Opinion

Once Again, The Goreacle Missed The Mark Entirely

Andy Patrizio Freelance Journalist
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Stop me if you heard this before: former Vice President Al Gore completely whiffed it on an environmental prediction.

I know, shocking.

The latest swing and a miss was a prediction he made when accepting his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, a prize becoming increasingly worthless given its dubious winners. “The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,” he said. “It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.”

Well, London’s Daily Mail has taken great glee in pointing out that not only was he wrong, there is a lot more ice now than there was two years ago.

The Mail pointed out that there was 3.91 million square kilometers of ice on the pole on August 25, 2012. Mind you, that’s in late August when it’s hot and even Alaska gets warm, so it will only thicken as fall approaches. On August 25, 2014, there was 5.62 million square kilometers of ice, a 43 percent increase. The images used and measurements came from satellite images published by the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

Gore continues his reign of error for one reason only; a complicit media that covers for his errors and ignores his critics. I know complaining about media bias is almost a cliché, but look at how they have behaved. Scott Pelley of CBS News and “60 Minutes” compared skeptics of global warming who complained about a lopsided story he did in the summer of 2007 to “Holocaust deniers.” Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman has also declared that “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

In December 2006, the Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen, host of weekly global warming program “The Climate Code,” began to advocate that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their seal of approval from any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe. “If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval,” Cullen wrote in a December 21, 2006 blog on the Weather Channel Website. So, the mainstream media is indeed aiding and abetting.

This is hardly the first time the seminary school dropout-turned-climate expert has swung and missed. In his speech to accept the Nobel, Gore declared the planet “had a fever.” And yet the Remote Sensing Systems site, which measures annual temperatures, says there has been “no global warming for 17 years, 10 months.”

His movie “An Inconvenient Truth” was found to be riddled with inaccuracies, falsehoods, and exaggerations on the level of Michael Moore. One example: he claimed Hurricanes would increase in intensity and frequency. Oops, we’re at a 30-year low.

Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, has said repeatedly that warming has nothing to do with it. He has also said there were more hurricanes in the first half of the 20th century than the second half.

Tad Murty of the University of Ottawa noted that in the other six ocean basins worldwide, hurricane activity is flat or declining. Dr. Murty said also that hurricane activity in the U.S. southeast was greater in the first half of the 20th century than it is now.

Gore claimed new diseases emerging around the world were caused by global warming. He was promptly shot down. “None of the 30 so-called new diseases Gore references are attributable to global warming, none,” said Dr. Paul Reiter of Institut Pasteur. He also called the movie “pure, mind-bending propaganda.”

But the Goreacle’s gall knows no bounds. Gore has been claiming the “science is settled” as far back as 1992, with his book Earth in the Balance. “Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.” At the time, a Gallup poll reported that 53 percent of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred. Another 30 percent weren’t sure and only 17 percent believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47 percent of climatologists didn’t think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent, while only 36 percent thought it possible and a mere 13 percent thought it probable.

If you managed to sit through “An Inconvenient Truth,” you know he used the Caney Fork River as the backdrop in some scenes. More than once, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation issued a “Notice of Violation” warnings due to high levels of zinc in the river. A report in the Wall Street Journal in June 2000 noted that soil samples drawn from the mine effluent and downstream “contained large quantities of Barium, Iron, and Zinc, as well as smaller amounts of Arsenic, Chromium and Lead.” Other tests by a separate lab found similar traces of heavy metals in the water and soil.

Guess who was polluting that river? In 1973, Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer sold the Pasminco Zinc Mine to the Gore family in 1973. For nearly 30 years until it closed in 2003, Al Gore Jr. drew an annual $20,000 royalty from the extraction of zinc from the mine, located in the remote Cumberland River Valley area and spilled its waste into the Caney Fork River.

The only mainstream news outlet to give this issue full coverage was USA Today. “In the five-year period from 1998-2003, before the mines were shuttered, more than 19 million pounds of toxic substances were released into the air, water and land, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory data. Most of that was zinc pulled from the ground during mining,” a 2007 article stated.

My favorite incident took place on January 15, 2004. The Goreacle gave a speech in New York at the Beacon Theater. He said, “I don’t think there is any longer a credible basis for doubting that the Earth’s atmosphere is heating up because of global warming.” Outside, it was almost ten degrees, the wind was 18 miles per hour and the wind chill was in the single digits.

Missouri Rep. Roy Blunt had a rather succinct response to the speech: “It is fitting that Gore chose one of the coldest days of the year to spread false information about the Bush administration’s record on global warming. Mother Nature didn’t agree with his message and neither do I. Al, it’s cold outside.”

Lisa Sabori, a PR specialist for MoveOn.org, the sponsor of the speech, told the New York Post “Maybe [the speech] won’t apply in New York right now, but Vice President Gore will be highlighting the effects of global warming in different parts of the world. We don’t control the environment.”

And yet your side insists man can control the planet’s temperatures and sea levels.

But this should come as no surprise. This is the person who used his sister’s lung cancer death in his 1996 speech to the Democratic National Convention to attack the tobacco industry when he used to grow tobacco and once boasted of it. He boasted in 2000 that his father lost his Senate seat in 1970 for supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when Al Gore Sr. voted against it. He also brought up his son’s near death in an accident at a convention speech when there was no reason whatsoever to bring it up, other than for sheer emotional exploitation.

By the way, that 2007 Nobel Prize? One of the contenders he was up against was a woman named Irena Sendler (or Sendlerowa). During World War II, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto where Jews had been rounded up by the Nazis. She knew what the Nazis were going to do and smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried.

Over the course of this effort, she smuggled out 2,500 kids/infants. That’s more than double what Oskar Schindler saved. Eventually she was caught, and the Nazis broke both her legs and arms, and beat her severely. She kept a record of all of the kids she smuggled out in a glass jar buried in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the family.

And she lost to this fraud.