Open question to WUWT readers: Will one member of the mainstream media — that was so quick to give page-space to Bill McKibben’s ludicrous assertions about Irene — even bring up these comments by Gore? Will Revkin or Bryan Walsh or ThinkProgress disassociate themselves and their orgs or simply assent through their silence?
Update: end of 08/29 Zero mainstream media outlets (except Fox News) covered Al Gore’s “racist” connections. The silence was not unexpected. Andrew Revkin was more interested (again) in interjecting his opinions on “acceptable” candidates for the GOP primary, a constituency that does not “fit” his worldview. Must be fun to coordinate your messaging with Paul Krugman.
By Caroline May in the Daily Caller
One day climate change skeptics will be seen in the same negative light as racists, at least so says former Vice President Al Gore.
In an interview with former advertising executive and Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky broadcasted on UStream on Friday, Gore explained that in order for climate change alarmists to succeed, they must “win the conversation” against those who deny there is a crisis.
(RELATED: Bill McKibben: Global warming to blame for Hurricane Irene)
“I remember, again going back to my early years in the South, when the Civil Rights revolution was unfolding, there were two things that really made an impression on me,” Gore said. “My generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators and we went, ‘Whoa! How gross and evil is that?’ My generation asked old people, ‘Explain to me again why it is okay to discriminate against people because their skin color is different?’ And when they couldn’t really answer that question with integrity, the change really started.”
The former vice president recalled how society succeeded in marginalizing racists and said climate change skeptics must be defeated in the same manner.
“Secondly, back to this phrase ‘win the conversation,’” he continued. “There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won.”
“We have to win the conversation on climate,” Gore added.
When Bogusky questioned the analogy, asking if the scientific reasoning behind climate change skeptics might throw a wrench into the good and evil comparison with racism, Gore did not back down.
“I think it’s the same where the moral component is concerned and where the facts are concerned I think it is important to get that out there, absolutely,” Gore said.
Gore also took shots at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has lambasted climate change alarmists on the presidential campaign trail, and other politicians who dare to question the veracity of global warming science.
“This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity, and to slander them with the lie that they are making up the science in order to make money,” Gore said.
Ironically, back during Perry’s days as a Democrat, the Texas governor supported Gore in his 1988 presidential bid. Perry became a Republican in 1989.
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AndrewR,
Thanks for the tip on The Blaze.
I wonder if ole Spotted-Al Gorbacle still grows tobacco on his southern plantation? Immense hypocrisy from the loony la-la land of leftism.
What does race have to do with climate change anyways?
Al is starting to sound disturbed, like a paranoid.
Seems Big Al is pushing hard an agenda that is driven by personal financial gain. Is there any information about the extent of his personal investments in the AGW industry?
As an antidote, may I recommend Syun-Ichi Akasofu – Two Natural Components of the Recent Climate Change (April 30, 2009. International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), at http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php
Gore seems awfully embittered these days. He should learn something from his former boss Bill Clinton – that is, being upbeat and optimistic sells. Vitriol does not.
Resorting to ad-hominem attack nonsense like he is currently doing is sure evidence he knows he’s teetering on his back foot.
In ancient Hebrew, Gore would have been referred to as a “fatkunt”.
Poor Al.
Failed as a Divinity student.
Rejected as a Presidential candidate.
Delusions of grander.
Illusions of intellect.
Reduced to a babbling talking head playing the Race Card.
History will not be kind to him. He’ll be written up as a Con Artist or a Religious Nutter that lead a generation of humanity down the Green Brick Road, wasting $Trillions on Greenie Schemes, Scams & Dreams.
Money that could be much better used solving real problems vexing humanity and this planet.
Al also apparently thinks we should starve about 5 billion people to death. This psychopath ought to be locked up in a padded cell.
“Industrial agriculture is a part of the problem,” Gore said. “The shift toward a more meat-intensive diet,” the clearing of forest areas in many parts of the world in order to raise more cattle and the reliance on synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer are also problems, he added.
Gore advocated organic farming and relying on “more productive, safer methods that put carbon back in the soil” to produce “safer and better food.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/28/al-gore-compares-climate-change-to-civil-rights-fight/#ixzz1WMXBtXDE
Looks as if Gore is reduced to speaking to himself…
This stupid moron is just making racism respectable.
Scepticism is not only respectable it seems to be increasingly trendy. Indeed if any more politicians join the sceptical side I’m going to have to seriously wonder whether it’s getting too trendy for my liking.
I wish I could draw like Josh, I’d draw a carton of Al Gore in the 1500s time period crying out, “The Earth is flat and everything goes around the Earth. The debate is over, the consistences of science has settled it…” The caption would read, “Al Gore in a past life.”
This man was the vice president of the United States of America…………..
‘Gore advocated organic farming and relying on “more productive, safer methods that put carbon back in the soil”’
Well, might be a problem Al if you would take a dump once and a while. That would release copious amounts of carbon that the microbes can put back to work.
oh go on, I dare you
Gore is a coward and a charlatan. If he had any courage whatsoever, he would be challenging those he disagreed with–people like Anthony, Steve, Ross or, even, God forbid, Richard Lindzen–to debate on the subject rather than hiding behind powder-puff interviews and making idiotic analogies in order to slime people.
He’s really beginning to piss me off.
More Gore bloviation.
By shouting it down.
First, there’s not much organized effort on the scoffers’ side, and to the extent that there is, in the form of think tanks and topic-specific skeptical organizations, that claim is relatively rarely made, compared to its frequency by bloggers and (especially) blog-commenters. Second, even such commenters don’t make the claim that “the scientific community as a whole” is money-motivated.
Gore is being inflammatory–which is a base way of motivating his base to be confrontational. I.e., in his Rolling Stone article he stated that he wanted warmists to be more active in writing letters and posting comments on the Internet. That’s how he wants to win the conversation. (But many warmist commenters don’t have the grasp of the subject they think they do-and they often make a poor impression in the way they conduct themselves.)
Second, there is a distinction that should be made (but isn’t) when we scoffers imply that climatologists stand to benefit from taking an alarmist position. They aren’t doing so because they pocket the grant money. Almost half of it goes to their university for overhead, and the rest mostly goes for their expenses, like salaries for assistants. (This is true of the grants received by skeptical scientists too–and warmists should make the same distinction when accusing them of greed.)
Their financial benefit is something more abstruse and global. That is, alarmism encourages continued heavy funding and prestige for their field as a whole, which benefits the profession as such, and which may or may not trickle down to them eventually. The purely personal benefit in promoting alarmism comes from increasing ones odds of getting published, which indirectly benefits ones career due to the “publish or perish” effect. Lastly, there are social-status benefits from going along with the herd of independent minds (as they are perceived in academia).
Deviationist scientists, in contrast, are acting against their professional and personal interest in taqking a skeptical position.
What Gore must be thinking is that scorcher-scoffers can be refuted by reciting the ready-made counterpoints provided on sites like SkepticalScience and How to Talk to a Climate Change Denier (and RC). The problem for Gore is that those counterpoints often refute strawmen, that scoffers have comebacks to other refutations, and that many contentious issues can’t really be firmly settled in the alarmists’ favor at the present time, even if they seem to have the edge on balance.
Of course, there are some silly scoffers’ statements that can be knocked down, or whittled down, but that’s only a portion of the case they make. Gore ought to read The Deniers (as a start) and process it if he wants to engage in a conversation.
I could just as logically charge Al with being a racist for disagreeing with me bout CAGW.
His lack of the ability to think is apparent.
The skeptics have long demanded a debate. Sounds like the alarmists are playing into their hands. Bring it on !
My wife of twenty five years doesn’t buy CAGW, I’m European, she’s Chinese, but what do we know?
Nothing new for Gore. It was well over a decade-ago when he drew this parallel…
Al Gore and Rachel Carson = MLK and Rosa Parks
When we were kids, we had Jack-in-Box to jump out and scare us, but we understood that it was only a temporary scare, perhaps what we need now is a new conversation piece and Al-in-the-Box to jump out and scare our kids. Then they can have fun putting Al back in his box.
Boy think of the marketing, and in this day and age you could have “IT” red faced and screeching out his climate doom and gloom rant.
Yep scary, but easily put back in his box. I’ll take a one cent commission per unit sold from anyone that wants to build one!!
Why not ‘Win The Debate’ first, Al?
Dave Springer says:
August 28, 2011 at 12:37 pm
“Uncontrollable fits of rage and inability to discriminate between reality and fantasy is symptomatic of tertiary stage syphyllis. This handily explains how a sex poodle becomes a crazed sex poodle.
Just sayin’ :-)”
____________________________________________
Have anything to do with his lisp?
So when did the people in the AGW camp become a race? Can you get them to comb their hair to the left or dye it green or something so that we can spot them more easily? What kind of insults are we supposed to hurl at them? Is it racism if we don’t hire a warmista because he is long on opinions and short on brains? If my GF buys into AGW and I don’t, are we a mixed race couple now?
I am going to have a lot of questions about this, I never was a big racist before this came up.