Al Gore, the Puritan global warming hysteric, insists that we all reduce our living standards and dismantle prosperity in order to SAVE THE PLANET!!! But he never practices what he preaches. He flies on private jets, once took rapid transit into a city but had his luggage brought in by limo, and most egregiously, has multiple huge homes, his primary residence being a massive energy hog. And now he has purchased another mansion in the very tony Montecito, near Santa Barbara. From the story:
Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, have added a Montecito-area property to their real estate holdings, reports the Montecito Journal. The couple spent $8,875,000 on an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, a real estate source familiar with the deal confirms. The Italian-style house has six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms.
I am sure Gore will pay his own company to plant a few trees as an indulgence and call it even.
Gore has made more than $100 million pitching climate panic. But he acts in his personal life as if it is all a scam. Do as I say, not as I do: That’s Elmer Gantry, er Al–the debate is over, but I won’t answer tough questions–Gore.
April 29th, 2010 | 12:22 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, Greengamma.com, Lisa, Michael Stryder, Wesley J. Smith and others. Wesley J. Smith said: Global Warming Hysteria: Al Gore, Hypocrite » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/m5PCD [...]
April 29th, 2010 | 12:25 pm
Shoot the messenger mentality?
No, messengers aren’t showered with accolades and awards. Make no mistake; Mr. Gore has taken a lead role in the CAGW faction. Obviously, he doesn’t believe what he preaches, why should we?
April 29th, 2010 | 3:41 pm
This typical liberal hypocrisy. “I planted a tree so I can burn up as much energy as I want.” What a joke. I wonder how all the climate dopes that made Al stinkin’ rich feel now? Hey, Obama, did Al make too much money?
April 29th, 2010 | 8:50 pm
Gee, blackman, you’d like us to think you never met a Republican hypocrite, yet here you are posting on one’s website.
April 29th, 2010 | 9:04 pm
I can not believe the lies coming out of mr gores mouth. He can not prove that global warming exsists. He is making millions of dollars telling lies. We just had snow storms on April 28th in New england. Is that global warming?? He had no right to receive the Nobel Piece Prize. He should return it. He did nothing to deserve it. Where is the proof of global warming Mr Gore, you can’t answer that can you. You can’t even face the media and tell the truth.
April 30th, 2010 | 12:30 am
[...] post: Global Warming Hysteria: Al Gore, Hypocrite » Secondhand Smoke | A … Tags: all-reduce, dismantle-prosperity, flies-on-private, Global Warming, living, [...]
April 30th, 2010 | 12:35 pm
Action starts with education and knowledge. Without the knowledge of how the planet works, we can’t make proper decisions regarding proper care of it. Scientists job is to observe and figure out how the earth’s systems function. They’ve observed changes occurring at rates never before observed in the long history of the planet.
You guys are so focused on Gore, that you ignore the scientific evidence that is published daily. For every 1 article that might point at natural factors causing our current global climate change, there are 80 studies that present evidence supporting co2′s effect as a green house gas.
Gore didn’t make this up! He’s just repeating what respected and accredited scientists have know for 40 years.
Gore has done more to educate the world about the reality of global warming and taken actions to make a difference in the world than any of you critics. He’s so busy trying to make a difference, that – yes, he fly’s his jet around.
You call it hypocrisy, most people see it as reality. The ability to see that the human race can make changes for the better, become more sustainable and invent technologies that extract energy from other sources than oil DOES NOT MEAN we want everyone to live in caves and destroy our economic systems!
that is ridiculous. You say that about Gore only because you disagree with his ideology and you are attempting to discredit him. Why don’t you look at the real evidence presented by real scientists from all over the world. Who cares about Gore! Get your heads out of your political pissing matches, and look at what we are doing to this planet.
We affect the planet with our pollution. Try dumping all of your garbage in your back yard for 100 years. your back yard will cease to be livable.
Now scale this simple concept to the size of the planet. It takes longer to fill up and pollute, but with 6 billion people, it’s only a matter of time. This is basic logic. And this basic logic has nothing to do with your political slant on science.
April 30th, 2010 | 1:21 pm
HW-how do you know if Wesely is a Republican?
April 30th, 2010 | 3:12 pm
Wow Jim! Are the “real” scientists real because they believe your ideology? There are several scientist who don’t believe the global warming theory, (I infasize theory), I guess you don’t consider them “real” scientists though. I’ll give you the plane (although he could fly commercially), but what about algores mansions? Does a family of his size really need all that space/energy usage? Gore is a hypocrite, plain and simple, and since your bashing the people on here for political ideologies, well algore is a political figure, what else did you expect from commenters on here? Actually you should be mad at algore not the people on here, the dude has been scamming people like you out of their money and promoting a scaled down lifestyle while he lives high on the hog.
April 30th, 2010 | 9:11 pm
recently I saw some photos of a volcano in the south pacific that would not have been recorded if there had not been a yacht sailing with a perceptive crew. Q: how often does that happen?
Q: if a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to see it…….
…..you understand……
April 30th, 2010 | 11:12 pm
Jim: All I see on your part is a very long diatribe with a lot of accusations and not an ounce of proof.
What makes you an expert on man-made global warming; since there is no such thing, only weather?
I’ll debate you on the fact that man-made global warming is a farce on any day you pick!
May 1st, 2010 | 8:27 am
The prospect of out-and-out catastrophe is the beating heart of the actually existing global-warming controversy. Warmists have helpfully spelled out the meaning of catastrophe in the most lurid terms imaginable: sea-level rises of a meter and a half with submersion of whole archipelagos and large portions of entire nations (picturesque Holland? just a memory), total desertification of sub-Saharan Africa, destruction of half the food-producing capabilities of enormous parts of the globe leading to the starvation of “hundreds of millions” of people, disproportionately in the Third World. Northern India and western China, home to a billion people, will to all intents lose their water supplies. Species extinction will occur on a scale not seen since the Precambrian. Simultaneously, social conditions will worsen dramatically, descending to a hobbesian state of nature, and, in historical terms, will do so practically overnight, spawning disease, war, and famine. In brief, we are asked to contemplate the Four Horsemen at full gallop, roaming the globe and pillaging like Huns.
You know what? If the “climate sensitivity” proposed by AGW is in fact correct, which is to say, four-to-six degrees of warming per CO2 doubling per century, all those horrors likely will occur! Without such melodramatic prospects in the offing should we “fail to act,” without such nightmares – a list that could with little effort be extended – soberly announced, there most likely would have been no Rio Summit, no Kyoto Protocol, and no Copenhagen Conference. The governments of the world would have been derelict in their duties in the extreme and possibly deserving of a visit by a firing squad had they ignored such predictions, which moreover were grounded in supposedly impeccable science.
If AGW didn’t assert what it plainly does, who would much care that the earth has been warming (moderately) since about 1850, which no one “denies”? They would care about as much as people did before AGW entered the scene, definitely from stage left, that in the previous three centuries the earth had been cooling or that in the three centuries before that surface temperatures were rising, and so on, back as far as ingenuity may discover. Which government would concern itself over a secular oscillation one degree in amplitude?
Of course the scientists themselves – most of them anyway – do not speak of war, famine, and plague. That task has been delegated to eager and excitable flunkies in the media. No, Mann and Jones and Santer merely have to announce their pat four-to-six degree scenario and all the rest follows as the night the day. (A notable exception is Jim Hansen at NASA, by far the most influential alarmist in the United States, who has called for trying coal-company executives at the Hague for crimes against humanity.)
Earlier Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “Assessment Reports” (AR1 and -2, mid-to-late 1990s) had produced no great alarm. But that was before the AGW ball really got rolling, to be precise, before the Mann hockey stick (1998). That single, bogus* graphic electrified the climatological community and galvanized calls for immediate and draconian government intervention because it seemingly demonstrated for the first time that (1) previous oscillations in temperature were much smaller than had been believed and in any event were not global in extent, and (2) since the industrial revolution commenced in earnest, the rate of temperature increase has growed like Topsy.
For the first time (AR3, 2001), the IPCC included in its “Advice to Policymakers” chapter, the conclusion that “it has been determined that global warming is accelerating and that it is probably manmade.” Lest there be further pointless quibbling, the meaning of “probably” is spelled out in the report’s discussion of confidence intervals: “probably” means “with 95% confidence.” The basis for the manmade part was, and still substantially is, a patent fallacy that scientists used to be taught to avoid as one would poison, i.e., post hoc ergo propter hoc. As temperatures have risen, so has industrial activity, and we blithely conclude that the one has caused the other! Putting aside the magnitude of the temperature anomaly at the heart of the controversy, industrial production is still rising, but the temperature curve is either flat or decelerating, aka cooling.
Of the 2500 names appended to AR3 and -4, reports that wholeheartedly endorse AGW, only about 700 are even scientists. Of the 700 fewer than 70 are climatologists. Only 60% of the 70 – 42 scientists, count ‘em! – thought human activity was responsible to any appreciable extent. When AR3 was being prepared, none of the dozen or so panelist drafts had concluded that the warming was “probably manmade”? That last particular and deliberately incendiary observation had been inserted, most likely by Ben Santer, a leading alarmist and chair of the IPCC report-preparation committee, after the final iteration of the chapter drafts had been circulated and without being resubmitted for vetting, in clear violation of the IPCC’s own report-preparation protocols.
Given such textual manipulation, the impact of which on policymakers was both importunate and consequential, a suggestion of some kind of conspiracy in operation is not at all unreasonable.
Moreover, that particular feat of report-writing legerdemain is no deep, dark secret. The President of the National Academy of Sciences was so concerned that in 2005 he submitted an op-ed piece to the WSJ (shamefully, the only newspaper that would run it) denouncing the insertion as tantamount to scientific fraud. The rest of the media yawned and ignored him.
Isolating what climatologists call a “temperature signal” in an enormous welter of disparate data, collected under maddeningly varying conditions (nothing like laboratory work at all), as well as a millennium in scope, is almost entirely a statistical exercise. Sure, there is a deterministic physics of an embarrassingly rudimentary sort lurking in the background. In fact, Steve McIntyre, a bona fide statistician, some time ago challenged Michael Mann, James Hansen, and the rest to present a physical argument, not a computer model that assumes CO2 forcing (warming), starting with first principles, that would proceed from any given concentration of atmospheric CO2 to the predicted and apocalyptic 4-degree-celsius of warming per CO2 doubling in the next century. No one has ever taken him up on it. It cannot be done; and that can very nearly be known apriori. The relevant equations to be solved, the Navier-Stokes equation, a set of second-order, nonlinear, inhomogenous partial differential equations cannot be solved in a finite amount of time with presently available computing power. This is not an opinion. Were the computing resources at NAS or Hadley CRU to increase 1000 times and set to work around the clock like a regiment of coked-up crack whores laboring to satisfy demand during Fleet Week, they could not be solved.
The only way AGW alarmists can lay claim to solving them is by stripping them quite naked of all semblance of physicality. the basic physics involves the Wien radiation law (c. 1879), which presumes radiation by an infinitely thin, infinitely dense, and impermeable infrared (IR) – in this case – blackbody source. Pathetically hammered into filling that monumentally idealized role is atmospheric CO2, a trace gas composing one percent of a 400-quadrillion ton atmosphere – so much for infinitely dense – that is distributed uniformly from the top to the bottom of the troposphere – so much for infinitely thin – and, if one matches the known 161 watts per square meter IR radiation in the pertinent 3-5 micron window from the earth’s surface with the know quantity of CO2 available to absorb it, the CO2 is already saturated, like a sponge that has absorbed all the water it ever can, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 (currently estimated at c. 290 ppm) could treble without a measurable increase in absorption occurring, the excess passing unmolested through to outer space, whereas the alarmists are fixated on a mere doubling. So much for impermeability.
The chief AGW proponents are not physicists, nor do they appear in their writings to be very much interested in physics even though the problem posed in AGW is at heart a radiative-physics problem. More pertinently, they are not statisticians even secondarily! They are trying to extract a certain temperature curve that matches their motley data sets, and, shockingly enough, they use off-the-shelf statistical software packages for the most part, tweaking them and the data until the curve fits without really understanding or even much caring about – ignorance is bliss – the numerous mathematical restrictions on the use of the software, some of them very difficult if not impossible to do justice to. Even then, what they succeed in producing with their tweaking is a hindcast of the raw data, the same data that they have repeatedly massaged, homogenized, and adjusted! – the terms used are numerous – not a forecast, which is where the rubber meets the road. Their forecasts, beginning in 1998, as even warmists admit, have been next to worthless for at least 15 years, judged by surface temperature measurements, and even all the way back to 1979 if satellite data is admitted, namely, no evidence of statistically significant warming can be found. It required an expert statistican like Steve McIntyre to “take the cunning in their craft [Romans 3].”
The main point to take away from this, I am suggesting, is that if more people of responsibility understood just how deeply AGW arguments are statistical guesswork, I think they would be quite alarmed and wonder just what sort of train they’re being urged to board.
* We can be pretty sure that even the IPCC is now allergic to Mann’s 1998 work because in AR4, which appeared after McIntyre’s exposure of its methodological shoddiness, the graph doesn’t appear at all! Think of it. The work that was easily the single greatest excuse for pandemonium breaking out after 2001, apearing all by its four-color lonesome on the cover of AR3, is buried in AR4 in a couple of footnotes. Mann et al. ‘98 had served its purpose, worked its damage, and henceforth could be scrupulously ignored.
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