From Townhall:

…At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. “If you look carefully,” author Michael Crichton observed, “you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”

Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as “selfish, conceited creatures.” Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”…

…Whether or not it’s adopted the trappings of religion, my biggest beef with environmentalism is how comfortably irrational it is. It touts ritual over reality, symbolism over substance, while claiming to be so much more rational and scientific than those silly sky-God worshipers and deranged oil addicts.

It often seems that displaying faith in the green cause is more important than advancing the green cause. The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice where they live. Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving - their numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years…. Plastic grocery bags are being banned, even though they require less energy to make and recycle than paper ones. The country is being forced to subscribe to a modern version of transubstantiation, whereby corn is miraculously transformed into sinless energy even as it does worse damage than oil…

I’ve argued before - the best defense against Gore-style environmental laws, taxes, treaties, &c may be in the first part of the First Amendment.

Earth Hour math. Heh:

…The lights on the suspension cables of the western span of one of the busiest bridges in the world are just for decoration, not for navigation safety or whatever. Pretty. They sure make a big difference to the look of San Francisco at night when they are turned off.

Question: Turning off these decorative lights for an hour saves enough electricity to power Al Gore’s house for how many minutes?

Answer: About 13 minutes. Let’s work on that math, after the jump.

O.K., the “architectural necklace” uses 600 nine-watt bulbs, per the Oakland Tribune.

So, (600)(9)= 5.4 kilowatts. Over one hour that equals 5.4 kilowatt-hours of juice saved by Earth Hour when these 600 lights were off. Remember this number, we’ll use it later.

Al Gore’s house burns an average of 18,400 kilowatt-hours per month, per the rumour fighting Snopes.com.

So, (18,400)/(30 days per month)= 613 kilowatt-hours per day. And (613)/(24 hours in a day)= 25.5 kilowatt-hours per hour (which is basically saying the house has average burn of 25.5 kilowatts).

Taking the 5.4 kilowatts of the decorative bridge lights and dividing by the 25.5 kilowatts of the house and you get .212 hours. Which is hard to understand, but you get to minutes by multiplying by the 60 minutes in an hour and you get 12.7 minutes.

So, that’s much electricity was saved by turning off these lights in San Francisco - enough to power A.G.’s house for about 13 minutes.

From the London Times:

… It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves…

…Today I can only laugh when I see the popular portrayal of George Bush’s America in much of the international media. Supposedly serious commentators will say, without evident irony, that free speech is under attack, that Bush’s wiretapping, Guantanamo-building, tourist-fingerprinting regime is terrifying Americans into quiet, desperate acquiescence in the country’s proliferating crimes.

The truth is that America not only harbours the most eloquent and noisy anti-Americans in its own breast, it provides a safe haven for people to come from all over the world to condemn it…

…The Americans who win global approbation in Oslo or at the UN are not simply critics of current American policy. They want to construct an international system that will for ever prevent the US from pursuing its own objectives, a system designed to dilute, counterbalance and constrain America’s ability to govern itself. They prefer a world in which American democracy is subordinated to a kind of global government, rule by a global elite, tasked to make decisions on everyone’s behalf in the name of multilateralism.

Al Gore wants the US to give up its economic autonomy and submit to rule by binding international obligations to curb its carbon emissions. Some of the Democratic candidates for the presidency want to tie down the American Gulliver under a web of global treaties. The British Government, if recent speeches by ministers are to be believed, is now apparently seriously committed to the idea that only the UN has the legitimacy to determine how nations should behave. In other words, that a system that gives vetoes to China and Russia and honours the human rights contributions of countries such as Syria or North Korea should be accorded a full role in the promotion of the dignity of mankind.

There’s a larger irony in all this. Even as the US demonstrates the openness of its own society, its unrivalled capacity for self-examination and self-correction, a free system based on the absolute authority of the rule of law, it is told it must submit itself to the views of Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels.

Fortunately, while the American system may be forgivingly tolerant of people with wild and dangerous ideas, it doesn’t generally let them run the country.

From the WSJ:

…You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I’ve developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life — I’ve used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I’m not a naysayer. I’m a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. “Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality…

…My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.

Many of my colleagues ask, “What’s the problem? Hasn’t it been a good thing to raise public concern?” The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves…

And from RCP:

The world has become such a difficult and dangerous place that I am deeply appreciative of recent amusing events, which seem as if they were written by the Marx Brothers or Monty Python. I have in mind, it should go without saying, Al Gore winning both an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. The very sentence sounds like a punch line. But I can’t quite figure out who is supposed to be the butt of the joke. I rather suspect that he has one more award to come — the trifecta of absurdism. Perhaps he will be pronounced the world’s greatest jockey or the world’s most graceful dancer. It only makes sense, given Al Gore’s acknowledged role in bringing the Internet to humanity. Whatever the award, the world will receive it with the same demeanor it displayed in appreciating the emperor’s new clothes several centuries ago.

Before reviewing Gore’s various inanities that won him the Nobel, it is worth taking a look at one of his related projects: carbon offsets. As chairman and founder of Generation Investment Management, a firm that purchases carbon dioxide offsets, Gore stands to profit further from what he sees as mankind’s misery — which is OK by me. I’m glad to see he finally has developed the capitalist instinct (like his dad did with Occidental Petroleum and Armand Hammer).

But carbon offsets are a rather strange concept. Let me use a simple metaphor to explain it: Let’s suppose that Al Gore goes to an Italian restaurant and eats a loaf of garlic bread, a plate of lasagna, a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, an extra-large pizza with seven toppings, a couple bottles of Chianti and a large assortment of pastries. As a result, he puts on 10 pounds. But he is deeply concerned that mankind is getting too fat. So he pays 10 peasants in Asia $10 each to eat nothing for a week. Although they are already thin, by starving themselves for a week, they each lose a pound. As a result, after a week, mankind is weight neutral. Al Gore weighs 10 pounds more, 10 Asians weigh 10 pounds less — and Al Gore is given another Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in keeping mankind’s waistline in check.

Of course, this example is not quite fair to Gore because that imagined humanitarianism actually costs him cash money. In the real carbon offset business, he looks forward to being paid for directing other carbon consumers to invest in carbon neutral projects. Although when Gore personally is using carbon, as when he flies in a carbon-belching Gulfstream, one of his companies would pay some other fella not to fly or plant a tree or do something to offset Gore’s carbon belching.

And from TCS:

Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz received the 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine for “his discovery of the therapeutic value of [prefrontal lobotomy] in certain psychoses,” including depression and schizophrenia. The prefrontal lobotomy operation, in which the nerve fibers connecting the frontal lobe with other parts of the brain were cut, and which often made patients zombie-like, would be repudiated by the medical community within a decade.

Al Gore, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, is a similarly poor choice, one likely not to stand the test of time. Leaving aside the school-marmish, preachy, superior attitude that makes him such a magnet for parody, Gore is a phony. Consider that in 1996, he gave an impassioned address to the Democratic party convention, vowing to fight the tobacco industry to his last breath because twelve years earlier his sister had died from lung cancer. In 1988, however, while campaigning for the nomination for president, Mr. Gore had been telling tobacco farmers (in a Southern accent much thicker than was ever heard from him in Washington) that he was practically one of them, that he had tenderly held the young plants in his own two hands, had their interests at heart, and so on. And his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which offers an exaggerated, one-sided, and often inaccurate view of global warming, is more propaganda than documentary.

Good stuff from The Australian:

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al’s Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to “alarmism and exaggeration” and identified nine major factual errors.

For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m “in the near future”. “The Armageddon scenario he predicts,” declared Burton, “is not in line with the scientific consensus.”

I’ll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15cm and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.

And nobody minds. His Honour was examining the vice-president’s acclaimed crockumentary because the British Government, in its wisdom, has decided to force-feed it to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. It would be nice to think it would have to be preceded by a warning that any resemblance between this film and any actual planet living or dead is entirely coincidental, but it seems more likely that the Nobel Peace imprimatur will completely insulate the picture from even the most modest quibbles.

A schoolkid in Ontario was complaining the other day that, whatever subject you do, you have to sit through Gore’s movie: It turns up in biology class, in geography, in physics, in history, in English….

….No matter how you raise the stakes (”It might take another 30 Kyotos”, says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. “We are,” warns Gore, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe”.

Wow. It’s not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. You wouldn’t happen to have the stats on that, would you? Universal “balance of energy” graphs for 1940 and 1873? Gore is the logical reductio of what the popular Australian blogger Tim Blair calls global warm-mongering: Worst-case scenario, with all the zeroes you want on the end, and then a few more for holes in the ozone layer as yet undreamt of. Anyone can, as the environmentalists advise, think globally and act locally, but only Gore thinks cosmically and acts not at all….

….Insofar as he’s made any contribution to global peace, it’s in persuading large swaths of a narcissistic Western world to busy itself with non-solutions to pseudo-crises to such a distracting degree that al-Qa’ida may wind up imposing the global caliphate without having to fire a shot.

As for the climate, you could take every dollar spent on “global warming” and blow it on internet porn, and the Earth’s climate in 2050 will be pretty much what it would be anyway. Meanwhile, Gore is now being urged to jump into the presidential race and save Democrats from the allegedly too-hawkish Hillary Clinton. I doubt he will.

But you’ll know he’s considering it if he starts slimming down faster than the Antarctic shelf. When Al Gore starts getting carb-neutral, we’re really in trouble.

A British court is considering blocking a UK decision to distribute Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to all their primary schools. The Education Secretary decision was challenged by a parent who claims the film is political propaganda full of scientific inaccuracies.

The trial is still underway - here are the court’s findings so far:

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The inaccuracies are:

• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming.  The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years.  The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming.  The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
• The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming.  The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice.  It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
• The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
• The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching.  The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
• The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously.  The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
• The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
• The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
• The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand.  The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

I don’t think courts are the best place to determine the veracity of scientific claims, but this outcome looks promising. Gore will probably win the Nobel Peace Prize this week anyway - after all, they gave it it Arafat.

NRO has an excerpt from Bjorn Lomborg’s latest book on climate change. The most interesting part is this quote Lomborg ascribes to Al Gore:

The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise. . . . When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.

Hmmm…”Mission,”"unifying,” “the thrill of being forced…to put aside…pettiness and conflict,” “human need for transcendence,” “moral and spiritual challenge” - sounds very 1930s Central European.

I’m not sure many people look forward to, “the thrill of being forced,” to do anything. Maybe he meant “the thrill of forcing others.” And what exactly does he mean by the “human need for transcendence”? Sounds like our aspiring Fearless Leader would like to transcend our basic rights - after all one man’s “pettiness” is another’s individualism. Finally, “moral and spiritual challenge(s)” are fine, but without better justification this divinity school dropout will run afowl the Establishment Clause.

City Journal on Al Gore’s new book Assault on Reason:

…Yes, (the book is) logically inconsistent and self-serving and unbelievably sanctimonious, but there’s a lot of that going around. What ultimately makes the book so disturbing is that something pretending to be a brief for reason and comity is so unbelievably small and mean-spirited. It is less an argument than an extended tantrum. Reading it is often like being locked in a room with a madman.

Even more than most partisan commentators today (and of course there are more than a few on the right), Gore is blind to how recklessly he abuses facts and applies double standards, not to mention to his own viciousness. He continually rails, for instance, against those who use “fear” and “simplistic nostrums disguised as solutions” to sway an inattentive and emotionally malleable public, causing it to “overreact to illusory threats and underreact to real threats”—this from the man behind the global-warming frenzy, who consistently downplays the menace of international terrorism…

…That The Assault on Reason has sold well is surely because Al Gore is now a name brand with whom a certain stripe of leftist is eager to identify. One is reminded of a recent marketing survey of Prius owners, which revealed that as many as 50 percent of those buying the Toyota hybrid do so because, unlike the Honda and Ford hybrids (which can be mistaken for regular Civics and Escapes), the Prius is immediately identifiable as a badge of virtue. Rest assured that this book, a similar emblem, will spend a lot more time on Hamptons coffee tables than at the beach.

From Townhall:

It’s easy to make fun of the Live Earth concerts – with all these pampered, puerile performers consuming prodigious amounts of energy in order to pontificate about the desperate need for “little people” to do their bit to conquer Global Warming. The Al Gore inspired inanity that played out in every corner of the globe seemed to concentrate on the message that the billions (literally) who watched these events on the tube couldn’t do anything on their own, but needed to wait for government to change policies in order to make a real difference. In other words, Live Earth managed to re-cycle one thing, at least – the old liberal mistake that says that citizens can’t do anything to help themselves (or their country, or their world) and their only hope involves changing government. In other words, to liberals (like all the well-intentioned bozos who participated in Live Earth) change only matters when it’s government initiated and government mandated. In truth, bottom-up changes in private, individual behavior (which are eminently possible on this issue) brings far greater impact than any top-down bureaucratic demand.

Right on. Check out the actual pledge Gore is peddling. Very little about personal responsiblity - mostly about supporting collective efforts.

Here’s the Pledge:

1. To demand that my country join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth;

2. To take personal action to help solve the climate crises by reducing my own C02 pollution as much as I can and offsetting the rest to become “carbon neutral”;

3. To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the C02;

4. To work for a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of my home, workplace, school, place of worship, and means of transportation;

5. To fight for laws and policies that expand the use of renewable energy sources and reduce dependence on oil and coal;

6. To plant new trees and to join with others in preserving and protecting forests; and,

7. To buy from businesses and support leaders who share my commitment to solving the climate crises and building a sustainable, just and prosperous world for the 21st century.

Three of th 7 points are entirely about “supporting” or “fighting for” laws that would restrict the freedom of others. The “reducing my own C02 pollution” point is watered down with the “as much as I can” point (leftists can always claim Bush lied and tricked them into doing less). Its further watered down with the old CO2-offset BS. The only point that involves personal action is promising to plant trees. I wonder how many trees the pledgers will actually plant - probably tiny in comparison to what a handfull of neo-fascist-homophobic-paramilitary-Boy Scouts get done every year.

On a related note, from Spiked:

It is hard to ignore the high moral tone of Gore’s missives. In his own words, he has a ‘compelling moral purpose’. He never misses an opportunity to spread his aura of sanctimony. And yet, curiously, his moral crusade depends for its legitimacy on the authority of science. There is very little that is transcendental about Gore. Revelation for him comes through science rather than supernaturally revealed truths. His crusade, he says, is aimed at preventing a catastrophe that is foretold by Scientific Truths. In his dogmatic worldview, today’s categories of good and evil, of virtuous behaviour and improper behaviour, are rooted in truths revealed by science.

However, it would be wrong to see Gore as a man who is fervently committed to science. Rather, he is in the business of politicising science, or more accurately, moralising it. In Gore’s world, science is not so much about testing out hypotheses and carrying out experiments; instead, under the Gore narrative, scientific evidence gives way to scientific (inconvenient) truths. Such science has more in common with the art of divination than of experimentation. That is why the science is always seen as having a fixed and unyielding, and thus unquestionable quality. Frequently, Gore and others will prefix the term science with the definite article ‘the’. So Sir David Read, vice-president of the Royal Society, recently said that ‘the science very clearly points towards the need for us all – nations, businesses and individuals – to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change’ (4).

Unlike ‘science’, this new term – ‘The Science’ – is a deeply moralised and politicised category. Today, those who claim to wield the authority of The Science are really demanding unquestioning submission.