Well isn’t this rich.
For months, the New York Times has systematically suppressed and downplayed the loads of scandals and errors signaling the downfall of the man-made global warming climate change movement—ClimateGate, FOIGate, ChinaGate, HimalayaGate, PachauriGate, PachauriGate II, SternGate, SternGate II, AmazonGate, PeerReviewGate, RussiaGate, Russia-Gate II, U.S.Gate, IceGate, ResearchGate, ReefGate, AfricaGate, DutchGate, and AlaskaGate. For most of this time, with the exception of a few T.V. appearances, climate multi-millionaire Al Gore has been in hiding.
So what does the “newspaper of record” publish over the weekend? A 1,895-word OpEd by the Goracle himself. That’s right. Like Al Jazeera dutifully publicizing the latest video every time Osama bin Laden crawls out of his cave, the NY Times allows Gore to come out of hibernation with nearly 1,900 words of unanswered propaganda, hyperbole, scare-mongering, political pot shots, ad hominem attacks against opponents, and, of course, loads of unsubstantiated and unfounded “science.”
The premise of Gore’s piece, called “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change,” is that despite all the scandals and mistakes of the AGW alarmist movement—and he only cites two of at least a dozen examples, a total of 82 words in the fifth paragraph—the science is still settled, the debate is still over, the planet is still on the verge of lethal climate catastrophe, the only solution is still to impose the most draconian governmental taxation and regulation in human history, and those who disagree with him are still greedy shills for Big Oil, uneducated ignorant rubes, or spreaders of “hatred and divisiveness” on talk radio.
In other words, same old sh*t, different day.
Here are some gems from this insufferable piece:
We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands.
If our grandchildren will one day look back on us as a “criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands,” Mr. Gore, it would be because of things that took place while you were a Senator and Vice President. It would be because while you and your party were in power, you ignored warnings about the inevitable bankrupting of Social Security, and about the rise of Islamic terrorism—a mess that had to be cleaned up by the guy who “stole the election” from you in 2000.
We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
Naysayers = liberalese for whistleblowers. And of course they “doggedly persist.” That’s what you have to do when you have your mainstream media, your government, and even world governments and Marxist-socialist dictators (e.g., Hugo Chavez) working against you!
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Bluegrass Pundit doesn’t let Gore get away with these dismissive statements:
Al Gore is believed to have made at least $100 million off of the global warming scam. Does he really wish he didn’t have that money? …
Saying “at least two mistakes” is really deceptive. The IPCC report used unpublished student dissertations and information from special interest groups to formulate sections of it’s report. There are so may errors in the IPCC 2007 report, an independent board has been set up to review the workings of the world’s top climate science panel. …
Next, more Chicken Little-ism:
In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
I’ll let Ann Althouse field this one:
The “pollution” is carbon dioxide, which is what flows out of our noses and mouths when we exhale. Do you think of your breathing passages as spewing shit? There’s nothing dirty or toxic about carbon dioxide. The problem has only to do with the greenhouse effect. But isn’t it so much more effective — i.e., scarier — to make people think we’re still talking about filth?
Not only that, but Gore and the alarmists don’t want readers to know that the largest greenhouse gas, making up about 75%, is water vapor. CO2 makes up only 0.038% of total greenhouse gases. Human emitted CO2 is about 2.75% of that, making human activity only 0.001% of all greenhouse gases. As Joe D’Aleo—co-founder of The Weather Channel!— puts it: If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.
This is what in the vernacular is called “an inconvenient truth.”
Now here comes the 5th, and only, paragraph addressing the scandals and errors:
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
Again Bluegrass Pundit has none of it:
Saying global warming scientists “may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law” is really sugar coating it. How does that explain climatologists conspiring to hide information, deleting emails, suppressing criticism, evading taxes and many other transgressions?
Now comes the “The Defense Rests” portion of the piece:
But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.
And with this statement, Gore sweeps all the revelations of the recently discovered IPCC and East Anglia scandals under the rug. Nothing to see here, folks. Business as usual. Full speed ahead.
Besides, Mr. Gore, there is no consensus in science. The accuracy of science isn’t determined by how many scientists agree—which itself is a myth; hundreds, if not thousands of scientists disagree with Gore’s AGW theory.
It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Thus starts the litany of unsubstantiated, debunked, and outright false scientific claims. First of all, while the IPCC has in fact had to revise their sea level rise figures year to year, those numbers have ended up having been overestimated, not underestimated (See here for a recent example). Second, there is no such rapid disappearing and melting, at least no more than there is growing elsewhere on the globe. Case in point: The only part of Antarctica that is melting is the little peninsula that sticks out toward South America. (Parts of South America, incidentally, are having a very hot summer.) But this peninsula comprises only 2% of Antartica; on the remaining 98% of the continent ice is increasing. Again, an inconvenient truth.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Here Al Gore the sleazy lawyer tries to sneak this doozie past his readers, hoping they will be ignorant of the following facts:
First, surface temperatures have been proven to be extremely unreliable owing to (1) the deliberate manipulation or strategic placement of temp stations that yield the results desired by the “scientists” and (2) not taking into account the effect of Urban Heat Islands on the figures. (It has been shown that the black asphalt and rooves of urban areas, which absorb much more heat than these same areas would have 130 years ago, and therefore artificially record temperatures higher than they actually are.
In addition, 130 years is a blip of a blip of a blip in the history of the planet. Since we’ve been coming out of the “Little Ice Age” since around 1850, it works to Gore’s advantage that the Earth’s climate has been rising since then. It also allows Gore to conveniently suppress from the reader’s mind all of the planet’s climate history prior to the mid-19th century. The Little Climate Optimum (a.k.a. Medieval Warming Period) and the Holocene Period were both warmer than AGW alarmists claim the planet is right now.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
Um, it’s not only climate deniers that have “speciously” argued that there has been no warming in the last decade. Phil Jones, the East Anglia professor at the center of the ClimateGate scandal, admitted two weeks ago that there has been no warming since 1995.
But Al Gore can safely assume that NY Times readers did not know that rather important bit of news because the Times did not report it.
… Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease.
This is not what Gore said in his book; he said hurricanes were going to be more destructive and numerous. Hmmm.
Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases.
Oh really? Where is the evidence for such scare-mongering? There ain’t none.
The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture.
Another lie. During the Medieval Warming Period, when Greenland was virtually ice free—i.e., when it was actually named Greenland by the Vikings!—northern Europe from the British Isles up to Scandinavia enjoyed since-unseen agricultural prosperity.
The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.
More scare-mongering B.S. If Gore is referring to polar bears, he better check the work of several polar bear specialists; their population has been stagnant or increasing for the past few decades.
In the next part of this pathetic article, Gore goes on to attack the free market system, particularly fossil fuel energy companies and their political “shills.” He then laments the existence of media outlets that refuse to toe the alarmist party line:
[C]hanges in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment.
Althouse takes on this paragraph thus:
Quick: Name a showman masquerading as political thinker. You said “Al Gore,” right?
And what is this “hatred and divisiveness”? It’s just criticism and debate. Al Gore is distressed that the media don’t propagandize for government regulation as they did back in the good old days of communism.
This article goes on and on and painfully on, but you get the point. Other blogs reacting to the NY Times’ “creative” approach to addressing the collapsing science of AGW alarmism:
Gateway Pundit: Junk Scientist Al Gore Still Beating Dead Horse
Bookworm Room: Does algore have any tone other than hysterical?
P.S. If you have not yet torn all the hair out of your head from this OpEd, the NY Times has some other gems: Fist, there’s “Depression’s Upside,” in which they cover up for President Hope&Change’s disastrous economic policies by suggesting that Depression is beneficial. (And to think this is the same paper which viewed the Bush years, with its record low unemployment, record low mortgage rates, and tons of tax revenue coming in due to Bush’s tax cuts, as economic hell on Earth.)
Then there’s “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged,” Frank Rich’s latest piece on the Tea Party Movement. (And to think, this was the same paper that during the Bush presidency supported the obsessed and deranged anti-Iraq-War movement and even published that notorious full-page “General Betray-Us” ad.)
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