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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/23/2006 6:11:57 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

An inconvenient blog Power Line Our friend Pat Cleary at the National Association of Manufacturers was astonished to find his Shop Floor blog included in the links provided by Al Gore's blog, which touts his new film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Pat devotes a section of his blog to debunking arguments by the likes of Gore about global warming. Was the inventor of the internet trying to be fair and balanced? Pat doubts it, inasmuch as his was the only dissenting voice on Gore's blog. Meanwhile a new analysis by the National Center for Policy Analysis (not among Al's links) contends that the science behind Gore's film is "fatally flawed." The study's author, David Legates, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Climataic Research, concludes that "science does not supprt claims of drastic increases in global temperatures, nor claims of human influence on weather events or extinctions." http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014160.php blog.nam.org blog.nam.org eteam.ncpa.org

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/24/2006 4:28:00 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Al Gore's Movie Betsy's Page A professor of climatology notes some inconvenient inaccuracies in Gore's movie. "An Inconvenient Truth" is billed as the scariest movie you'll ever see. It may well be, but that's in part because it is not the most accurate depiction of the state of global warming science. The enormous uncertainties surrounding the global warming issue are conveniently missing in "An Inconvenient Truth." http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2006/05/al-gores-movie.html tcsdaily.com

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/24/2006 7:22:59 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Gore's inconvenient lie By Patrick J. Michaels The Washington Times Commentary Page May 24, 2006 The word's out: Puffing up global warming is scientifically acceptable, a legitimate activity required to get people's attention on this important issue. The latest example is Al Gore's global warming horror show, "An Inconvenient Truth." Most people with a standard American science education (i.e. none) will leave convinced that the world is going to come to an end from climate change -- or, rather, that it has already started to do so. It's a sad fact that some scientists, and scientist wannabes (like Mr. Gore) take this tack, because it will only weaken the public's growing distrust in what they perceive is a scientific elite that leaves them out of the feedback loop. Presumably safe drugs develop unforeseen and fatal side effects. Engineers charged to protect a major city build levees that crash in what (in New Orleans) was a modest hurricane. Their hybrid cars don't get the mileage EPA says they will. So here's what Al told Grist Magazine about global warming: <<< "I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience." >>> It would be nice to think he came up with this de novo. But exaggeration of global warming has long been considered virtuous. Consider NASA's James Hansen. He has claimed the Bush White House muzzled him on global warming. How muzzled is certainly debatable. He has far more recent news citations than any other climate scientist. He also started the whole global warming hysteria, with some remarkably inflammatory congressional testimony in 1988, and he is Al Gore's climate guru. Here's what he wrote in 2003 from his Broadway office, in the online journal Natural Science: <<< "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decisionmakers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue." >>> In fact, in 1989, he told The Washington Post he felt it was his duty to bring global warming to the attention of the political process. Apparently it was also "appropriate" to exaggerate it for political effect. Stanford's Stephen Schneider, interviewed by Jonathan Schell in Discover magazine later that year, spoke of the need to "capture the public's imagination." Scientists would have to, <<< "offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. ... Each of us has to decide what is the right balance between being effective and being honest." >>> The bias of scientists can actually be proven mathematically. Examine the major scientific journals, university press releases, or individual newspaper articles resulting from either. You'll find out that it's almost always "worse than we thought." A survey I did last year put the ratio of "worse" rather than "better" news on global warming at about 15-to-1. Of course, any new information added to a forecast has an equal probability of making it "worse" or "better," similar to the odds for flipping a coin. The odds of throwing only one "head" in 16 tosses are less than 1 in 4,000. There are many reasons for this bias. Most environmental scientists pursue their profession because they have some strong feelings about the environment, just as doctors often are passionate about human health and welfare. Then issues compete for public attention (i.e. funding). Presenting them in as important a light as possible is required by such competition. And without funding, there's no research, which means, for most scientists, a new job. That's "The Inconvenient Truth" about global warming. Prominent scientists feel it's perfectly fine to exaggerate, and so does the former vice president. Their wish is that such exaggeration brings forth the political will to regulate our energy supply because of global warming. Such a prospect will be profoundly expensive, and by every analysis, will do nothing measurable about climate change itself. Mr. Gore's own scientists have told him this. But the cost to society from the cheapening of science will stay with us for generations. Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media." washingtontimes.com

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/26/2006 2:24:53 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Al Gore - lying scumbag. He's a perfect fit to run as the libs choice for prez. Same Al Gore, different day by Jonah Goldberg Townhall.com May 26, 2006 Al Gore's a lucky man. As we speak, his facade is being added to Mt. Huffington, that virtual Rushmore of Great Men Destined to Save America. The committee deciding who gets chiseled onto Mt. Huffington has only one member: Arianna Huffington. In years past she has elevated her ex-husband, Michael, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and formerly relevant Warren Beatty as saviors of the republic. Now it's Gore's turn. In a recent write-up of Gore's visit to the Cannes Film Festival to promote his new film on global warming, which premiered Wednesday in Los Angeles, Huffington hailed the "new Gore" as the "hottest star in town," beating out Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks. Gore told Huffington that this was his second trip to Cannes. "The first was when I was 15 years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists - Sartre, Camus. ... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!" This, gushed Huffington, "may explain his pitch-perfect French accent." Perhaps. Though according to David Maraniss' biography of Gore, the former vice president's 15th summer was spent working on the family farm. Remember those stories about how Al Sr. said, "A boy could never be president if he couldn't plow with that damned hillside plow"? That was the same summer. Apparently, Poppa Gore thought a boy who couldn't both plow a field and parlez French existentialism could never be president either. Then there's the fact that young Al got C's in French at his tony Washington high school, St. Alban's. That's some school if a kid who can intelligently discuss Sartre's "La Nausée" and Camus' "Betwixt and Between" in apparently pitch-perfect French still can't earn a B in French class. Mon dieu! But let's be fair. Maybe he misremembered the age at which he studied existential philosophy in France (though I could find no mention of such a trip in a quick search of his biographies). Why not trust him? After all, he's not running for anything, right? Wrong. Or at least that's the hope of a growing number of liberals and journalists who are starting to get pre-buyer's remorse for Hillary Clinton. In a giant love letter to Gore in New York magazine titled "The Comeback Kid," an unidentified Democratic strategist likens the perceived inevitability of the Hillary nomination to "some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it." The answer seems to involve Gore on a white horse. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter tells Huffington that, "Democrats are looking everywhere to find their presidential candidate." But, he says, "the solution may be right under their noses." The reasoning behind the Gore boomlet extends beyond anti-Hillary angst. Gore won more votes than President Bush in 2000, which makes him not only popular but a lovable "victim," too. As one batty contributor to Huffington's blog puts it, "If Al Gore was the Democratic nominee ... there's no reason to think he would get any fewer votes than he did before." But more important, he's "a new Al Gore" - more relaxed, more passionate, more this, more that. And, of course, his fame as an environmental crusader is his greatest attribute among the liberal cognoscenti. Yet there were hundreds of stories about how Al Gore was a "new Al Gore" in 2000. Indeed, save for the environmental crusader part, it was the same new Gore then that we see before us today. Does no one remember his bold switch to earth-tone shirts, sloppy smooches with his wife and passionate harangues about Big Oil and fiscal lock boxes? In fact, there have been lots of new Al Gores. In 1987, Dick Gephardt groused that "maybe the next debate should be between the old Al Gore and the new Al Gore." In 1992, the press spotted the new Al yet again. The New York Times noted that "in Campaign '92, there is a new Al Gore - crisper, animated, more to the point, leavened with a bit of impish humor." In 2000, the new Al Gore did leave out his apocalyptic environmental messianism. But now the thinking seems to be that strident, green finger-wagging environmentalism would help him in '08. Good luck. The truth is that there's always been just one Al Gore, a man betwixt and between his head and his heart, wanting to be both nerd-philosopher and poet-warrior - and coming up short on both counts. It's reminiscent of another existential play, originally written in French, so Gore no doubt knows it well. In "Waiting for Godot," Godot never comes - and we are never even sure who Godot is. But we get the sense that the nonexistent Godot is really a Rorschach test of sorts, revealing more about what the audience wants him to be than anything else. So it is with those waiting for Gore. Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online. Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com townhall.com

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/26/2006 2:58:24 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

An Inconvenient Truth -- the Rejected Title Iain Murray The Corner My friend Julian Morris of the International Policy Network in Britain suggests that, if Al Gore wanted to be accurate about the nature of his film, he should have called it, “"A set of implausible predictions based on poorly parameterized models." He recognizes that it wouldn’t have been as much of a crowd-pleaser… corner.nationalreview.com policynetwork.net

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/26/2006 3:48:51 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Gore & Farming Jonah Goldberg The Corner I get a lot of email like this: <<< Al Gore's father may have made him do the farming chores that he claims, but it is crystal clear to anyone that knows even a little about farming that Al Gore does not have the foggiest notion about farming as a business. In his eulogy of his father, he said the following: * He taught me how to plow a steep hillside with a team of mules. He taught me how to clear three acres of heavily-wooded forest with a double-bladed axe. He taught me how to take up hay all day.... * Plowing a "steep hillside" would have violated the regulations of his conservation district. He implies that he cleared 3 acres for more farming, by putting that sentence among the farming tasks. Farmers were paid in the early Sixties NOT to farm, to leave a portion of their farmland idle. A farmer would very likely would not have been allowed to add to his farmland. A U.S. senator would not have allowed this to happen because of the bad publicity. Al Gore, Jr., may have farmed, but he apparently learned NOTHING about the business. Signed: Someone who knows just a little bit about farming. >>> Me: I don't want to get into the weeds on this. But I think the basic point is that whatever it was that Gore's dad made his son do, good farming techniques weren't part of it. According to Gore's biographers, Gore's dad wanted to develop his son's character. His dad's farming/business practices generally don't always look above board, but that too is irrelevant. There are witnesses on the record who say they saw Gore doing the hillside plowing and whatnot. As for Gore spending a summer at existentialist sleep-away camp in France, I've seen no evidence that this ever happened. I will gladly post any reliable evidence or testimony someone sends me saying he did. corner.nationalreview.com

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/30/2006 7:34:41 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Al Gore Continues to Enjoy the Lifestyle He Can Afford Iain Murray The Corner Al Gore justifies his enjoyment of a carbon-intensive lifestyle in a speech in the UK: <<< He said he was "carbon neutral" himself and he tried to offset any plane flight or car journey by "purchasing verifiable reductions in CO2 elsewhere". >>> Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning. The new aristocracy; there's no other way to describe it. corner.nationalreview.com news.bbc.co.uk

To: Sully- who wrote (20165)	5/30/2006 7:58:14 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Gore's Moralism [Iain Murray] For more on Gore the Moralist, check out Jim Pinkerton at the link below: In his unwillingness seriously to consider tradeoffs, in his high-pressure Keynote-ing salesmanship for one view of the world, we sense that Gore the Environmentalist is really Gore the Moralist, more determined to scold us than to help us. The window of truth opened to him, and he's willing to let us look through it, too — but we'd better care, or else. For Gore, the personal is the environmental; he's out to legislate eco-morality, an eco- morality in which glaciers and the snow atop Mt. Kilimanjaro matter more than any other concern. I've been calling Gore an aristocrat for his desire to use certain conveniences while denying them to the rest of us, one way or another. Perhaps "Prince Bishop" might be a better label. corner.nationalreview.com tcsdaily.com