Al Gore Lives in an Alternate Reality

In Al Gore's world, there exists the orthodox dogma handed down by the Global Warming Magisterium, and then there is all other opinion. Opinion, research, facts that don't square with Received Wisdom is, as he so eloquently put it recently at the Aspen Institute, "Bullshit!"

Listen for yourself:

Al Gore calls B.S. on climate change naysayers ... by RealAspen

Best comment at Soundcloud: "Al Gore thinks the sun is bullshit?"

A G&S Challenge

We challenge our readers to view the following Reading from alGore, and fail to laugh, snort, groan, or eye-roll. Can't be done.

The Dangers of Luke Warming

Al Gore's new movie, "My Soup is Cold!"

Ora Pro Nobis

"An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs."

More at Public Secrets.

Al Gore: The Gift That Keeps on Talking

As Professor Reynolds observes: "Al Gore is looking (and sounding) more and more like a Baptist televangelist all the time." Of course, one distinction is that at least some televangelists actually believe something, while al Gore worships only, well, al Gore. But he does it with such passion, fervor, and righteousness that it's hard not to be impressed.

Coal: The Clean, Green Alternative

The New York Times reports:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

And that's not the sort of thing our masters at The Times get wrong.

Leading the Way

"The day’s events began when the White House sent an ox cart to pick up Mr. Gore at his hotel, where he had arrived by S.U.V. motorcade last night following a charter jet flight to Washington D.C."

More HERE.

Global Warming News

Surface temperature monitoring stations have recorded about a one-degree rise over the last 100 years.

Unless they haven't.

Surprised?

Polls be damned. We're going to have to start paying attention to Amazon.com's "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?" feature. For any item you're presently viewing, it tells you what other people actually ended up buying. Mostly it reveals (duh!) that folks bought the thing you're looking at. What's more interesting is to look at what was purchased by those who didn't.

If you look at this edition of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," for example, you'll learn that while 90% bought it, and most of the rest decided to take either a different edition or the sound track from the musical, fully 3% instead bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Do we suppose they're both on some sort of "reluctant heroes" reading list?

(Everyone who looked at "Harry Potter," by the way, bought, well, Harry Potter.)

It's a game any number can play, and it's fun for the whole family. But, since you asked, our own favorite is al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." Mostly these lookers bought one or another product bearing the al Gore fabular trade mark. But fully two-thirds of those who didn't instead found what they were looking for in "The Secret," a movie (heretofore unknown to us), described thusly:

The Secret is a feature length movie presentation which reveals The Great Secret of the universe. It has been passed throughout the ages, traveling through centuries... This is The Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted. All the resources you will ever need to understand and live The Secret. The world's leading scientists, authors, and philosophers will reveal The Secret that utterly transformed the lives of every person who ever knew it... Plato, Newton, Carnegie, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein.

Not only that, it comes with a (how did we know?) can't-miss endorsement: As seen on Oprah and Larry King.

Al's clearly found his milieu.

Al Gore Our Inspiration

We were frankly skeptical on the subject of "carbon offsets." That's the practice of reducing or eliminating one's "carbon footprint" by paying someone else to do something that sounds environmentally friendly. Partly our thinking was informed by the fact that Al Gore promoted such things, thus leading to the presumption that it was some kind of scam. Partly our lack of enthusiasm resulted from certain disturbing historical parallels that, shall we say, didn't work out very well.

But that's all changed. What was lost now is found!

And that's not all! You can get your very own carbon offsets at Free Carbon Offsets.

Presented as a public service. Have a nice day, and really, truly, feel better about yourself!

Live a Cat-Neutral Life!

Hardly a day goes by without yet another story about some nutball whose trailer is overrun by 427 cats. So this may be an idea whose time has come: Cat Ownership Offsets!

Polar Bear Paid to Look Dead!

Bear: It was a beautiful sunny day. Really warm--just the way we polar bears like it. I was lying on an ice floe, catching some rays, thinking of maybe nipping out to get a baby seal for lunch, when this camera crew approached me in a boat.

ET: What did they say to you?

Bear: They asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. I said, what kind of movie? You know, cause I don't do nature programming. No money in that. They said it was some big deal Hollywood feature film, and offered me several dozen pounds of fresh salmon. I said sure, what the hell. I've always wanted to act. Especially since my cousin made it big in New York. Three shows a day at the zoo, and all the fish he can eat. Not bad. His place is nice too. A little small, maybe, but that's Manhattan for you.

ET: So what did they want you to do?

Bear: Well it began as a major part. Growling and everything. To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed that it was cut from the final movie. They opted for some bear animation instead. My agent had a lot to say about that I can tell you. And it had taken, like, days to shoot. They had me doing everything: jumping off the floe to rescue my "cub"--a real brat of an actor--and fighting other bears, you know, for survival and whatnot. But mostly what they wanted was a lot of shots of me sleeping on the floe, playing dead.

ET: You weren't really dead.

Bear: No. It's called acting.

ET: But what about that heart-wrenching photo for the movie's publicity--of a bear howling next to its mate...

Bear: That was me. Actually I was howling, "Dinner time!"

Read the whole sad story HERE.

Logic Offsets

We've been silent on the alGore electric bill dustup, mostly because we think it would be unfair to pile on.

No, really.

We've actually been more interested in the response from Planet Gore that it's much ado about nothing, inasmuch as the ex-Veep buys "carbon offsets" and "green power."

We speculated that we knew what "carbon offsets" might be (we were wrong), and we were pretty sure that we knew what "green power" probably was (we were right). But we were equally sure that buying green power couldn't possibly actually accomplish anything. Please recall that our undergraduate education is in economics, and we have an advanced degree in bullshit-detection. As to green power, someone else has boiled it down rather well:

Buying "green power" is just rearranging the deck chairs, buying power that would have been in the energy mix anyway. It's like buying the green M&M's when no one else cares what the color of their M&M's are.

But we assumed that "carbon offsets" were some sort of market or trading system which would permit al Gore to produce more methane, by paying someone else to use less methane than that other fellow would have produced. How this might be accomplished was pretty murky. Would Al buy a year's supply of Beano for some poor Mexican family? Or maybe pay some kid who'd then agree to ride his bike to school for a month rather than drive his Range Rover. But we were wrong.

We learned what this scam actually involves from NPR, although they (surprise!) didn't seem to recognize what they were actually saying. While it's far more complicated, it's all about giving money to a firm that's doing something thought to be environmentally friendly. That is, al Gore uses as much coal-fired juice as he wants, so long as he passes over enough long green to somebody who's promoting compact florescent bulbs, or who promises to plant a tree.

Why Al oughtn't to contribute to such efforts -- and then endure the conservation hardships himself that he so quickly demands be imposed on the rest of us -- isn't readily apparent. But there's a disturbing similarity here to so much other Rich Liberal blather, as Ed Morrissey recognized:

. . . purchasing offsets only means that Gore doesn't want to make the same kind of sacrifices that he's asking other families to make. He's using a modern form of indulgences in order to avoid doing the penance that global-warming activism demands of others. It means that the very rich can continue to suck up energy and raise the price and the demand for electricity and natural gas, while families struggle with their energy costs and face increasing government regulation and taxation. It's a regressive plan that Gore's supporters would decry if the same kind of scheme were applied to a national sales tax, for instance.

This is the same old same old: Teddy Kennedy doesn't care how high your income taxes are, because he's already rich, having inherited money made back when rates were low, and there was a tremendous markup on smuggled Canadian Club.

"And The Oscar for Best Science Fiction Film Goes to . . ."

This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.

The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Read the whole thing.

[UPDATE] Who says there's nothing good you can say about al Gore? Not Extreme Mortman!

This Just In

New York Times Reports: Overwhelming Consensus of Scientists Agree on New Cosmology: Earth Revolves Around Al Gore's Head.

Former Vice-President looks on as Evil Demons cause manifestation of disembodied hands, floating globe.

Winner of 2006 Reuters Award as "Best Non-Photoshopped Pic Incorporating Hands, Earth, and at least one of the Un-Dead."

"Hi! I'm Al Gore! I used to be the next President of the United States, but now I get paid to be a prop in third-rate magic acts."

Life comes at you fast, whether you're K-Fed or an unemployed tobacco farmer.

New York Post reports: Al Gore's head not yet as large as planet earth. But almost.