Carbon Crater Al

Gore Unhinged
Dr. Paul Kengor
Monday, July 13, 2009

“How can ANYONE take this man seriously?” writes Marilyn, a frequent reader of our Center for Vision & Values articles.

Attached to Marilyn’s email was this headline, “Gore compares climate change fight to war against Nazis.” As the accompanying article noted, Al Gore, speaking at the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, warned his audience—mostly British—of the imperative to confront climate change, as Britain and the Allies once battled Hitler.

“The former U.S. vice president said the world lacked the political will to act,” reported the London Times, “and invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill by encouraging leaders to unite their nations to fight climate change.”

Fancying himself a contemporary Churchill, Gore sounded the clarion call, declaring that the essential missing ingredient is courage and commitment. Like the brave Sir Winston in those ominous days of the Battle of Britain, Gore stoically exhorted: “We have everything we need, except political will.”

As for those pusillanimous appeasers who cover their eyes to the need for urgent action? Presumably, they are modern Neville Chamberlains, appeasing the evil of global warming, just as history’s Great Appeaser placated Hitler.

Predictably, Al Gore’s extremist proclamations were largely ignored by the mainstream press that tragically serves as educator-in-chief to most Americans. This isn’t the kind of headline deemed newsworthy by Katie Couric and CBS News.

See the rest of the article here.

From “The American Thinker”

June 05, 2009

NASA’s Latest Discovery: Sun Heats the Earth

Otis A. Glazebrook IV
Robert Calahan at NASA’s Goddard Space Center could be in big trouble — for telling the truth. Here is a headline for an article in the Daily Tech:

“NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming”

Here are some excerpts from the piece:

A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate.  The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.

Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles.  At the cycle’s peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat.  According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, “Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene.”

This report may represent the third time that NASA’s DR. James Hansen, Al Gore’s point man on his AGW hoax, has had to backtrack on his claims that humans are responsible for climate change.

In the past Dr. Hansen was forced to admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year on record due to a lack of standardization of weather reporting stations. Hansen also misstated that “October 2008 was the hottest on record,” largely because the data used repeated September’s.

The article concludes:

The inconvertible fact, here is that even NASA’s own study acknowledges that solar variation has caused climate change  in the past.  And even the study’s members, mostly ardent supports of AGW theory, acknowledge that the sun may play a significant role in future climate changes.

Could Dr. Hansen’s Reign of Error as head of the Goddard Institute for Space Flight be coming to an end? Or will Robert Calahan get the ax for telling the truth?

Science or ideology?  What’s it going to be NASA?

From “The American Thinker”

December 15, 2008

Warmist hysteria intensifies as temperatures plunge (updated)

Thomas Lifson
With temperatures falling since 1998’s peak, and much of the nation shivering, global warming propagandists become have become shriller, even asserting counterfactual propositions. Case in point: Seth Borentstein “science” reporter for the Associated Press.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters debunks the “global warming is accelerating” nonsense offered by AP to gullible (or mendacious) editors in newsrooms across the country. It is remarkable to see bald-faced lies so readily debunked.

The willingness of media outlets to offer self-evident tripe in the face of both the data of the past decade and the immediate experience of people in their daily lives right now has to be considered a form of hysteria. Both the Associated Press and the newspapers which collectively own it are in serious economic trouble, with substantial layoffs accomplished and likely to be repeated, and questions about their survivability evident to everyone.

Instead of focusing on improving performance and survivability, the organs putting forth this claptrap jeopardize their already shaky reputations. It is suicide by propaganda.

Meanwhile, Al Gore, speaking in Germany, has predicted that the polar ice caps will be gone in 5 years. Meanwhile, the 20 foot rise in ocean levels, which he predicted “in the near future” is nowhere to be found. Miami is not under water.

This buffoonery would be merely amusing, were it not for the intention of the Obama administration to cripple our economy to prevent the imaginary harm so recklessly predicted.

Update from Marc Sheppard:

This isn’t the first time the AP “science writer” has gone H.G Wells in his reporting. You may recall us taking him to task in March 2007 for a number of similarly over-the-top doom-saying articles.  Among them was one so inept in its prediction that the IPCC AR4 would blame Hurricane Katrina on manmade global warming that Professor Neville Nicholls, the Lead Author of WG1’s Chapter 9, felt compelled to write:

“I was disappointed that after more than two years carefully analyzing the literature on possible links between tropical cyclones and global warming that even before the report was approved it was being misreported and misrepresented.”

The professor then addressed Borenstein’s bogus sooth-saying directly:

“We concluded that the question of whether there was a greenhouse-cyclone link was pretty much a toss of a coin at the present state of the science, with just a slight leaning towards the likelihood of such a link. But the premature reports suggested that we were asserting the existence of much stronger evidence.”

Here we are over a year and a half later and this man continues to slip his counterfeit wisdom past his editors.

Fortunately, as the overheated predictions of both alarmists like Borenstein and agenda-driven agencies like the IPCC fail to meet observed cold reality, this hoax may finally be singing its swan-song.

8/13

Electric Al
Al Gore wasn’t too happy with a PD update a few weeks ago on his energy consumption habits at his Nashville palace. His environmental adviser, Kalee Kreider, contacted us to clarify a few things about the former vice president’s carbon footprint.

For one thing, she says Mr. Gore now buys his power through Nashville Electric’s “Green Powerswitch” program, which — like similar programs offered by other utilities around the country — allows customers to pay extra and receive assurances that their power nominally comes from a solar or wind facility. (However, for the record, Nashville Electric purchases all its power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which says the “backbone of the system” is its eleven coal-burning plants. They account for 60% of its power; nuclear for 30%.)

Ms. Kreider also says the “Inconvenient Truth” impresario has installed solar panels, feeding electricity back to the local grid. She says this power is metered separately, so wasn’t deducted from the embarrassing figures about Mr. Gore’s energy consumption reported by the Tennessee Center for Public Policy. Finally, she says the Gores have installed a geothermal system for heat and hot water — an unspecified “problem” with which even prompted a visit from the fire department last year.

The effect of these improvements and modifications, Ms. Kreider says, has been to reduce the Gore household’s net energy use by 40% since the Tennessee Center’s Drew Johnson first publicized Mr. Gore’s energy bills last year.

Hooray! The Gores still spend more in a month than most households do in a year. Nor have they released the cost of all these retrofits, which only seem to prove that you can spend a fortune on green indulgences and still maintain a sizeable carbon footprint. But it would be nice to have some cost figures — if only to know what Mr. Gore would have in store for the rest of us. The former vice president has lately become a partner in a Silicon Valley firm positioning itself to profit from “green energy” mandates that would be imposed by law.

– Brian M. Carney

7/16

Founder of the Weather Channel refutes Gore’s alarmism re: global warming: See A False Frenzy on Global Warming.

6/21

Smokestack Al
Environmentalists are constantly telling us that major reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions can be made fairly painlessly, so the case of one former Vice President is instructive.

Al Gore made headlines last year when the Tennessee Center for Policy Research disclosed just how much energy the “Inconvenient Truth” auteur consumes in his giant new palace in the Nashville suburbs. Mr. Gore responded at the time by assuring the public that he was purchasing “offsets” to make up for his energy-guzzling ways.

Well, this week the Tennessee Center’s Drew Johnson checked in on Mr. Gore again. And despite an alleged program of greenification – including geothermal systems, solar panels and lots and lots of nifty compact fluorescent bulbs – Mr. Gore’s electricity use from the grid was up 10% in 2007 compared to the year before. At this rate, he’ll never hit his Kyoto targets. His Tennessee home currently eats up 17,768 kilowatt-hours of electricity every month – about 50% more electricity than the average household consumes in an entire year. That’s one inconvenient carbon footprint.

– Brian M. Carney