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Posted on February 19th, 2010
How Al Gore Wrecked Planet Earth
The Washington Post this morning has a strong story on the collapse of the movement to stop climate change through a binding treaty negotiated under UN auspices. And even the normally taciturn New York Times is admitting that the resignation of the top UN climate change negotiator suggests that no global treaty will be coming this year.
Short summary: the current iteration of the movementwith its particular political project and goalsis dead. This will not be news to readers of this blog where the news was announced on February 1, but never mind.
...
...Frankly, I blame Al Gore. Unlike naive scientists who know little about life beyond the lab, or eco-activists whose concepts of the international political system come from writing direct-mail solicitations to true believers in rich countries, the former vice-president had decades of experience with high politics. It was his job to provide the leadership that could channel the energy and concern of this movement into an effective political program. Perhaps theres a story we dont know yet about how Mr. Gore labored quietly and in vain for many years to explain to his fellow global greens about the difficulties and intricacies of the political process. Perhaps he reminded them that it takes 67 votes in the US Senate to ratify a treaty, and that the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol were preemptively rejected 95-0such a thorough beating that the Protocol itself was never even submitted to the Senate while he was in office. Perhaps he tried to explain to them that a global movement for a treaty was setting itself up for a colossal and comprehensive failure and begged them to take a more realistic course. Perhaps he urged them to be their own harshest critics and to make sure that any information and projections that came out the movement and institutions like the IPCC should be scrubbed cleaner than clean. Perhaps he begged them to make sure that the IPCC was staffed and led by competent, thoroughly vetted and full-time people whose tempered judgment could lead the institution through the inevitable storms it would face.
That could have happened, but I dont think it did. I think Al Gore failed the climate change movement and that his negligence and blindness has done it irreparable harm. If the skeptics are right and the world isnt warming or if natural causes are responsible for climate change it doesnt matter much. But if Al Gore and the climate change people are even half right about what is happening to our world, the cost of Mr. Gores failures are incalculably great. He was the one world leader who had the standing inside the climate change movement to lead it onto a more sustainable path and, as far as we can tell from the facts now before us, he didnt really try.
Ultimately, the most telling argument against global warming is the lack of seriousness with which the greens themselves have approached the issue. Getting the world to make the kind of changes greens want is a much more complex and serious endeavor than they themselves seem to have understood. As my colleague Michael Levi says in the Post, It is becoming increasingly clear that a legally binding treaty is not in the cards People arent quite sure what direction theyre going in at all.
The greens claim to understand the dynamics of complex ecosystems better than the rest of humanity; the simplistic assumptions and unrealistic strategies with which theyve approached the complex ecosystem of international politics dont provide the dispassionate observer with much evidence in support of this claim.
Hmmmm...... So when the predictions of major dislocations from the presently changing climate come true, the 'sceptics' are preparing a way out.
No, Gore was not a liar, he was just incompetant at conveying the urgency of the message.
Like I have been saying all along, you people are going to blame the scientists as the inevitable happens.
And you are completely incapable of seeing the fundemental dishonesty of your position. Not a good survival trait.
Oh my, you are so right. The jury is way out on that.
So what we have is a situation where things are rapidly changing, the people that study that change have been saying for over a hundred years that the cause of the change is the increase in GHGs created by the burning of fossil fuels. And the industry that profits on the use of those fuels has been fighting the facts with denial and lies for the last fifty years.
And we see the change accelerating, we know that it is affecting life in the ocean at present in a negative manner, and, from past geological evidence, may create major disturbances in climate on land. Land that we depend on for agriculture. But, since we don't know for certain where the edge of the cliff is, just keep the hammer down on the accelorator, we have nothing to worry about.
Not fighting alternative energies? LOL. Every time someone mentions wind, solar, or geothermal, there is a loud chorus of boos on this board.
I would say we are all doomed! But the shit won't hit the fan for about 10,000 years or so. Somebody dig me up and let me know when it happens!
Oh my, you are so right. The jury is way out on that.
So what we have is a situation where things are rapidly changing, the people that study that change have been saying for over a hundred years that the cause of the change is the increase in GHGs created by the burning of fossil fuels. And the industry that profits on the use of those fuels has been fighting the facts with denial and lies for the last fifty years.
And we see the change accelerating, we know that it is affecting life in the ocean at present in a negative manner, and, from past geological evidence, may create major disturbances in climate on land. Land that we depend on for agriculture. But, since we don't know for certain where the edge of the cliff is, just keep the hammer down on the accelorator, we have nothing to worry about.
Not fighting alternative energies? LOL. Every time someone mentions wind, solar, or geothermal, there is a loud chorus of boos on this board.
Really? Perhaps you haven't been reading the distrust of destroying existing businesses while the new technologies aren't up to speed, nor even close. That the best source of new technologies will come from private sector, not government pay to study or worse, demand the regulations before the development? (Sort of like forcing green cars on GM, when the market demand isn't there?)
Annie, are you truly that ignorant? The people that had the EV1 that GM built, wanted to keep them, even if they had to pay a new price for them after leasing them for years.
The Toyota RAV4 Electric will bring $50k on the open market today with 150k on the odometer.
Cease the subisidies for coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Then see how present alternatives stack up.
Not only that, I really appreciate your concern for the well being of the petro-dictators. For that is who we are supporting by using the amount of oil that we do.
By the way, here is why you cannot buy an Electric RAV4 today
GM and Chevron Oil cooperated to kill the Electric car
OR, you refuse to acknowledge the possibility that there may be more than man made issues here, like cyclical. Again one needs to address the problem with the attempts to adjust temps, based on warmer friendly methods, and indeed ignore the known medieval warming period-where man made issues were non-existent regarding atmosphere.
The scientists that study climate do not see any other cause, other the GHGs. In fact, by the Milankovic Cycles, we should be slowly moving toward another ice age, not seeing the rapid warming that we are today.
Since my primary interest in science is geology, the year to year temps are not what I have been basing my concerns on. It is the rapid retreat of alpine glaciers, and the loss of ice in the Arctic, resulting in the outgassing of permafrost and Arctic clathrates. It is the loss of giga-tons of ice in both the Greenland and Antarctic caps.
From Paleo-climatology, we have pretty good records of the results of very rapid increases in GHGs. And none of the occurences were beneficial for the life present at the time.
I'm not about to fight this all over again, however you would do well to read your posts from a year, two, more ago about not ignoring the information at hand. You didn't know about the manipulations then, but there is no excuse today.
Oh my, you are so right. The jury is way out on that.
So what we have is a situation where things are rapidly changing, the people that study that change have been saying for over a hundred years that the cause of the change is the increase in GHGs created by the burning of fossil fuels. And the industry that profits on the use of those fuels has been fighting the facts with denial and lies for the last fifty years.
And we see the change accelerating, we know that it is affecting life in the ocean at present in a negative manner, and, from past geological evidence, may create major disturbances in climate on land. Land that we depend on for agriculture. But, since we don't know for certain where the edge of the cliff is, just keep the hammer down on the accelorator, we have nothing to worry about.
Not fighting alternative energies? LOL. Every time someone mentions wind, solar, or geothermal, there is a loud chorus of boos on this board.
Really? Perhaps you haven't been reading the distrust of destroying existing businesses while the new technologies aren't up to speed, nor even close. That the best source of new technologies will come from private sector, not government pay to study or worse, demand the regulations before the development? (Sort of like forcing green cars on GM, when the market demand isn't there?)
Annie, are you truly that ignorant? The people that had the EV1 that GM built, wanted to keep them, even if they had to pay a new price for them after leasing them for years.
The Toyota RAV4 Electric will bring $50k on the open market today with 150k on the odometer.
Cease the subisidies for coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Then see how present alternatives stack up.
Not only that, I really appreciate your concern for the well being of the petro-dictators. For that is who we are supporting by using the amount of oil that we do.
By the way, here is why you cannot buy an Electric RAV4 today
GM and Chevron Oil cooperated to kill the Electric car
OR, you refuse to acknowledge the possibility that there may be more than man made issues here, like cyclical. Again one needs to address the problem with the attempts to adjust temps, based on warmer friendly methods, and indeed ignore the known medieval warming period-where man made issues were non-existent regarding atmosphere.
The scientists that study climate do not see any other cause, other the GHGs. In fact, by the Milankovic Cycles, we should be slowly moving toward another ice age, not seeing the rapid warming that we are today.
Since my primary interest in science is geology, the year to year temps are not what I have been basing my concerns on. It is the rapid retreat of alpine glaciers, and the loss of ice in the Arctic, resulting in the outgassing of permafrost and Arctic clathrates. It is the loss of giga-tons of ice in both the Greenland and Antarctic caps.
From Paleo-climatology, we have pretty good records of the results of very rapid increases in GHGs. And none of the occurences were beneficial for the life present at the time.
I'm not about to fight this all over again, however you would do well to read your posts from a year, two, more ago about not ignoring the information at hand. You didn't know about the manipulations then, but there is no excuse today.
So they manipulated the glaciers? The ice caps?
And how do you account for the fact that even the skeptics have to agree that it has been significantly warmer? Not my figures, theirs.
In fact, there is very little evidence that they manipulated the figures. When you compare the figures they have to those of Spencers and Christys, there are only minor differances. Both show rapid warming.
