Al Gore Breaks Silence on Global Warming Fiascos (Fiasci?)
If you've been wondering where former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore has been hiding out during the recent Climate Crackup (or as I prefer, Klimate Krackup!!!), wonder no more. Gore broke his silence yesterday in an op-ed of 1,896 words' duration in Los Tiempos de Nueva York.
And it turns out that even if you don't have global warming to kick around anymore, you'll still have to worry about shady oil sheikhs:
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
To my untrained and never-interested eye, Gore seems to make a game effort to handle in turn each of the recent debacles in the global warming consensus. I find Al Gore so essentially repellent that I can't fairly judge his success or failure here, so hash it out among yourselves. The truth, like climate change itself, must be felt in the moist or shriveled nipples of each of us.
