Is Al Gore full of -- Hot Air?

"An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar for best documentary. According to the NY Daily News, fewer than 300 people were eligible to vote in the documentary category for the award. As most are aware, in his movie, Gore claims that production of carbon-dioxide from human energy use will cause devastating changes to the Earth’s atmosphere within 10 years.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reported that Gore’s 20-room mansion in Nashville, TN guzzles nearly 20 times the energy of the average American home. Gore, who took more than a month to concede his loss to President George W. Bush in the Presidential election of 2000, has spent the past year promoting his film, making frequent use of private jets. One cross-country flight in a private jet produces nearly double the amount of carbon dioxide produced by an average American in an entire year. I'm not saying other people, Republicans included, aren't just as hypocritical - but Gore's presence in the global warming space certainly seems to be speeding up the process!

Personally, I don't have much doubt that we (people) are contributing to the CO2 content of the atmosphere. However the science and the alarmism don't quite match up.

Dr. William Gray, a top hurricane researcher, called Gore a "gross alarmist", adding, "He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about".

The problem is, the long term climatic record shows that we are actually headed for another Ice Age, so whatever we do now is likely to be money grossly misspent.

The scientific record shows that it is warming that precedes the increase in C02 in the atmosphere - not the other way around, as the global warming alarmists claim.

According to Bjorn Lomborg, a respected environmental author, implementing the Kyoto protocol will basically postpone global warming for about five years at the end of the century. Lomborg says, "With global warming you're going to see more heat deaths, but what most people don't tell us is we're also going to see much less cold deaths...The point is again to say we have a tendency to bark up the wrong tree.

We worry intensely about climate change, but the point is we can do very little good at very high cost. What the Nobel laureates basically told us is if we spend our money on HIV/AIDS, we can do $40 worth of good for every dollar. If we spend it on Kyoto, we can only do 30 cents. Let`s do the $40 first."

Lomborg continues, "Basically what they told us was it was HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, free trade, malaria and agricultural research. Those are things that we can do cheaply and do an immense amount of impact in this world right now and also for future generations. Kyoto came down at the bottom. Not because climate change is not real, but simply because the way we tackled it through Kyoto is very expensive and a very poor way of helping the world."


Of course, when scientists want to debate, there is one solution: belittle, insult and sometimes threaten the lives of those opposing voices until they're snuffed out and can no longer be heard. Isn't it ironic that the Greenies who so vehemently advocate that we ride bicycles to work refuse to support one of the cleanest and safest forms of power - nuclear electric plants? The French get 70 percent of their electricity from nuclear power, but we Americans haven't licensed a new nuclear plant in 35 years!

Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London. Boy are we Americans a bunch of ideo-political-greenie IDIOTS!

Scientific consensus has been overturned over and over again throughout history, from eugenics in the 1940s to global cooling of the 1970s, and every generation has groups that think that they are so right they shouldn't be questioned.

I know this will be tough to believe, but sometimes fear makes people act irrationally. Luckily, we have the media to put things into perspective, because nothing ever gets over hyped on television or documentaries, or newpapers:

• From the "L.A. Times" in 1978: "No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere".
• TIME magazine`s big spread from 1974, asking "Another Ice Age?"
• "Newsweek" said global cooling evidence had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard pressed to keep up with it."
• Even in the mid-'90s, the New York Times was talking about a frozen earth, except it wasn`t the 1990s. It was 1895 when it first appeared!
  
  Yikes! All you need to do is switch the words "cooling" with "warming" and we've heard it all before!
  
  I'm not going any further with this. I think I've made my point. We cannot just swallow this garbage whole - we need to chew on it carefully, and THINK. And you know what? That ain't hot air.