Where in The World Is Al Gore?

Is he giving a speech in China?

Millions remained stranded in China on Monday ahead of the biggest holiday of the year as parts of the country suffered their coldest winter in a century.

Freezing weather has killed scores of people and left travelers stranded before the Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival -- the only opportunity many people have for a holiday all year.

It has also brought China unwanted negative publicity six months before the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

President Hu Jintao chaired an emergency Politburo meeting on Sunday for the second time in a week to discuss rescue efforts.

"We have to be clear-minded that the inclement weather and severe disaster will continue to plague certain regions in the south," said a statement issued after Sunday's meeting. "Relief work will continue to face challenges, posing a tough task."

Where In The World Is Algore?

Is it possible he's in Baghdad?

So, yes, not only did it snow in Iraq, but it snowed in the very heart of Iraq--Baghdad and a wide area to the north and west. It may not be unusual in the western deserts, which are significantly higher (and thus inherently colder) than the low alluvial plain (`Mesopotamia`) that lies at the heart of Iraq. I understand that TV and Internet media have shown clear confirmation to this effect. I have email stating that a snowman was made in Balad. Farther south and east (to the Gulf and to the foot of the Zagros Mountains), the storm has yielded a cold or chilly rain.


The focus for the winter snow is shifting out of Arabia and into Iran with snow breaking out widely in the west and north as I write. It has begun as of Friday afternoon in Tehran. It looks as though the primary path for substantial snow will leave northeastern Iran for southeastern Turkmenistan, southeastern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan.


The plains of western Turkistan (central Asia) will stay unusually cold for at least a few more days. This will lead to more `sea-effect` snow off the southwestern Caspian Sea. Friday, heavy snow has once again hammered Bandar-e Anzali, Iran, where there may be as much as one meter (essentially three feet) of snow on the ground. Water equivalent of this latest snow was 1.8 inches (45 mm) within twelve hours. Southeastern Azerbaijan will be prone to sea-effect snow as well.


In western Arabia, the region of Tihamat Ash Sham, there have been soaking thunderstorms, some in Jeddah and Makkah. Indeed, we have data showing 61 mm (2.6 inches) at Makkah. This must be roughly the normal rainfall for one year in this part of Arabia!

"Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?"

My fingers have finally thawed out and my heart has resumed a normal rhythm after shoveling my driveway and sidewalk this morning (official snowfall at Forbicite HQ: 7.5 inches.) I contemplate buying a snowblower from Russ and April. But why should I? Has not the Goracle promised Floridaesque weather for us here in the Arctic Northwest?

If Marion Jones had to give back her Olympic gold medals, will Algore have to return his Nobel Peace Prize in 5 or 10 years when all this global warming alarmism is proven to be untrue? Yet another columnist for yet another big-city newspaper has attacked Gore and the BS he is peddling. In the January 6 Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby wrote:

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

"In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm"

A group of left-wing environmentalist wackos are attempting to get the ribbon seal put on the list of endangered species. The ribbon seal's primary habitat is drift ice in the Bering Sea, which according to the tree huggers, is being destroyed by "global warming." If the ribbon seal is listed as an endangered species, it could lead to economically crippling regulations on emissions in the U.S.. That, of course, is the point, not the protection of seals.

We've all seen and read the much ballyhooed coverage of the shrinking Arctic ice pack. But did you know that since 1979 (when satellite photos became available), the Antarctic ice cap has been steadily growing and the mean temperature steadily declining, with last year seeing the most Antarctic sea ice yet? I didn't think so. Western-style capitalism, in all its evil forms, must be eradicated. Global warming BS is succeeding where thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads failed. Al Gore's Travelin' Global Warming Show is rolling along, and nothing as inconsequential as the facts can be allowed to get in the way.

Or can they? James Tierney, the Science Editor of the New York Times, wrote in a column published on New Year's Day that he's had it with global warming hucksterism:

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”

“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

Happy New Years To All The Assholes of the World!

With a bonus Keith Olbermann. Double bonus Olbermann.

Too Good Not To Post

"The 'Church of Global Warming' revisited"

Another great column from Michael O'Neal in today's Moscow-Pullman Daily News, guaranteed to drive the liberals nuts:

Two weeks ago, "Hypocrisy and the Church of Global Warming" appeared on this page. The reaction was predictable: To set me straight, earnest readers sent me scientific stuff. But science wasn't my subject. With tongue in cheek, I took as my subject the sociology and politics of the debate.

Allow me to retract my tongue.

Science and religion seek different sorts of truths in different ways. Scientists propose theories. The "willfully ignorant" raise doubts, question those theories, and offer possible alternatives. New data comes in. Theories get tested and modified. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman put it best: Scientists must "be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory."

But when all doubts, questions and alternatives about global warming are silenced, or when dilettantes launch cowardly personal attacks or make babblescent threats to cancel their subscription to the newspaper because it provides a forum for alternative views, that's religion, not science, and religion in its least attractive guise, so feeble that it can't - or won't - withstand scrutiny. At best it's science by press conference. Not all that long ago, leading scientists fervently believed that criminal propensities could be predicted through cranial measurements. At the same time, they wrongly dismissed plate tectonics as pseudoscience. I say, thank heaven for the doubters and questioners.

Further, I don't like to be told not to drive an SUV by someone with a private jet. Far from being a "distraction," the lives of the rich and famous, many living off the fruits of industrialization, are at the dead center of the debate. The issue is not simply whether global warming is a real problem. I'll grant that it is. The real question is, what do we do now? Every one of us consumes far more than we need. Our cars are too powerful, our houses too palatial, our appetites too piggish. So how are you going to sell the concept of "cutting back" and treading lightly over Mother Earth when the nation's most conspicuous people, including Al Gore himself, or John Edwards and his 28,000-square-foot, $6 million mansion, leave behind Sasquatch-size carbon footprints? So they buy carbon credits. How nice. I can't, so I nibble at the edges of global warming by shivering in my house or driving a tin can death trap, but my actions will accomplish nothing if everyone doesn't play, including the nations that cynically violate the Kyoto agreement they signed with great self-congratulation. And do you think your hybrid Prius and its components were manufactured in plants powered by solar panels?

This raises the issue of alternative energy. Every form of energy, alternative or otherwise, has its downside, but many people don't want to confront global warming in their own backyard. Lord help me, I plead guilty. I might be a proponent of nuclear power - it's clean, and the plants have smaller footprints than conventional power plants - but I don't want one frying my figgins from across the street.

But if a proposal is made for a hydroelectric dam, or a tidal or wave-energy or ocean-current facility, or a wind farm, or the conversion of farmland to cultivation of biomass fuels, trust-fund environmentalists rise as one to oppose it. Back in the 1970s, when the Alaskan oil pipeline was being built, dilettantes who wouldn't know a caribou from a cockatoo waxed hysterical that the pipeline would destroy Alaska's caribou herds. But according to the state's Fish and Game Department, when the oil started to flow in 1977 Alaska's caribou population was about 6,000. Today it's more than 27,000. And the sky did not fall.

Whatever energy source we use, it has to be produced somewhere. If preening "environmentalists" along Cape Cod and elsewhere really believe in global warming, they should be willing to make compromises. Instead, they try to grab the turd by the clean end with cant like "environmentally sensitive area." Yet they heat their homes with oil and coal burned in power plants located in someone else's environmentally sensitive area - in most places, poor neighborhoods - then have the gall to whine if their playground is threatened.

We can fix the problem or be dilettantes. But dilettantes can't make the hard choices, except when they're making them for others.

Amen, Mike.

Fat Albert's Meat Problem

It turns out that Al Gore needs to buy some burger offset credits.
It may be that burgers and pot roast are a greater threat than SUV's and Al Gore can't call himself a true environmentalist until he stops eating meat.
Frankly, I think he needs to stop eating a lot of things.

Update: This is the next issue that I think Al Gore should address. I'd also like to know if Al Gore sells or buys sex toy offset credits.

"Hypocrisy and the Church of Global Warming"

Here is columnist Michael O'Neal's take on the global warming controversy from today's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Here's the problem with the whole global-warming kerfuffle.

Long ago the debate parted company with science. Global warming has become a creed, with its own messiah (the Rev. Al Gore), scriptural texts (the Kyoto Protocol, the European Panel on Climate Change report, “An Inconvenient Truth”), and a congregation with the ecstatic fervor of snake handlers. Anyone who wages jihad against heretics opposed to the faith will be whisked off to paradise — in a hybrid Prius, no less, a “Re-defeat Bush” bumper sticker permanently affixed — there to be met by 72 vegetarian virgins.

Now all creeds have their dark underbelly of hypocrisy. The Church of Global Warming is no exception. Take Barbra Streisand (please). Babs gets all moon-doggy around chic-geek Al — whose electric bill is 12 times that of his Nashville neighbors — and preaches to us about how we have to “cut back” to stop global warming.

Fair enough. Let’s start with some inconvenient truths. Streisand and her husband, actor James Brolin, live on a ranch with five homes. They spend $22,000 a year watering their lawns. They have a 12,000-square-foot barn. The barn’s air-conditioned.

Dang, guess I gotta “cut back” and sell a couple of my homes.

Or take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who proclaims herself an environmentalist yet is part owner of a California golf course that’s been cited for polluting groundwater. The owners were granted a permit to build the course on the condition that it include habitat for endangered species. The course was built in 1996, but the habitat areas are nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, she’s hired lobbyists to fight the environmental regulations that affect her.

But for sheer breathtaking hypocrisy we can always count on the Kennedys, the most visible members of a contemporary aristocracy who consecrate their existence with the holy water of environmentalism. Ted and eco-evangelist Robert Jr. blame global warming on Big Oil. Yet the family owns a company called Arctic Royalty Trust, which leases land for oil drilling. They accumulated the land by persuading farmers, mostly poor blacks, to sell the mineral rights to their land. Because the enterprise is a trust, they don’t pay taxes on the profits.

It gets worse. A Boston developer has been proposing construction of a wind farm — the Holy Grail of alternative energy — off the coast of Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard. The farm’s 130 turbines, from 7 to 13 miles off the coast, would produce up to 420 megawatts of squeaky-clean electricity, enough to supply all the needs of the surrounding communities.

But it’s not the Holy Grail for the Kennedys — or the Humane Society, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and other groups. They staunchly oppose the development: It would spoil the view. It would interfere with yachting. They object that the company might make a profit on its $900 million investment.

Economic analysis reveals that the price of the electricity would be higher than that of the oil-fired electricity Cape Cod residents currently consume. So what? The price of that electricity is artificially low because it fails to include what economists call “negative externalities” — the societal costs, like the effects of pollution, that the buyer doesn’t pay for. Alternative energy, at least for now, carries a higher price tag, but if wealthy Cape Cod residents have to pony up a few hundred dollars more per year for clean energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming, they’d merely be absorbing the externalities of the oil they now burn — in someone else’s backyard — to heat their homes.

But no matter what the proposal, the congregation rises to its collective feet to oppose it. Nuclear? You’re kidding. Hydroelectric? Nope, messes with fish. Coal? Touch not the unclean thing. Wind? Nope again, some birds might get killed, even though one California study found that out of 10,000 dead birds, 700 are killed by motor vehicles, 5,500 by flying into buildings and windows, 1,000 by cats — and 1 by wind turbines.

On this page, the faithful’s rhetorical armamentarium consists of little more than sophomoric personal swipes at one writer who dares to question the faith. Meanwhile, we can bow before either the idol of alternative energy or the mammon of carbon. Whichever we choose, we should all choose, and it can’t always happen in someone else’s backyard.

Al Gore's New Career: Comedy

Al Gore's excuse for "do as I say, not as I do" energy consumption, his so called "carbon offsets," continues to yield brilliant comedy dividends. While this is no doubt embarrassing to the extreme for Gore to end up as such an obviously naked emperor on this one, I think there could be silver lining in the form of a career writing political satire for him.

In today's edition of the Wall Street Journal, in the Journal Exchange section, two letters to the editor appeared that demonstrate the bright future Gore would have if he took my advice and went into comedy writing.

The first submission reads:

"Use 'Energy Offsets' And Feel Good Again

Your March 1 editorial "An Inconvenient Pool" concerning Al Gore's "carbon offset" for his heated swimming pool raises an intriguing question. Since I can afford, for example, a heated pool, but do not have one, can I claim an "offset" for the energy I am therefore not using? I do not use private jets for travel, either, which would appear, by Mr. Gore's logic, to be another way I am helping protect the planet. In fact, there are so many ways in which I am not consuming the energy that I could be, I sense an economic opportunity. Perhaps I could sell my energy off-sets to Mr. Gore to help ease his conscience a little. I will await his call.

-- Charles McCoy
Cincinnati"

I love it! Let's all start totaling up the different ways that we could consume energy, but do not, and start selling the resulting ecological plenary indulgences to eco-nuts with guilty consciences!

The second submission on this topic reads:

"I'm planning to trademark and copyright the term: "Carbon Indulgence." I'm also contemplating a Web site and a 501(c)3 so rich people like Al Gore can send me money so I can put up solar panels and continue to heat my house with wood that grows on my own property outside my door.

-- Phil Fuhlman
Exeland, Wis."

I think I like this idea even more than the first, since we get to follow Gore's model: continue to contribute to the problem you rail against (after you concoct the problem, of course), meanwhile buying a "solution" to the "problem" that pays you back. Only in this case, Gore and others like him can demonstrate their commitment to the cause by purchasing offsets for the rest of us who can't afford the lifestyle Gore demands of everyone else. Here's your opportunity to lead from the front, Al! I'll send you the dimensions of the roof of my house soon.

WSJ Pronouces Barbra Streisand on Carbon Offsets

So sorry Algore. As anybody with any sense already knows, your carbon offsets are a bunch of BS.


Al Gore's "carbon neutral lifestyle" is a veil available only to the rich and wasteful, like Al Gore. And, as it turns out, the veil is even thinner than it seems.

We don't begrudge anyone the opportunity to make a buck. But there's a difference between making money by producing things people want and making money by gaming the regulatory process. There's no market here unless the government creates one, and who has the profit opportunity depends entirely on who the government picks as the winners and the losers in designing this market in the first place. So it's no wonder that almost any business that has ever put an ounce of CO2 into the atmosphere is rushing to show its cap-and-trade bona fides.

The Goracle has no clothes.

Al Gore, My Inspiration!

Al Gore has inspired me and perhaps provided a coterie of soon to be discomfited Palouse residents with a little cover. Last Sunday, Al Gore won an Academy Award for his scare flick, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about the imminent perils of global warming and carbon emissions. On Monday, the power bill for just one of his three mansions was made public and, on that house alone, Al Gore’s energy consumption is 20 times the national average.

I really couldn’t understand why the mainstream media paid so little attention to Al Gore’s carbon extravagant lifestyle and glaring hypocrisy. This guy preaches to the rest of us about how we need to reduce our “carbon footprint.” But he runs up a utility bill that exceeds most Americans take home paycheck heating and lighting just one of his mansions. Al Gore’s power bill is the moral equivalent of those photographs that caught former televangelist Jimmy Swaggart in a motel room with a prostitute. And that was big news. But Al Gore isn’t.
Apparently, the ever vigilant and unbiased mainstream media were satisfied with Al Gore’s explanation that he purchased “carbon offsets” from people and businesses that emitted less carbon dioxide than was morally allotted to them. Purchasing these credits somehow neutralized his own excesses and permits him to claim, with a straight face, that his existence on this earth is “carbon neutral.”
I must confess that, at first glance, Al Gore’s carbon credit scheme made me think that I could diet more comfortably by purchasing fat credits from skinny people. I was even more skeptical when I learned that Al Gore was essentially purchasing these carbon credits from himself. Al Gore is the co-founder and chairman of the company “Global Investment Management,” that buys and sells these carbon offsets.
Now, a cynic might compare Al Gore to Johann Tetzel, the 15th century papal peddler of indulgences who enraged Martin Luther by offering forgiveness from sin for a price.
"As soon a coin in coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs," was Tetzel’s sales pitch as he rode around the German countryside in his horse drawn wagon, advertising his franchise.
But certainly, a man who is known to his devotees as “The Goracle” could not be so cynical or ambitious as that. We have it on the word of his spokesman that Gore is not ambitious and a spokesman for Gore must be an honorable man.
And so, as a devoted free marketeer myself, I see this as a potential business opportunity that I might want to investigate. No, I’m not going to sell oatmeal offsets to people with high cholesterol or tofu credits to vegetarians who occasionally chomp a Whopper. What I’m offering are guilt credits to anti-Wal-Mart activists who succumb to the temptation of lower prices.
With every hurdle of real consequence passed and only gratuitous nuisance complaints remaining, it is now inevitable that Wal-Mart Supercenters will be built in Pullman and, in all likelihood, in Latah County just outside the Moscow city limits. And the day will come when each of those activists will find it more convenient or just so much cheaper to shop at Wal-Mart that they won’t be able to resist the pull any longer, and they’ll go inside and buy something. They might even stand in line on Black Friday to get their Christmas shopping over with early and inexpensively.
And I’d like to give them an opportunity to cleanse themselves of that embarrassment by offering low price offsets. Certainly there are people out there, like Al Gore and Paris Hilton, who are so filthy rich that they never have to consider retail prices. And we all know people who delight in conspicuous consumption and purchase designer label blue jeans at 5 times the price of the identical pair with a Kirkland Select label. Why not trade the extravagance credits that those people earn to crypto-Wal-Mart shoppers as guilt salve? Ever dollar they save at Wal-Mart can be used to purchase extravagance credits from me. If one of these activists is sighted by a fellow PARDner emerging from Wal-Mart with a gallon of milk that cost 50 cents less than it would have across the street, then the guilty party only has to display an extravagance credit to cleanse the record of the sin.
Why not? It worked for Al Gore.

Al Gore Dummies Up

After scolding the media for failing to adequately convey his message of environmental alarmism, Al Gore fled the stage without answering questions.

I'm sure the rest of you are as shocked as I am to learn that the media has not toed his line obediently enough, but he does.

"I believe that is one of the principal reasons why political leaders around the world have not yet taken action," Gore said. "There are many reasons, but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say 'rejected,' perhaps it's the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias.

"I don't think that any of the editors or reporters responsible for one of these stories saying, 'It may be real, it may not be real,' is unethical. But I think they made the wrong choice, and I think the consequences are severe.

"I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced."

Gore would not answer any questions from the media after the event.

I wonder why?

More on "Carbon Offsets"

If you're filthy rich, like Al Gore or his Hollywood limousine liberal buddies, where to you buy carbon offsets that allow you to live a lifestyle that consumes spews 20 times as much carbon as the average family? Well, in the case of Algore, he buys them from himself.

Bill Hobbs has the rest of the story.

So far, so good. So, where does Gore buy his ‘carbon offsets’? According to The Tennessean newspaper’s report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman:
Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…
As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he “buys” his “carbon offsets” from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn’t buy “carbon offsets” through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.

Will someone tell my how this story is different from a televangelist getting caught in a motel room with a whore?

Al Gore's Hypocrisy Nothing New

It's worth recalling Al Gore's 1996 Democratic National Convention speech when he claimed that he converted from tobacco grower to anti-tobacco activist.

The fact is that Al Gore continued to grow tobacco and courted the tobacco farmers' support during the 1988 presidential primaries, long after his sister had died.

In the 1988 campaign, Gore bragged of his tobacco background: “I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put [tobacco] in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it, I’ve dug in it, I’ve sprayed it, I’ve chopped it, I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn, and stripped it and sold it” (Newsday, 2-26-88).

Here's another source of Al Gore's habitual Barbra Streisand.

Of course, it could be the company he keeps.

An Inconvenient Truth

The day after winning an Oscar for his environmental Chicken Little story, the truth about Al Gore's own lifestyle comes out.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

And, that's for only one of Al Gore's three mansions.

"Eating the greens"

This essay, presented a week ago by British writer Austin Williams at the New School in New York, is an incredible critique of environmentalists and is a must read, given all the letters appearing daily in the Daily News skewering Ed Iverson for daring to question the global warming orthodoxy.

I especially agree with Williams when he states:

It’s a confusing complaint for those like me who are interested in more human-centred politics, because, to me, it seems that rather than the eco-message being marginalized, there is in fact an incessant, domineering, environmental orthodoxy that seems to infect every issue under the sun.

The absence of a critically engaged public discourse on environmental matters – and political culture more generally – caused by the closing down of public debate around environmental concerns, means that ‘green’ issues have entered the public domain as mantras rather than propositions to be debated, fine-tuned and rejected/accepted according to their own merits. One of the curious consequences of this un-contended situation is the inability of the environmental ‘movement’ to believe in their own moral high-ground. In truth, their elevated status has been given to them, rather than won.
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The fact that environmentalists have hyped up the evidence-based justification for their existence (however much the actual science of global warming has been disputed by others) means that they see success through the prism of tangible evidence-based results and have ended up as tick-box, check-off managers of good behaviour.
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I believe that the logical consequence of an unquestioning acceptance of limits, reduced resource use and individual responsibility - the essential ingredients of the environmental agenda - is a tendency towards small-thinking, while pretending that we're looking at the Big Picture. Unfortunately, without a critical appraisal of the problem and an open-ended debate on possibilities we are simply accepting a new and slightly more cynical spin on the old environmentalist agenda.

Brit Hume had a perfect example of this behavior management foolishness today:

According to a recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, America's meat eaters are a major cause of global warming. American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide than vegetarians every year...According to Noah Mohr of EarthSave International: "Arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products."

Oh brother. And yet

Anthony Leiserowitz, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon writes: "Most Americans believe global warming is real but a moderate and distant risk. While they strongly support policies like investing in renewable energy, higher fuel economy standards and international treaties, they strongly oppose carbon taxes on energy sources that put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

Debunking Al Gore's Junk Science

If you have a spare fifteen minutes, you should read an overview of Marlo Lewis Jr.'s "Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: One-sided, Misleading, Exaggerated, Speculative, Wrong" located at this link.

It shows how enviromental fear is used as a scare tactic against Americans and the failings of the Kyoto Protocols. It counters many statements that the global warming liberals, greens and mainstream media often use.