Al Gore lost the 2000 election. It was a blow to his ego, a blow to the mentality that as a vice president to a popular president, he was a natural fit to be the next president. I'm stating all this to remind us that this man has been basically, a career politician for his adult life.
Al Gore seems angry. After the election, he needed a way to avenge the people who kept him out of office, if only for his own personal vindication. He did what he felt was the surest way. He took a very speculative and debatable scientific theory, stated it as fact, and blamed it on the Bush administration.
Global warming has turned into a very effective campaign as it undermines Bush and the Republican party in several ways:
- While Bush and Republicans talk about Al Queda, Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as being the primary threats to the United States, global warming dilutes and downplays the significance of the "war on terror" in favor of what is basically, a war against American industry.
- It perpetuates the concept that the Republican party is all about oil and industry, at the expense of public welfare.
- It perpetuates the concept that Republicans are anti-science.
I do not remember Gore ever speaking of global warming in his campaign speeches. Most, if not all of this concern seems to have come after the 2000 election. In the film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore tells us that this has been a long time concern of his. I guess he was too busy inventing the Internet to tell us all about the global warming crisis in the days before he was vice president.
I've watched the film
An Inconvenient Truth - twice, in fact. Gore throws a lot of evidence about global warming at us. Evidence is one thing but as any real scientist will tell you, it takes more than evidence to draw conclusions. Funny how Gore claims so much scientific knowhow, yet doesn't grasp this principle. For example, look at the "big bang theory" of the creation of the universe. There is tons of evidence that support it, very little that disputes it, and it is generally accepted by most astronomers and astrophysicists. Yet it is still considered "theory" as it has not been proven. In his film,
Gore draws conclusions.
This makes the whole movie false. Gore concludes that:
- There is no debate amongst the top climate scientists in the world. Global warming is happening.
- Global warming is happening due to the industrial world spewing loads of carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere.
- The effects of global warming will be totally catastrophic.
- Global warming catastrophes can be averted if we start taking measures now.
My next posts are going to look into these "conclusions". The first one is the easiest one to debunk. No way are scientists all in agreement on the reality of global warming. My next post later this week will be about an increasing number of the world's climate scientists that do not agree with Gore's conclusions.
