round of deforestation in the Amazon. China is taking the green lobby head on, suspending a multibillion dollar Airbus order to protest EU carbon cutting plans.
It is hard to think of any recent failure in international politics this comprehensive, this swift, this humiliating. Two years ago almost every head of state in the world was engaged with Al Gore’s issue; today the abolition of nuclear weapons looks like a more hopeful cause than the drafting of an effective international treaty that will curb carbon emissions even a little bit.
Read the whole thing. Gore’s fame was a bubble, a hothouse flower that could not survive the harsh realities of the post-Bush era, where many enthusiasms are failing for insufficiency of other people’s money.
Also, there’s the hypocrisy:
If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.
It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.
You are asking billions of people, the overwhelming majority of whom lack many of the basic life amenities you take for granted, people who can’t afford Whole Foods environmentalism, to slash their meager living standards. You may well be right, and those changes may be necessary — the more shame on you that with your superior insight and knowledge you refuse to live a modest life. There’s a gospel hymn some people in Tennessee still sing that makes the point: “You can’t be a beacon if your light don’t shine.” . . . 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.
What this tells the skeptics is that Vice President Gore doesn’t really believe the gospel he proclaims. That profits from his environmental advocacy enable his affluent lifestyle only deepens their skepticism of the messenger and therefore of the message
Indeed.
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AGW is one case where we should shoot the messenger AND the message!
Wow. What a deserved excoriation. A complete sandblasting basically down to the bone.
I agree with the previous poster. Brilliant.
Hey VP Gore….is your head out of the sand long enough to face the truth??
I dare you to read it and I DOUBLE DARE you to trump the argument.
You can’t.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Actually, those who have the Minus Midas do not leave what they touch dull and leaden. What they touch turns brown and stinky.
Lovecraft and “To Serve Man” in one thread – wow! How would Lovecraft describe Al Gore? Something like “One of the old gods cackling madly in the stygian darkness of a warped and alien alternate reality while his mutated followers cavort around campfires in tattered plaids and Birkenstocks. The eldritch wailings of an ancient bearded accordion player drive them to ecstatic warblings amongst the gibbering cacophany of nature gone insane.” Now where is that map of Arkham? Hurry, we must shut the pulsing portal before he and his writing tentacles can come through!
The CAGW fraud needed a front man, a front of house barker, a recognized face. From the start Gore was a product, similar to a synthetic boy band created to meet a perceived market need. Gore was a known face and had high contacts in the circles of power, one of the elite. He brought a fake smile and he was a former VP so he knew the right people and being a politician he knew how to talk and talk and talk and talk, boy did this dude know how to talk, on and on and on. He was in fact the perfect candidate, a self obsessed vain puffed up politician.
This front man had all the advantages, he could call on instant MSM coverage, he had access to all the bigwigs for the essential photo ops. A ready to go, pre packaged front man and the CAGW fraudsters thought they had a winner at first. They lined up fake awards, got him to front a lavishly funded propaganda film and marketed that film like a Hollywood blockbuster. It all seemed to be going so well didnt it, but what went wrong? Great packaging but no actual product inside.
Everything Al Gore claimed was a pack of rancid lies, instead of being economical with the truth and telling small lies and exaggerations and hedging his bets he went for the giant lies, the whoppers, he went so over over the top with his lies and gross scaremongering exaggerations that it embarrassed even the high priests of the CAGW cult. Climate scientists could not hope to verify or support his gross lies but neither could they afford to contradict their spokesperson, now that was a doozy of a problem!
A disconnect between the fairground barker and the freaks in the tent became apparent, the barker promised the marks too much, even the thickest country bumpkin demands that the freak show has a bearded lady, the wolf man and the sheep with two heads. But Mr Gore in front of his freak show tent promised the bumpkins the wonders of the world were hidden in his tent when in fact his tent was empty. The fairground barker can promise the marks the earth but at some point even the thickest inbred hill billy good ole boy will want to see whats behind the tent flaps. Our Texan friends would say ‘he is all hat and no oil’ we Limeys would say ‘he is all mouth and no trousers or ‘all fur coat and no knickers’. Bye Bye Mr Gore.
OT
Folks, I am not a scientist. Therefore, when I read a word I don’t know, I look it up. I just spent some time to look up “interence” then “wave interence”. I’ve come to the conclusion the poster meant “wave interference”, only because that makes sense in the context. Please, can you give me (and maybe others) a break and do a quick proof before posting? It’s hard enough for me to keep up without typos 🙂 Thanks in advance.
All these references to Lovecraft brought this little beauty to mind. Just substitute the next IPCC report…
May I endorse Mr. Bastardi’s comments:
One more “minor” item. GORE IS WRONG ON THE PERIL TO THE PLANET FROM WARMING… both by the fact its not caused by AGW and that cooling is by far the worse, and more likely, of the two options. Hypocrisy aside, what he believes is wrong.
100% on point!!
The new fall back justificatory defense for warmists when on the ground long trend climate facts make plain that their espoused views on the mechanisms of climate are worse than idiotic is http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090 http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory
Additionally http://andyadkins.livejournal.com/266446.html (AGW is Falsified): Climate Change is a titular semantic expropriation of the realities of Galactic phenomenon to advance anti-competitive & ideological opportunisms that permit inflation based marketplace manipulations for the benefit of the few. It is befallen by the absence of logic wherein honest dialogue dictates that if green technology is desired then an energy policy that frees economic factors from reliance upon deficit spending is necessary. Furthermore, it never considers that Greenhouse Gases accumulate when the atmosphere contracts.
If manmade activities were contributing to the Global Warming engram then the atmosphere would be expanding with warming and the gases could not become more concentrated. These gases are accumulating as a result of changes to the magnetic field relations between earth & sun. The weakening of the Sun’s surface level magnetism corresponds with strengthening planetary magnetic fields.
For earth, one marker of the changing magnetic relationship between it & the sun is the decrease in the extent of the ionosphere. Compaction of the ionosphere is indicated by greater magnetosphere density & strength. Magnetosphere density & strength governs the potential for upper tropospheric response amplitude through its relationship with Earth’s magnetic core. Since the troposphere is the primary container for atmospheric gases, it is unscientific to make assertions about temperature impacts of GHGs without considering its determinants.
Here I would like to thank Joe Bastardi for including in his columns & videos links to graphs of the decline of atmospheric temps between 2,000& 25,000 ft on the most recent 10 year scale. This decline can only occur if the rate at which Earth is releasing infrared radiation is increasing. These changes to Earth’s Radiative Budget Equation entail that adiabatic lapse rates (ALR) are subjected to conditions of inconstance regulating the directionality & flow rate of convective currents.
We view the tectonics exercised by the differentiated impacts of the changes to the energy management of the sun as earthquakes & volcanic eruptions. These events occur in response to changes to magnetic field outputs by the gravitodynamic inputs determining solar fusion rates. They are another aspect reinforcing the increase in potency of ERBE through the magnetic field relations of earth & sun because tectonic events release aerosols which strengthen the relationship of attracted polarity between the inner cores of earth & the increasingly ionized magnetosphere.
Solar warming conditions,conversely, produce an expansion of the Ionosphere by dispersing the ionized strength of earth’s magnetic field. The weakening of Earth’s magnetic field promotes constancy for ALR by reducing impacts from solar dynamics upon directionality & flow rates for convective currents thereby subjecting them to increasing effects from ground level conditions (lost mechanisms for heat escape)
Noteworthy supplement http://bigthink.com/ideas/39014#comments
GEORGE B on June 25, 2011, 1:33 AM
There is actually very little greenhouse heating on Venus. The surface is not warmed by sunlight. Most of the sunlight is reflected from sulfuric acid clouds well above most of the CO2.
The temperature is due to adiabatic heating. The lapse rate of Venus’ atmosphere is pretty close to Earth’s.
Venus has a lot more atmosphere than Earth does. If the surface pressure on Earth were the same as that of the surface of Venus, we would have pretty close to the same temperature as Venus. It is actually a “conventional wisdom” myth that Venus’ surface temperature is due to CO2.
Most of Earth’s atmosphere is below 50km altitude. You have to get to 50km on Venus just to get to the same atmospheric pressure as Earth. At 52.5km to 54km altitude the temperature is around 25C.
Venus’ atmosphere extends out to 250km, Earth’s extends out to less than half that. If we were to pump as much gas into Earth’s atmosphere as Venus has, even with Earth’s ratio of gases, the surface temperature of Earth would be pretty close to the temperature of Venus, even though we are farther from the sun and have much less CO2. The reason is the adiabatic heating caused by the atmospheric density.
rbateman says
“Hidden beneath the glowing Green paint lies another purpose, that of a harvest plan.
It’s in a cookbook entitled “To Serve Man”.”
* * *
It’s a cookbook, it’s a cookbook!!
Well they do say that Global Warming is the new religious faith.
And what is happening is similar to the times of the Inquisitions.
And we all know how well that worked out.
Joe Bastardi says:
June 25, 2011 at 8:21 pm
One more “minor” item. GORE IS WRONG ON THE PERIL TO THE PLANET FROM WARMING… both by the fact its not caused by AGW and that cooling is by far the worse, and more likely, of the two options. Hypocrisy aside, what he believes is wrong.
——-
Respectfully Joe, we don’t know this as of this moment. I know is a bit of a past time for skeptics to bash Gore, Hanson, Mann, Trenberth, etc. but we can’t as of today definitely say the basic AGW theory and potential threats to current ecosystems from AGW is wrong. Your certainty is misplaced as the level of uncertainty is still needing much more delineation.
Claiming that the earth is millions of degrees inside hasn’t helped him, either.
A well-written essay by Walter Russell Mead. Few historians or politicians dare speak the truth like Mead does. Al Gore is a poser, period. [snip] A pretender. And he knows it. Unlike Mead, however, I have always doubted his sincerity, precisely because of the lifestyle that Mead rightly excoriates in the context of the “crisis” Gore seems to think we are all in.
The clincher for me, however, came all too early in the essay, a point I’ve reminded a number of Gore syncophants about in the past: “Tennessee voted for Bush; Florida or no Florida Gore would have gone to the White House if those who knew him longest and best had rallied to his support.” Those who knew him longest and best repudiated him. What does THAT tell you? That they had known the truth, the essence of the man, long before the rest of us did. And the truth set them free.
[Please be careful what you write, Anthony is liable for what is posted here ~jove, Mod]
“we can’t as of today definitely say the basic AGW theory and potential threats to current ecosystems from AGW is wrong”
Since pretty much every testable prediction ever made by the Warmistas has proven a dismal failure, we can quite clearly say that it’s a load of garbage.
And that is why people like Gore are increasingly ignored. You can only scream that the world is on the bring of disaster for a few years before everyone notices that the predictions never come true and writes them off as little better than the guy walking down the street with a sandwich board saying ‘The End Of The World Is Nigh’.
In fact, that guy is clearly smarter because he doesn’t ever make a testable prediction. The Warmistas seem to have figured this out and started predicting disaster in 2100 rather than disaster in 2010, but they’ve already destroyed any credibility they ever had so the technique doesn’t work.
Before Copenhagen the Warming Industry was telling us it was the last chance to save the planet. Well, we did nothing, so it’s too late to save the planet, so why should we do anything now?
I don’t like the essay too much. It’s all emotional and bends the reality in its way. It’s still too soon for that kind of expression and even if it wasn’t I think it’s wrong.
We’ve had enough emotions. What we need is science.
R. Gates says (June 25, 2011 at 11:07 pm): “…but we can’t as of today definitely say the basic AGW theory and potential threats to current ecosystems from AGW is wrong.”
True, technically. But we have no/zero/nada evidence that the CAGW hypothesis is correct (no, untested computer fantasies aren’t evidence) and some evidence that it is incorrect (e.g. the predicted but missing tropical tropospheric “hot spot”). We do know that vigorous efforts to protect ourselves from the “not definitely disproven” bogeyman interfere with the economic growth that saves us from the definitely proven bogeymen of poverty, disease, ignorance, hunger, natural disasters, etc.
Brilliant and as we Aussies Say “Spot On”!
Re alan says:
June 25, 2011 at 8:37 pm
AGW is one case where we should shoot the messenger AND the message!
And marvel that they got both sides of Hanlon’s Razor – a cocked up conspiracy!
Our mate Al is a WATERMELON green on he outside and RED in the middle.Cheers
Al Gore knows what it is like to turn left into a dead end already.
http://youtu.be/mqe8d_LXPwc
You would think he could learn from it.
A word on pristine wildernesses “Brazil is debating a forestry law that critics charge will open the floodgates to a new round of deforestation in the Amazon”
1/3. A look at how the Serengeti wilderness in Africa has been shaped over time by mankind.
2/3. How Yellowstone’s Indian tribes were displaced to create this great American wilderness
3/3.A look at how new evidence of ancient man’s influence shows that the Amazon rainforest, the epitome of a last wilderness under threat, may not be as natural as we believe.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011wd41
Please God save us from those rabid environmentalists.
Shut down the EPA.
Good Post: send a copy to Gore et al.
RGates:
You can keep kidding yerself if you want, but there’s no CAGW coming from our CO2 emissions. Solar irradiance, basic geography and water vapour drive Earth’s weather, and weather averaged = climate. If AGW is significant enough to compete for attention with plate tectonics, solar cycles and orbital fluctuations – not to mention the known natural hazards we face, we can adapt with time to spare.
Surely the point is that Mr Gore was at least partly responsible for helping to get the CAGW the high profile it currently has – through “An Inconvenient Truth” – and it’s always revealing when someone says: “Do what I say, (not what I do)”. But smart though I’m sure Mr Gore is, I doubt he was the driver: it’s sinister how the whole train wreck got rolling so fast, and for so long. Someone, or something, was driving and that scares me – a great deal. Blogs like this, and the general public’s unerring ability to side with commonsense gives me some hope we’ll see it through to get a better world on the other side – but at great cost – especially to the public’s view of Science.
Policyguy says:
June 25, 2011 at 10:04 pm
May I endorse Mr. Bastardi’s comments:
One more “minor” item. GORE IS WRONG ON THE PERIL TO THE PLANET FROM WARMING… both by the fact its not caused by AGW and that cooling is by far the worse, and more likely, of the two options. Hypocrisy aside, what he believes is wrong.
100% on point!!==================
ah but..
Hypocrisy aside, what he believes is wrong…….
thing is he does NOT believe it, hes a salesman, a shill for an agenda 21 eu ecofreakout life
for everyone else!
as a saviour of mankind( his divinity training is showing)
hes above us peons dont’cha know?
and Orwells pig always springs to mind when I think of him.