Nobel Propagandist Al Gore has reemerged to dogmatize again about global warming, responding this time to the collapse of scientific arguments for abandoning fossil energy. The former US vice-president wants everyone to quit worrying about the obvious surrender by science to politics at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations creation lately forced to recant claims about melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and irreversible warming. In a Feb. 28 column in the New York Times, Gore sees little of importance in the mistakes.
"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 [IPCC]," he writes. After glossing over the two errors and attributing politically motivated manipulations by data handlers in the UK to "an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands by climate skeptics," Gore proclaims "that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged."
A tired point
His argument progresses little beyond that tired point. The rest of his long column is a harangue against imported oil, people who disagree with him, "media organizations" he dislikes, free markets, the Senate's failure to pass cap-and-trade legislation, and "political paralysis," national and global.
Name-calling riddles the screed. In addition to villainous "skeptics," Gore berates "market fundamentalists," "polluters refusing to act," and "showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment." Redeploying an overworked and altogether silly analogy, the former vice-president likens businesses that resist regulation of carbon emissions—which he calls "unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons"—to the tobacco industry. And, as always, he disparages dissenters without acknowledging their arguments. Failure to submit to the Gore evangel, for example, condemns his contemporaries to being remembered by their grandchildren as "a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands."
These are the blind swings of a political pugilist caught against the intellectual ropes with his arguments bruised and bloody. Gore's attempt to scoff away the IPCC's lapses is pathetic. The errors were not trivial. IPCC's 2007 warning about melting Himalayan glaciers made headlines and intensified the alarm fueling pressure to implement costly remedies. Its overstatement of sea-level rise in the Netherlands had the same effect. Indeed, other errors not brushed aside by Gore have emerged, such as IPCC's exaggerated claims about vanishing rainforests.
The pattern is clear: IPCC errs on the side of climate alarm. Leaked e-mail messages from the University of East Anglia foreclose all possibility that the errors just happened to fall on one side of the political issue. The messages showed scientists responsible for crucial climate data maneuvering to prevent publication of views contrary to their own, scheming in other ways against opponents, and withholding or misplacing data. The thoroughly politicized mayhem in full electronic view defines the consensus to which Gore alludes. In a growing number of ways, parties to it have been caught tricking away their credibility.
Gore does his own standing no good with his whiny, unconvincing attempt to reduce these events to insignificance. Now, more than ever, he looks like a prophet of hollow prophesy. "What is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption," he preaches in his Times column. That's too heavy a load of moral certitude for a lame mule like the IPCC to carry.
Grand outcomes
If Gore truly worried about grand outcomes levered by minor precedents he'd object to the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to regulated emissions of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling on legal standing and definitions, a federal agency is moving to assume control over much economic decision-making in the US. The ruling didn't address climate science; it merely settled a question about statutory intent. It nevertheless provided for an historic expansion of government.
Because EPA's move increases pressure on Congress to cap carbon emissions, Gore won't fight it. His real concern is politics, not science.
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