Distinguished Company

The rhetoric is certainly heating up ahead of the U.N. Climate report due out tomorrow.

Today, former Vice-President and current Global Warming ambulance driver Al Gore, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his "wide-reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming." If he wins, he will join the ranks of other olive branch-bearing luminaries such as Mohamed el Baraedi (IAEA) , Jimmy Carter (international conflict resolution), Kofi Annan (UN), Yasser Arafat (PLO) and Betty Williams (peace in Northern Ireland). Although Ms. Williams was deserving of the award at the time, recently she was noted for her comments advocating the murder of George Bush--in the name of peace.

Of course this is only a partial list made up of the less deserving peace prize winners in my opinion. There are several worthy winners, but I note the less deserving ones because if Mr. Gore wins, I believe he will land squarely in the less-deserving category. This does not make Mr. Gore a bad guy, but does he deserve a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for being a global warming pollyanna?

I think not.

I saw his movie, An Inconvienent Truth, ironically on a greenhouse gas-spewing flight to Europe. I had read many of the criticisms of his movie before I saw it, so perhaps I was a little biased against him in the first place, nevertheless I tried to keep an open mind. After seeing the movie though, I agreed with all of the well publicised criticisms and had a few of my own to add. Ultimately though, it boils down to this: Al Gore is a bad spokesman for the Green Revolution.

The reason I think Al Gore is a bad spokesman for the Green Revolution is because he's only politized the issue further by using half truths and junk science (for example, the Mann hockey stick) on which to base many of his conclusions. Dr. Michael Mann refuses to share his methodology so that other scientists can recreate his conclusions. Isn't that the the lynchpin of the scientific method? If the proof is so irrefutible and the "enitre scientific community is in agreement", why the need to distort the truth? Besides, he's singing to the choir. He makes no attempt to be all-inclusive when he takes gratuitous jabs at Bush in his movie, or through his sober, menalcholy reflection on the results of the 2000 elections. These things have no place in a real scientific movie about global warming.

Imagine if George Bush had lost in 2000 and spent the last 5 or 6 years touring the world with a slick multimedia presentation that proved conclusively that the science is in: we need to burn more fossil fuel because the globe is cooling. Now you begin to see the problem with Al Gore being the poster boy for the Green Movement.

For 8 years Al Gore was the Vice President of the United States of America. This is a pretty powerful position with not many official responsibilities. As the leader of the Senate, he was in an optimal position to influence our government's policy on climate change. Specifically, the well-meaning but fatally flawed Kyoto Protocol was introduced in 1997 on Mr. Gore's watch. Though the Bush administration catches endless grief from environmentalists for it's refusal to consider abiding by it, in 1997 the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to ratify the Byrd-Hagel Resolution which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States".
If Mr. Gore had so much environmental conviction, why did he not use his ample power to convince the Senate of the folly of their vote?

I am not saying Mr. Gore is wrong. I am not saying that the globe is not warming at an alarming rate. However, when somebody can tell me with 100% certainty what the weather is going to be a week from now, I'll start to listen to the people that are telling me what the climate is going to be in 50 years. Think back to the hurricane forecast for last year. Most everybody was in agreement that it was going to be a terrible season for hurricanes. Al Gore certainly believed it; it was a central theme of his movie. There was not one major hurricane. Not even one minor hurricane made landfall. And what was to blame? The often-studied, naturally-occuring and fairly-predictable El Nino pattern. And if you want to quantify the costs--do a little research and see how the now defunct hedge fund Amaranth lost $6 billion dollars which can ultimately be blamed on the hurricane forecast; or look into how much the premium for hurricane insurance went up and apply that to everybody living in a hurricane danger zone.


There are groups of scientists and policy makers that do not believe that global warming is the greatest threat facing mankind at the moment. Bjorn Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus is one such example.

There's a movie out now called Mine Your Own Business.
I've not seen it yet, but it is a Michael Moore-style documentary that exposes the "dark side of environmentalism." Leisure greenies will surely appreciate that style.

Here's the trailer.

The fact is nobody completely understands the complex interactions between the lithosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and the oceans. Anybody who's honest will admit that. All of these interactions influence our short, medium and long term climate and environment in ways we've not even begun to understand. The globe is warming. 30 years ago many of the very same people who are talking about global warming now were wringing their hands over the fact that the globe was cooling.

What will it be 30 years from now?