Recently in Al Gore Category

Investor's Business Daily:

Already 20,000 overnight hotel stays that had been reserved for the December United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen have been canceled. Either a lot of people are losing interest — or they're thinking it will just be too cold.

Maybe not an antidote, exactly. It's about as far to one side of the climate argument as Gore's flick is to the other (though, interestingly, AAFAIT actually admits warming is "on the low end of the IPCC models.").

But hey - you're smart enough to watch both and decide for yourselves where the truth lies.

Climate McCarthyism at EPA and elsewhere. If scientific credibility is what you're after, this doesn't help. But given this is D.C. and a lot of dollars are at stake I s'pose it's inevitable.

Rasmussen:

As is often the case, there’s a telling division between the views of populist or Mainstream America and the Political Class. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Mainstream Americans say they are not willing to pay higher taxes and utility costs to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming, compared to only 17% of the Political Class.

For 57% of the Political Class taking steps to stop global warming is more important than job creation, while 71% of Mainstream America believe job creation is more important.

A matter of who stands to gain most? Are the politicos just that much smarter? Whadda you all think?

When Operation Market Garden failed, the Netherlands - less Jews and many Christians who were being exterminated in prison campes elsewhere - nearly starved to death. My grandfather risked his own life in the Dutch underground. Dad lost whole neighborhoods full of friends in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Even six decades later the horror of neighbors being lined up and shot by Hitler's thugs is nearly impossible for my father to convey. 

The global warming debate has been interesting and informative. At other times insulting and frustrating. But never infuriating.

Until now.

Gore owes my father an apology.

Excerpts from here:

A team of scientists with years of expertise in climate issues has written an open letter to Congress asserting the "sky is not falling" and there is no evidence man is causing global warming.

The new letter said the facts are simple: "The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for 10 years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

"The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN'T EXIST."

The [cap & trade] legislation would, however, "cripple the U.S. economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors," the scientists warned.

-D

...but I haven't had an Al Gore post up in a while, and couldn't resist this via AAEA:

National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) Energy Committee Chair Maurice R. Stone, [right], who just finished the first ever Climate Change Summit course administrated by Vice President Al Gore, is now a certified Climate Change Ambassador. [snip]

Maurice Stone is a senior management executive with over 27 years of extensive entrepreneurial and business management experience. From December 2007 to the present Mr. Stone has been involved as an equity principal and/or agent in various business structure financings in the energy, healthcare, baked goods, and real estate markets. Mr. Stone earned his B.S. degree in electrical engineering, with a minor in Finance from Memphis State University in 1981.

I'm sure Mr. Stone's a good guy, and it's great to see a businessman in this position. But it strikes me that someone with little background in physical oceanography or climatology can be christened a "certified" Climate Change Ambassador after a three day business meeting with Al Gore.

First it was indulgences.  Now, it seems, come the knights templar.

Certified indeed.

National Review lifts this from US News:

"It's Al Gore's greatest frustration," says Newport. "We seem less concerned than more about global warming over the years. . . . Despite the movies and publicity and all that, we're just not seeing it take off with the American public. And that was occurring even before the latest economic recession."

Greg quotes Al's old boss ("It's the economy, stupid"). The reality of the cost of regulating and taxing CO2 certainly hurts the climate change cause.  But I agree with that last sentence in the quote. I said a year ago that this issue was on the wane. Live Earth and Earth Hour were both enormous flops. I didn't even see a lot of hype (outside green circles) for this year's Earth Day beyond the normal trash pickups and such.

Question now is what can a frustrated Al accomplish with a majority Democrat Capitol Hill?

Answer:  Your wallet's not out of the woods just yet.

LDS Church jumping on the climate bandwagon?

Some Utah environmentalists see the LDS Church as a strong potential ally, "I think it's a great sign that Al Gore is at least having a conversation and starting a dialogue with the church here," said Vanessa Pierce, Executive Director of HEAL Utah.

Pierce raised another point that may make the LDS church particularly sensitive to the issue of global climate change. "In the South Pacific the Church has a tremendous influence and those were some of the people who are going to be most directly impacted by global warming," she said.

Christian Science Monitor:

In an unprecedented move Wednesday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee rescinded the Peace Prize it awarded in 2007 to former US vice president Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, amid overwhelming evidence that global warming is an elaborate hoax cooked up by Mr. Gore.

Ouch.

UPDATE: Too bad this isn't and April Fools joke.

UK Times Online:

“The new supercomputer, which will become operational later this year, will emit 14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year,” said Dave Britton, the Met Office’s chief press officer. This is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by 2,400 homes – generating an average of six tonnes each a year.

Of course. But hey - they can always buy CO2 offsets from Al Gore.

UPDATE: Ethanol added to gas to reduce CO2 lowers mileage and has the opposite effect. In the comments:

As a policy matter, if people's mileage is going down by 20%, then it's going to take 25% more gasoline to go the same distance. 10% of that new product is ethanol, which means that we're using 12% more petroleum-based gasoline than we would without ethanol additives. Yay for environmentalism!

While Gore is forthright about his allegiance to Christianity, it is evident that Christianity is only one of several belief systems from which he has collected his beliefs. The others include secular humanism (particularly the theory of evolution) and the New Age movement.

Gore argues that we will have a better motivation for caring for the earth when we see ourselves as connected with it, and as we’ve seen, he bases that connection on the pantheistic “web of life.” The problem with Gore’s reasoning, though, is that by basing life’s value on an impersonal web of life he diminishes the value of all life to its lowest common denominator. Consequently, human life becomes no more valuable than the life of a rat or rhododendron. And when humanity’s sense of value is diminished, so, too, will our motivation for valuing the rest of creation be diminished.

More here. -D