Is it my imagination or is Al Gore rapidly becoming the Newt Gingrich of the left? a) He powers his humongous Tennessee mansion with nothing but fossil fuels. b) He builds a second mansion right next to the Pacific Ocean (thereby disregarding his very own warnings relative to sea levels rising). And now, best of all, c) he sells his television network, Current TV, to an entity, Al Jazeera, that is currently bankrolled almost exclusively by Middle Eastern oil....AND he tries to finalize the deal prior to the fiscal cliff negotiations so he wouldn't have to pay as much in taxes. To say that this fellow is a Gingrichesque hypocrite is pretty damned accurate, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Tipper gets a cut?
It is always all about the money.
ReplyDeleteTipper had better get a cut, Russ, putting up with him for all those years.......They all seem to have a price, Jerry, Gingrich with Fannie and Freddie and now Al Gore with this.
ReplyDeleteMoney?!? Do you think you would be different if you had 250 million sitting in the bank? I would like to think that I would not be, BUT ........
ReplyDeleteHe and the Newster both have that bizarre and big headed look you only find in politicians. Not a normal look you will find down at the local garage or see in a mailman's outfit.
ReplyDeleteI think that the 2000 election changed Gore. He went from being a measured and reasonable individual to something quite different, I think.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI think you're wrong Will,2000 had nothing to do with this asshole.
The people of his home stste knew exactly what he was.
Rusty has a point.... Gore showed himself to be a truly reprehensible human being with his hard (but thankfully failed) effort to disenfranchise the entire nation in 2000 when he lost the election. An effort that included perjury, ballot tampering, and a truly crazy scheme to get ballots without votes on them counted as votes for him.
ReplyDeleteI doubt this was a sudden change (or loss) of character. He was probably like this all along. There are examples of his immoral/criminal/corrupt behavior and desire for power at all cost prior to the 2000 election. I'm not referring to Gore's many self-aggrandizing whoppers such as when he claimed to have invented the Internet.
I am referring to such incidents as his using his Vice Presidential office to run his political campaign (a crime), and then claiming he was above the law ("no controlling legal authority") when he was caught doing so.
Will, do you think that Gore was "measured and reasonable" when he repeatedly claimed to be above the lawwhen caught breaking it in 1997? This was well before the election.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I guess that if you can't carry your own home state....But as a Senator, wasn't he a part of the Democratic Leadership Council and considered a moderate then?
ReplyDeleteSo...'An Inconvenient Truth' was just another AlGore-ithm ?
ReplyDeleteI don't want to excoriate the man too much but there were some errors in the movie. The dude says that seal levels are going to increase by 20 feet in a hundred years. Compare that to satellite data which shows that sea levels are rising at about a third of a millimeter a year and 3.3 centimeters per century. In the exacting words of Bjorn Lomborg, "Yes, there's global warming and, yes, it is a problem but it isn't the end of the world."
ReplyDeleteAnd the same thing is happening on Mars (look at the icecaps).
DeleteIMO, Gore did more to harm to GW science than help. Technical-wise
ReplyDeletethere is a lot of data to sort through: 97% of scientists recognize the problem and 67% of
the public. Scientists are lousy
salesmen....but not as bad as Gore!
You have a good point: Gore, a highly partisan and divisive figure, has much more heavily politicized this issue than it might have been otherwise.
ReplyDeleteBB, I'll bet that that 97% figure has a lot of gradation in it. Bjorn Lomborg and Pat Michaels, for example, both believe in global warming (though they both recognize that the satellite data shows a lesser level of it and that there has actually been cooling over the past decade or so) and that man is possibly a factor but neither thinks that the situation is anywhere a "tipping point" and that we need to be cautious in our response.
ReplyDeleteAnd the percentage may in fact be coming down - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316469/Royal-Society-issues-new-climate-change-guide-admits-uncertainties.html
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there is a lot of graduation among the 'believers'.
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, we have a relatively small window of a few
dozen years of data to project out
over time; it is a planet problem, with China currently leading in
greedhouse gas output; there are
probably better approaches than
cap & trade, etc.
It seems that if a relatively
small population cluster like Cleveland a few years back, can
produce flammable rivers, a large
population of humans can impact
our environment any number of ways.
IMO, we should not leave our
descendants with superstorms and
deserts in weird places any more than we should leave them with trillions in debt. ...no easy choices.
There is interesting data indicating aggregate
ReplyDeleteaverage temperature, overall trend
and the wiggly (high amplitude) year by year temperature. We note
that 2012 in the US was 55.3 deg,
which is almost off the linked
chart. There are so many variables,
some better understood than others,
that lead to interpetive difficulty: ocean currents, winds aloft, cloud formation, etc which
may in some cases ameliorate the process and in others, accelerate
it. I'll cop out and suggest that
in a couple hundred years we will
have a better grasp.
Using that same graph, look at the huge dip in temperature from 1940 to 1975, an era of massive increases in atmospheric carbon.
ReplyDeleteThere arenobviouslymother factors at work besides atmospheric CO2.
ReplyDelete"....look at the huge dip...."
ReplyDeleteWill, that's no way to speak of our former Vice President and self-proclaimed creator of the Internet!