Al Gore: Hoist On His Own Canard

Al Gore's fear-mongering book and video, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, represent an undeniable triumph for K-12, academe, Hollywood, TV, the press and liberal lemmings worldwide. And no mean achievement in the entrepreneurial spirit of, say, Bernie Madoff, Charles Ponzi and John Law. (1)


But fashions change, and the recent dismantling of the too-neat science used to support the "planetary emergency" may take hold in the public imagination; perhaps the sky is not falling after all. And it may turn out that the Chicken Little town criers, from researchers to governmental and supra-governmental elites, may have had base motives. But given the inertia of liberal ideology, it is hard to know how the Climategate scandal will be resolved. Playing it safe, one may imagine, is Mr. Gore, who seems to have gone to ground. There is a deal of rumbling in America and Europe about formal investigations and, ultimately, legal sanctions. It will be interesting to see how much support Gore and his fellow laureate, IPCC chairman Rejenda K. Pachauri, can rely on from establishment power brokers of the left.
 

In many ways AGW fears and the narrative projection of global doom are symbolic of liberal thinking. It is a victory of utopian vision over reality. (2) Whatever threatens the vision must be destroyed -- truth, fact, reality be damned. And the creation of a crisis-fear in the public mind is a fine way to recruit supporters since people instinctively band together to fight existential dangers. In context it is worth noting that, since the beginning of the environmental mysticism movement, there has always a false assumption that the natural world is in stasis -- a "balance of nature" that we must preserve. In fact, the natural world is always in flux -- evolving and devolving, and thinking of "ecosystems" as static and balanced can only be justified by observations over relatively short times. Climate change is a premier example, and when raw (in the common sense of "uncooked") are available and correctly presented, it is clear that the earth's climate is cyclical. The IPCC and its constituencies deliberately ignored or failed to publish historical data showing the influence of solar mimima, ignored long periods during which recorded temperatures did not support their agenda, and abandoned rigor in the placement of temperature monitoring stations, deliberately skewing reported data. In short, for the warmist community, fact was the enemy of the "greater truth".

 
To illustrate the point, I invite the reader to consider the title of Mr. Gore's myopic opus.  It is revealing in the extreme. An inconvenient truth, for starters. The choice of the leading article suggests that there are many truths, and the one in question is merely inconvenient.  But truth is never a matter of convenience, except in the realm of liberal ideology; there, when truth is incompatible, it is simply denied as false and a new one is constructed that is more congenial to their beliefs.  Though Mr. Gore clearly meant that his truth would be "inconvenient" to AGW deniers (read heretics, apostates), he unwittingly projects his own way of thinking. (3)   Finally, 'planetary emergency' -- alluded to previously -- is a strawman meant to instill fear.

So now we return to Al Gore's current and future status.  As I mentioned earlier, he has carefully maintained a very low profile, and among all but the truest True Believers his reputation has been severely tarnished.  The threat of litigation is a real one for Mr. Gore, Chairman Pachauri and a number of scientists in Europe and at home. Sen. James Inhofe is preparing for hearings before the senate, and under pressure,  the British parliament has launched investigations.  It seems to me that for Al Gore (and others) the question is not whether, but how high, will he be hoist?
 


Note.  Readers who depend solely on traditional American media will have found little information on the climate change scandal called (predictably), Climategate.  So I offer a very abbreviated summary:

What skeptics in the scientific community had long known became embarrassingly exposed with the publication of the CRU emails that revealed deliberate manipulation of climate data in aid of "proving" Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).  Following closely upon the publication of the email correspondence were further admissions that temperature metrics had been "massaged" from Australia and New Zeland and the U.S. to Russia.  It became clear that government entities, NGO's and universities -- national and international -- had been actively involved.

For more information there is a more complete summary here.  There has been much good work done by bloggers, and without their work this scandal would likely never have come to light.  Readers who want to examine this issue at the level of fine detail will find everything they need at this excellent site.  I recommend Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth Global Warming the Missing Science.  Finally, a brief article by Patrick J. Buchanan, The Hoax of the Century, provides comic relief (citing prior 'scientific fraud') along with highlights of debunked AGW claims.

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1. As a general matter, I have great admiration for successful entrepreneurs; but I prefer them honest and with some grounding in reality.
2. Feeling the need to footnote "reality" is to acknowledge the pernicious influence of relativism in contemporary thought and education. What I mean by the term is its traditional, Western meaning. Reality is the state of affairs in the world derived from the observation and verification of facts.
3. Al Gore defenders may reasonably say that he was only asserting that there are many conditions in the world, and some are more difficult than others. I can accept the argument, but, given the Left's history of denying objective truth and substituting ideological myth, I think Gore revealed more than he intended.