We have to say we are amused by Al Gore and his travelling caravan of doom. Not so amused that we’d like to see him President, of course. But it’s kind of funny to be lectured so earnestly by a C student about things so inherently implausible. And it is even more amusing to watch the degreed masses line up to participate in the latest fad. Let’s look at some examples from climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer in TCS, addressing the former Vice President about his new movie:

– Your presentation showing the past 650,000 years of atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide reconstructions from ice cores was very effective. But I assume you know that some scientists view the CO2 increases as the result of, rather than the cause of, past temperature increases. It seems unlikely that CO2 variations have been the dominant cause of climate change for hundreds of thousands of years. And now that there is a new source of carbon dioxide emissions (people), those old relationships are probably not valid anymore. Why did you give no hint of these alternative views?

– When you recounted your 6-year-old son’s tragic accident that nearly killed him, I thought that you were going to make the point that, if you had lived in a poor country like China or India, your son would have probably died. But then you later held up these countries as model examples for their low greenhouse gas emissions, without mentioning that the only reason their emissions were so low was because people in those countries are so poor. I’m confused…do you really want us to live like the poor people in India and China?

– There seems to be a lot of recent concern that more polar bears are drowning these days because of disappearing sea ice. I assume you know that polar bears have always migrated to land in late summer when sea ice naturally melts back, and then return to the ice when it re-freezes. Also, if this was really happening, why did the movie have to use a computer generated animation of the poor polar bear swimming around looking for ice? Haven’t there been any actual observations of this happening? Also, temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930’s…before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don’t you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?

– Why did you make it sound like simply signing on to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions would be such a big step forward, when we already know it will have no measurable effect on global temperatures anyway? And even though it represents such a small emission reduction, the economic pain Kyoto causes means that almost no developed country will be meeting its emission reductions commitments under that treaty, as we are now witnessing in Europe.

We will confine ourselves to the first point of Dr. Spencer, that CO2 increases may be the result of rather than the cause of measured warming over the last million years. Take a look at this chart, prepared by Bert Rust, of the National Institutes of Standards:

380 out of each 1,000,000 parts of the atmosphere are carbon dioxide. 999,620 out of each 1,000,000 parts of the atmosphere are other things. As some temperatures on the planet have increased, so too have some levels of CO2. But why would you assume that 80 of the 1,000,000 parts are the cause of anything at all, rather than some combination of others of the 999,620 parts, or other things entirely that have nothing whatsoever to do with the composition of the atmosphere? Correlation is not causation, and indeed, it just might be reverse causation, as Dr. Spencer says. More carbon dioxide, trapped in ice and elsewhere, may be released if temperatures rise. And of course the “temperature anomaly” of half a degree centigrade may or may not have any meaning at all as a trend. But none of those details blunt the ardor of the former Vice President.

We previously wrote that, based on Al Gore’s recent SNL appearance, it looked as though he was not going to get back into politics. We based that conclusion in part on his odd monologue, in which Al Gore constructed a fantasy universe of the last five years, where he was President and 9-11 did not happen. We did not consider that Al Gore might very well base a successful campaign on the utter denial of reality, which is what obsession with global warming is about.

(By the way, we admit the possibility of Al Gore’s sources being right on their conclusions that global warming is taking place now. We even admit the possibility that it is primarily man-made, though we don’t believe it. With all that, we would still maintain that the problem of global warming is largely phony, and in any event is, at worst, a nuisance compared to the important and severe problems faced by mankind today.)

There is a good part of America today that wants desperately to think about complete and silly irrelevancies like global warming rather than the real problems facing America and the world. Indeed, we venture to say that if CO2, at 400 parts per million, learns how to chop off your head while shouting Allahu Akbar, the global warming enthusiasts would immediately look for something else to obsess over.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 12:24 pm and is filed under General, Religion, War, art, culture, business, idiots!, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.