Posted on 08/09/2006 12:54:26 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
AL GORE establishes his environmental credentials straight away in his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
When he stands by a river, sees the leaves, feels the river bank give a little beneath his feet, hears a cow in the distance, he feels all gooey inside. This profound revelation sets the scene for his deeply manipulative movie.
We first see the man who was almost the US president stride onstage to give a PowerPoint presentation claiming the global warming apocalypse is nigh. That presentation - boring graphs, pie charts, diagrams and all - is the movie, interspersed with footage of Gore strolling around his family farm in Tennessee, chatting about himself, and dragging his suitcase from airport to airport.
Next month, Gore will bring his Apple Mac to Sydney to launch the movie and, judging by a preview audience this week, he is in for a rapturous reception.
The "inconvenient truth" that Gore has selflessly dedicated his life to warn us about is that "humanity is sitting on a time bomb". We have "just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heatwaves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making".
Humans have polluted the atmosphere so much in the past 50 years that diseases and parasites are spreading, from lice and ebola to malaria. He provides no evidence, and doesn't mention that the rise of malaria coincided with the banning of the pesticide DDT, the most effective weapon against mosquitoes.
Gore's movie lingers on images of destruction and human misery from Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans last year. Global warming is the culprit, he says, with hurricanes at record levels last year. Like everything else in his movie, he presents it as incontrovertible fact, without mentioning that hurricane experts from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the evidence linking hurricane activity and global warming is inconclusive.
He makes curious claims such as "Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand" because the sea level has risen so much. Really?
He shows scientists examining ice cores from the Antarctic, which he claims show changes in the atmosphere over two years resulting from a political act in the United States, much like a ring in a tree trunk: "Right here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act. It's very distinguishable."
At one point Gore, the one-time US vice-president, stands on a moveable platform next to a screen showing a graph of carbon dioxide and temperature over time. The two lines mirror each other until, suddenly, the temperature line stops and the carbon dioxide line takes a drastic turn upwards, climbing off the chart and a couple of metres up the wall, with Gore in hot pursuit. This carbon dioxide line shows the effect of human activity over the past 50 years and projected into the future, he says. The frightening implication is that temperature will mirror this increase, incinerating us in a flash, but where is the rest of the temperature line? Just as the audience is pondering this mystery, the scene ends. Forget the evidence, just trust Al Gore.
The next scene gives us a reason for this leap of faith as the camera pans over old newspaper headlines from 1989, when Gore's six-year-old son was badly injured in a car accident. "It turned my world upside down," he says, making him ask: "How shall I spend my time on this earth."
Of course, he will save it.
After all the panic, the final credits present an odd logical leap with a long list of simple domestic tasks we can perform to prevent the global catastrophe: buy energy-efficient light bulbs, drive a hybrid car, get our parents to come to the movie, and pray.
Gore presents as a missionary, the font of sacred scientific information known to only a privileged few which he is now sharing person by person with his audiences. For all its ostentatious stodginess and earnest-university-lecture style, the movie is sophisticated propaganda, full of hyperbole, misleading and incomplete information, and vicious about non-believers. It is aimed at children, and its distributors will provide an interactive online study guide for 39,000 teachers around Australia.
But as the geologist Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, has said: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic." We have more to fear from another ice age, he claims.
The problem with Gore's approach is that he makes the threat of man-made global warming seem so certain, so enormous and so insoluble that most people turn off. Visiting Sydney last year, Johan Norberg, the author of In Defence of Global Capitalism, pointed to one effect: a recent survey in the once deep-green Sweden showed that people thought the environment was in crisis at the same time as their interest in environmental issues had fallen from 30 per cent to 5 per cent. "Everyone thinks the environment is falling apart but they're not going to do anything about it," Norberg said.
The apocalyptic way in which climate change is so often presented by green groups, the media and on government websites is a kind of "climate porn", according to a report, Warm Words, released this month by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank. "Sensationalism … serves to create a sense of distance from the issue."
It argues: "Alarmism might even become secretly thrilling - effectively a form of 'climate porn' rather than a constructive message. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse to bring about action."
It is human nature when faced with a problem too large to solve to simply ignore it in the hope it will go away. Funnily enough, the other eco catastrophes so confidently predicted 30 years ago - acid rain, nuclear winter, species extinction, the population bomb - never did eventuate.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Gore realizes that only adult-trusting children will believe his bilge without question.
Should somebody tell him that the airlines will carry his suitcase for him, if he gets on the plane?
Nahhhh...
Public education has been peddling this garbage for the last 30 years. People almost believe it.
A lot of hot air.
Ha!
The real "inconvenient truth" was the rise in Islamo- terrorism on Clinton / Gore's watch for 8 years( WTC'93, Khobar,Embassy bombings etc ) and their propensity to turn it all over to lawyers.Now we have what we have.....frankly I'm more worried about nuclear proliferation among these nutjobs who swear they're going to slaughter us than the 1 or 2 degree rise in avg. global temps.
I wonder what science courses he took at Harvard. I had heard he took the survey courses that weren't intended for science majors. I'm tired of people who can't even balance a chemical equation using propaganda rather than science to make their arguments.
They are incompetent!
He panders to build a following.
AlGore "educating" some penguins :
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI&search=gore%20and%20penguin
I understand he used to hypnotize chickens.
Clinton-Gore were incapable of dealing with the increasing challenge from muslim radicalism on their watch, a movement that actually does kill Americans along with anyone and everyone else within reach.
As he considers another run for the presidency he believes that the weather is the most pressing crisis we face, and he proposes to fight, not muslim radicalism, not nuclear mullahs, but the weather.
We sometimes criticize Bush and company for their insistence on calling the present conflict a war on "terror" rather than being more specific, a war on muslim radicalism, muslim fascism.
But what can you say about a guy who proposes, in the middle of this very real war, to go to war against the weather?
Hehe...
In 2016, when none of this comes to pass -- I hope this algore is dragged out of whatever loony bin he he is in at time and subjected to international humiliation.
He sounds cereal this time.
This is priceless, "climate porn",
I never knew too much about him. Didn't he invent the Internet? ;)
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