Head global warming hysteric Al Gore does terrible harm to the cause about which he espouses so passionately. Not only is he a supreme hypocrite in the carbon intensive way he lives and the money he makes off the issue—as he accuses his opponents of venal motives—but his beyond hyperbolic shrieking causes people to roll their eyes in a “there he goes again,” shrug.
Gore gave a commencement address at Hamilton College yesterday, and he was at it again. From the speech:
We are living, also, in a time of other challenges; and some of you might be surprised if I did not make mention of the climate crisis. It is a challenge that in my opinion is the most serious challenge that our civilization has ever faced. And because we live here, most of us — I know this graduating class has students from not only in the United States, but from other countries around the world.
Let’s see: Our civilization has faced the “Black Death” plague that killed 30-60% of the European population, a far greater crisis than anything AGW might cause. More recently, the unmitigated horror of World Wars I and II with hundreds of millions killed, mass genocide committed, multitudes starving, and much of Europe’s infrastructure twice left destroyed, were surely beyond anything AGW has in store. For awhile the AIDS crisis looked as if it would cause much of sub Saharan Africa to implode. It still could. The Cold War (barely) remained “cold” because if it ever got “hot,” a nuclear conflagration could have been unleashed—as almost happened in 1962—that would have utterly destroyed civilization, and perhaps made us extinct—pleasing the anti humans. Today, we have a growing threat of economic meltdown across the globe, mass migrations from south to north straining our capacities, the potential for nuclear and biological terrorism, the list goes on and on. In short, whatever problems we face with global warming, it is not the “the most serious challenge our civilization has ever faced.”
Then he turns to the GWH’s inability to panic us into profoundly unwise public policies:
But for those of us who live here in the United States of America, I truly believe it is a challenge that is unprecedented. It is a struggle for the soul of America. And I say that because it is a test of our ability to distinguish between what is true and what is false. To determine, more accurately put, what is more likely to be true than not.
Unprecedented? How about the struggle over slavery? That was the most profound and important struggle for the American soul in our history. The Revolution was also a struggle for our soul. The great Civil Rights Movement challenged us to hearken to the better angels of our nature. The politics around the Great Depression did too, because our very freedoms were on the table. Good grief.
Gore decries what he calls “propaganda” against the global warming crisis and proceeds to engage in the big P himself by pointing to recent extreme weather events, such as the Russian heat wave and the Pakistani flood, as proof of his fears:
And the scientists are now in a shift; theoretic saying that, if you ask the question, would these events have occurred in the absence of manmade global warming, the answer is almost certainly no.
But that’s baloney. Indeed, the Russian heat wave has been that shown not to have been global warming related. Ditto the Pakistan catastrophe, which was within “natural variables.”
Enough. Al Gore presented himself to the Hamilton grads as a great intellectual inheritor of the sages of the Enlightenment and epitomizing the rule of reason. He is precisely the opposite. His perpetual resort to demagoguery, extreme hyperbole, crass appeal to fear, and use of distorted and outright false “facts,” do his cause great harm.
If Gore wants to see why so many people refuse to join the GHW parade, he should look in a mirror.
