deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.Let us examine this energy and alternative energy job claim for a moment and then I will move on the global warming issues. He complains that we have a growing dependence on oil from the most unstable region of the world. Well, Iraq is embarking on an ambitious program to expand its oil production to exceed that of Saudi Arabia [The Economist, 20-26 Feb 2010]. It may not accomplish this quickly, but if it even comes close to matching the output of Saudi Arabia, the cost of oil will remain very reasonable for many years to come and the alternative energy companies Al Gore has invested heavily in will not be able to compete, even with much larger government subsidies than our government drowning in debt can provide. OK, yes, Iraq is still in this volatile region, but every additional supply of oil adds to our energy security. Of course, one can also ask Gore why he and his Progressive friends who care so much about energy security and who do not want to pay for oil abroad will not allow us to explore, drill, and develop oil fields in our own off-shore waters and in the ridiculously innumerable acres of government-held land in the U.S. Neither does he explain why taxing the oil companies more heavily will help them to find more oil in the U.S. and abroad. Neither does he explain why sending money abroad to buy oil is somehow worse than sending money abroad to buy any other goods, services, or resources. We live in a global economy, which he seems to disparage with his fear of depending upon a global oil market, which in fact is a great advantage to us in stabilizing the price of oil and assuring its availability.
Next he makes the outrageous claim that we trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy. I really do not know what he is basing these claims on. It is true that China is rapidly increasing its output of cheap, inefficient solar panels largely for sales to countries with mandates requiring that they generate power with expensive solar power plants. The technology is more advanced in the U.S., but our costs of production are rather high. Perhaps Al Gore should call for a steep reduction in our absurdly high corporate income tax which makes it very difficult for American companies to compete in the global markets Al so fears. After all, the U.S. and Japan, whose economy has not been able to get out of the starting blocks for the last 15 years, have the highest corporate taxes in the world today and Obama wants to make them higher! Of course, Al would probably want a tax reduction only for his solar power companies, being a crony capitalist. Then he also claims that he has enumerated the most important sources of jobs for the 21st Century. What do you suppose the track record Teddy Roosevelt would have had for predicting the main sources of jobs in the 20th Century in 1910? Or, you may substitute the name of any politician of that time you might prefer.
Al Gore goes on to say:
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. 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 have dealt enough with the scientific scandal of the claims made by the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists that I will not lay out the magnitude of the problems here again, though I will continue to discuss those problems in other posts. I am just going to say that this attempt to minimize the scientific problems of the global warming alarmists has not held up in Australia or now in the United Kingdom and is beginning to collapse on the heads of such alarmists in the U.S. also. Many comedians are now picking up on this fraud and that is usually the end of any theory being taken seriously! So, Al Gore shows himself here as an ostrich with his head in the sand. Perhaps this is a delaying tactic, so he will have time to unload his alternative energy stocks on other Progressive suckers.
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.
By the way, when I tried to warn other alumni of Brown University and Case Western Reserve University of how the scientific argument for man-made global warming had fallen apart and that the alternative energy companies were going to have a very hard time of it as a result a couple of months ago, I was called rude, trailer trash, a flat-earther, and many other names by a great many alumni. Some of them had invested in alternative energy, one planned to work for such a company when he finished his graduate studies, one was an associate professor whose research grants depended upon the scare, and many others were just being good religious Progressives.
Al goes on to say:
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.The record of the UN IPCC reports has been to consistently overestimate the sea level rise and there is no reason known to me to think that more recently they have underestimated sea level rise to come. The Arctic ice cap expands and contracts mostly due to winds and not due to melting, so it is rather insensitive to any modest warming, such as that since the end of the Little Ice Age. In any case, if sea ice melts, it does not change the sea level! The ice on Baffin Island and on Greenland can cause the sea level to rise, but there is no reason to think all that ice is going to melt either. This is just more groundless alarmism perhaps issued to help his stocks hold value until he can unload them. As for Antarctica, most of the continent has been experiencing ice expansion, not contraction, in recent times and again there is no reason for alarm. Furthermore, there is no link to man's CO2 emissions here.
Then he makes the claim that
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.And this is almost certainly nonsense also. The official NOAA land surface temperature data has been so badly manipulated to make it seem as though the world has been warming that we now know that data is useless for establishing whether a given month or year is one of the warmer months or years in the last 130 years. Absolutely a meaningless claim. This is the word of an inveterate liar, so that everything such a liar has to say must be taken as meaningless. How naive does Gore think the American People are?
Now let us examine a perfectly illogical statement Al made:
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.Prof. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and a stalwart alarmist, recently stated that there has been no significant global warming since 1995. Since 2001, there has been a slight cooling, if anything, though this may also be regarded as insignificant. Now, if there was warming from 1990 to 1995 and then the warming stopped, the decade from 2000 to 2010 would be the warmest decade in recent history, even though no warming had occurred since 1995. But, Al wants us to believe that the claim that the last decade was the warmest means that warming has not stopped. This does not logically follow Al. You should have taken a philosophy course in remedial logic at Yale, Al. The claim that the last decade has been the hottest since modern records have been kept is also based on the warming manipulated surface temperature records, which disagree with the satellite temperature records which are more accurate and have not been tampered with to try to create an exaggerated warming.
Al goes on to make the argument that the recent heavy snowfalls are the result of global warming causing an increase in winter humidity. I have already debunked this argument in an earlier post.
Al's specious claims continue:
Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.The global warming pollutant is primarily CO2 and it is not a pollutant any more than water vapor is. By far the most ice is in the Antarctic and it is not melting as claimed. Other ice-covered areas are growing and contracting from year to year as they usually do, but perhaps with a very slight tendency to melt due to the recent end of the Little Ice Age. But, the seas are actually rising at a very slow rate compared to the average rise since the end of the last major Ice Age. While some have rashly predicted that hurricanes will become stronger, there is no evidence in history to support this and the likelihood is disputed by the best experts on violent storms. Last I knew, there was also no reason to believe that flooding and drought were significantly worse than at other times in history. I have no idea where Gore got that claim. As for the seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures, these go through cycles historically and there is no link to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Where does Al get all of this nonsense? Probably from his day dreams, which he spent so much time doing when he got a D in the course of the global warming advocating professor he now claims was so important to him when he was at Yale.
Gore now ramps up the scale of human misery to be caused by global warming:
the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.If the world were to become slightly warmer, life in most of the world would become easier, not harder. There might be some civil unrest in Florida and Arizona, since fewer people from New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would choose to move there upon retirement! Any slight extension to the growing season would be welcomed, not feared, in those cooler places which the greatest warming has been occurring, if you could actually believe the claims that it has, which you cannot. The increase in deadly diseases idea does not hold water either. For instance, it is claimed malaria will spread north. Nonsense, malaria was widely in the north in the 1800s when it was colder than now. It moved south mostly because swamps and marshes in the north were drained and because DDT was widely used there in earlier decades.
Next Al Gore informs us about his political, ethical, and human race assessments. This is interesting. He bemoans the fact that the economy is now largely global, that the industrial countries do not want to lose their jobs, and that the emerging economies have rising expectations. He goes on:
The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.Apparently, he thinks the world should be bipolar and that communism somehow made it more properly bipolar. He thinks a strong belief in market economics is hubris. He claims that government is the democracy sphere and that it is in opposition to the market sphere. This is really weird. Government, even when largely democratic, does not allow everyone the freedom to buy whatever goods and services they choose individually or allow them to start their own business or allow them to work freely for anyone who wishes to hire them. Government, even so-called democratic government, always tends to interfere with these personal decisions. There is no more democratic way for a free People to live than in a free market economy. Yet, Gore tries to make us think that the one-size-fits-all-decrees of government make for a more democratic society than does a free market society. Hogwash.
Next, Gore sets out on a tirade against television:
Simultaneously, changes 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. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.This is a bit strange too. The heyday of television for the news was prior to the recent period when Gore wanted carbon cap and trade and restrictions on energy use. Pretty much all but one news network (Fox) have been touting the Progressive line on global warming and the nefarious role of the industrialized humans, anyway. One would think he might be railing against the Internet, which he invented, for its role in helping to expand opposition to the Democrats cap and trade schemes, disseminating the evidence that the catastrophic global warming claims were false, enlarging the Tea Party revolt, and getting out the information in the Democrat bills they did not want the People to know about until after they became law. Oh, but of course, he cannot rail against the Internet, because he invented it! Then, it is curious that he talks about exploitation of the ignorant and easily victimized People in the same sentence in which he tells us that calling the Progressive program "socialist" is unfair. I still find the very words exploitation and solidarity sickening after decades of hearing them pour out of the mouths of socialists, Marxists, and communists!
Now the elitist Progressive comes forth strongly again:
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.Yes, of course, we cannot allow the People to make their own choices in the free market, because we must use the force of government to redeem these sorry sinners. We, the elitist Progressives, must use the force of government to enforce myriad laws to make the People do what they will not choose to do individually in their own lives. Of course, many of them are not college educated and many who are did not go to Ivy League quality universities, so we brilliant and well-studied elite will so manipulate the government that these unwashed peasants will do as we tell them to, while we all pretend this was democratically decided. The People will not make the right personal choices, so we will deceive them into thinking they made the very laws which they would not obey except for the fact that the government will force them to do so. Government must constrain the private sector to redeem the sinning People. Government is the Messiah or the elitists who manipulate its levers are the Messiahs.
This sort of manipulation has been going on for a long time. For most of this time, this caused many people simply to feel disenfranchised. But, finally, the people became angry about it and they decided they had to do something about being taken advantage of by those who manipulated the levers of government in order to redeem them from the things and actions they loved. The People have responded with the Tea Party movement. It is now clear that very many of the People have seen through the Al Gores, John Kerrys, Obamas, Pelosis, Reids, Waxmans, and their ilk.
Perhaps the day of big government redeeming the People will finally come to an end and the People will finally redeem their government. To do that, they must force it to obey the Constitution, which will take some doing. But once you see through the obscurantism of the Gores, this becomes a lot easier. The man behind the curtain has finally been seen and he is not impressive at all.
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