Don Surber, Walter Williams tag-team Al Gore and Tom Teepen

 
Al Gore has gotten huge lately. And I don't mean just physically. Sure, he may in fact be visible from space, but more importantly, a grass-roots presidential campaign has emerged in recent months. The "Draft Gore 2008" campaign is a touch comical given his recent efforts to take commercial advantage of the publicity surrounding climate change.


The 'draft Gore' exertions highlight a certain blissful naivety (note: I restrained myself and didn't say "gullibility" this time) present in certain segments of the electorate.

Why do I consider these well-meaning citizens naive? First, consider that Gore's 10,000-square foot Nashville estate consumes roughly $2,400 a month in gas and electric bills, including $500 a month for the pool-house. Gore also has two additional homes including a 4,000 square foot Arlington, Virginia mansion. And, while promoting his recent movie, Gore traveled in private jets rather than on commercial flights. So, when it comes to personal sacrifice, Gore isn't exactly making himself an eco-martyr.


Then there are the facts behind global warming itself. In a recent op-ed, the brilliant Walter Williams shredded the "science" surrounding the human causation of climate change. Put simply, the assertion that we can control the Earth's temperature dials by suppressing industrial economies is the modern-day equivalent of alchemy, only without the intellectual rigor.

About 65 million years ago, the Earth experienced one of the most rapid and extreme global climate changes recorded in geologic history. The period has been named the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum." The ocean was 18 to 27 degrees hotter than it is today. Antarctica, which is today's coldest place on Earth, was home to temperate forests, beech trees and ferns. The Earth had no permanent polar ice caps. In the past 65 million years, the Earth's temperature has increased and decreased with no help from mankind. My questions to the anti-climate change warriors are: Can mankind really stop climate change, and what is the "correct" Earth temperature? [Ed: emphasis mine]

Don Surber notes several little-publicized events in which scientists increasingly question Gore's eco-hysteria using -- who'd have thunk it? -- science, as opposed to YouTube videos of glaciers collapsing into the sea.

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week... Man’s contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn’t change the climate if we tried, he maintained. “We’re all going to survive this. It’s all going to be a joke in five years,” he said. [...and...] Major cuts in carbon emissions would hurt the nation’s economy and provide little or no environmental benefit, a top hurricane predictor said Friday... And there’s scant evidence that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases affect hurricane power or frequency, professor William Gray told an audience Friday, the final day of the Governor’s Hurricane Conference in Fort Lauderdale. But Oscar-winning expert Al Gore said penguins are walking across the Sahara... Augie Auer said carbon dioxide as a result of man’s activities was only 3.2% of that, hence only 0.12% of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066%, 0.047% and 0.046% respectively. And we’re going to waste trillions of dollars worrying about that 0.12%? Especially when the actual cause of Earth’s temperature fluctations is the Sun’s own temperature fluctuations?

Never one to let the facts get in the way of a business opportunity, Al Gore continues to shill for shutting down industrial capacity and for increasing the size of the "carbon-offset" market.


Carbon offsets are, of course, the so-called 'currency' that allows polluters to make up for their emissions. What Gore isn't telling you is that a wide range of respected scientists, environmentalists, researchers, agriculturalists, and activists -- on the left, mind you -- believe that carbon offsets are a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse. In fact, whenever I hear the term, I catch the distinct whiff of a junk-bond scheme, only updated for the era of eco-hysterics.


Of course, a little science never stopped Democratic party public relations hacks -- er, I mean op-ed columnists -- like Tom Teepen from slamming the GOP. In a series of columns, Teepen pilloried three GOP presidential non-contenders (Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo -- quick, name their home states!) for questioning Darwin's theory of evolution.

So far has the Republican Party fallen into a sink of anti-intellectualism. Indeed, into fantasy. One doesn't believe in or not believe in evolution, any more than one believes or not in physics... Republicans, as a party, have moved a broad contempt for science toward the center of their vaunted "values..."

Teepen, Democratic party shill that he is, can't see the hypocrisy that oozes from every pore. Al Gore and his merry band of eco-marketers have used every tactic imaginable to silence the scientists who question his climate change campaign and carbon offset rhetoric.


Instead, Gore and his PR hacks have run rough-shod over any scientists who point to history and question the advisability of destroying the global economy to enrich the carbon offset marketeers. Don't look for a column on this topic any time soon from the likes of Teepen, Dowd, and Cohen.