Former Vice President Al Gore may be getting rich as the all-high
guru of global warming or climate change or whatever he and his buddies
are calling it these days, but he’s beginning to look and act like the
fool his detractors have always claimed him to be.
Global warming became climate change when the Earth stubbornly refused to warm as Al and his disciples predicted. Now it appears that the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, whence have come numerous predictions that we will all cook in short order, has discovered that over the last decade the earth has warmed up not by the 0.2 degrees so confidently predicted by U.N. experts but by a mere .07 degrees. What’s more, it turns out that when one factors in the impact of the naturally occurring El Niño and La Niña, temperatures haven’t risen a bit.
{mosads}Admitting this was something of an embarrassment to the Hadley people, since many of the direst predictions coming from the Gore camp are based on Hadley models and computer simulations. What has proven more embarrassing both to Hadley scientists and to the Gore crowd is that Hadley has been working overtime for years to silence skeptics, cook the data and lie in the interests of the global warming policy agenda.
We know this not because of any shame-faced admissions from embarrassed if objective scientists, but because someone at Hadley posted internal e-mails revealing the fraud global warming aficionados have put over on Hollywood, the U.N. and the Nobel Committee. Those e-mails are the talk of the scientific community, Republicans in the Senate are demanding an investigation into how Gore and company have used false data to stampede the political community, and responsible researchers are distancing themselves from colleagues willing to pervert science on behalf of an ideological and political agenda.
Gore and his friends will no doubt direct their rhetorical fire not at the lying scientists, but the dastardly whistleblower who revealed the perfidy. When insiders are caught it is always this way, but the truth is out and shouldn’t be swept under the rug by journalists and others who never seem to mind when someone leaks confidential or even secret information that endangers our national security or our men in the armed forces.
Moreover, Gore himself is not above twisting facts and exaggerating even the false data with which he buttresses his arguments for state control of just about all human activity in the name of saving the planet. His most recent book, for example, includes photo imagery of the Earth that, according to International Business Daily writers and former NASA researcher Roy Spencer, has been, well, “doctored.”
The cover art depicts imagery to which Gore and his editors have added four hurricanes, including one spinning in the wrong direction and, impossibly, another on the equator. To make matters goofier, the graphics manage to delete Castro’s Cuba, something many of us on the right have been trying unsuccessfully to do for decades.
It is possible, that Gore is just plain ignorant of what is or isn’t possible in the Caribbean, the location of Cuba or the falsity of the data he so glibly quotes in his travels. The former vice president’s followers should ponder the evidence for themselves to determine whether their hero is a fantasist, a liar or an ignoramus. The degree to which he has been able to turn a buck by convincing otherwise apparently sane men and women that the sky is falling argues that he knows exactly what he’s up to, but every once in a while there is evidence to suggest otherwise.
Consider a recent Gore appearance as a guest of Conan O’Brien, to whom he patiently explained geothermal energy. The former vice president and Nobel Prize winner correctly observed that it is possible to harness or exploit the heat to be found beneath the earth. So far so good, but Gore couldn’t help elaborating. He told O’Brien that as you approach the Earth’s core, things get hotter and hotter. “Extremely hot,” he lectures, “several million degrees.” Perhaps Gore was confusing the Earth’s core, which is hot enough, at 6-8,000 degrees, with that of the sun, or is so deluded as to actually believe that without cap-and-trade we’ll all fry as our planet’s temperatures approach those of the sun itself.
Or maybe the man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington-based governmental consulting firm.