How Climate Sanity Has Been Gored

By LARRY BELL   Forbes.com 2/3/11

My new book, Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, is dedicated to Al Gore, whose invention of the Internet made it possible–and whose invention of facts made it necessary. Beginning with the aggressively hyped 1988 U.S. Senate hearings he organized, no one has done more to melt down complacent minds with stoked-up claims of fossil-fueled climate peril.

In 2006 Gore launched an initial three-year, $300 million “Alliance for Climate Protection” media campaign to promote greenhouse gas reductions. While ads appearing in national television, print, radio, and online outlets were directed to diverse audiences, the ultimate target group was government legislators. As he stated, “NASCAR fans, churchgoers, labor union members, small businessmen, engineers, hunters, spokesmen, corporate leaders, you name it–where public opinion goes, federal policy will follow.”

An example is an early TV segment, narrated by William H. Macy, showing footage of American soldiers storming beaches of Normandy during World War II, a civil rights march, and a moon landing. The message linked these critical historic events to an urgent call for action. “We can’t wait for someone else to solve the climate crisis. We need to act, and we need to do it now. Join us. Together we can solve the climate crisis”.

What crisis? Apparently this was supposed to be self- evident. And what solution? Although the message doesn’t quite tell us, it’s actually very clear. We should all support a war against climate change. The answer, of course, is to support cap-and-trade legislation and alternative energy subsidies. And why? Speaking before a 2007 U.S. Joint House Energy and Science Committee, Mr. Gore offered a particularly important reason: “As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave of investment in it…there will be unchained investment”. What better way to reduce evil carbon than to make it a profitable commodity?

Al Gore has been busy on both battle fronts, and has made a lot of money in the process. In 2004 he co-founded Generation Investment Management LLP (GIM) with three partners; former Goldman Sachs Asset Management chief David Blood and two others from that firm. GIM is a London-based firm that invests money from institutions and wealthy investors that are “going green”. GIM and Goldman Sachs were also big investors in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which expected to become the New York Stock Exchange for carbon offset marketing provided that the federal cap-and-trade legislation Gore has lobbied for was enacted. The organization closed its doors after November 2010 elections removed that likelihood.

Gore joined the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers in November 2007, whose key partner, John Doerr, has been pushing hard for biofuel subsidies. GIM also became a KPCB affiliate. As vice president, Gore had cast a 1994 Senate tie-breaking vote in favor of ethanol mandates, something he now admits to regretting. He stated four years later that, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had certain fondness of the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president”.

Since his nonelection to the presidency, Gore has accumulated an estimated net worth well in excess of $100 million. In addition to his six-figure speaking gigs, he signed on as a Google advisor in 2001–before it went public–and received stock options reportedly valued at more than $30 million. In 2004 he and some investment partners purchased the Canadian news network News World International (NWI) for $70 million and renamed it Current TV. Those investment partners include former Goldman Sachs senior director and Democratic Finance Committee chair Philip Murphy, Senator Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy and former AOL Time Warner CEO Bill Pittman.

These and other sources of revenue have afforded means for an opulent and hardly “carbon neutral” lifestyle. His Bell Meade area Nashville mansion alone, one of three Gore homes, was reported to use about 221,000 kWh of electricity per year, more than 20 times the amount consumed by average American households. He has defended this by claiming that some of this power comes from “renewable” sources, with the balance canceled out by carbon offsets purchased through GIM, apparently making it all okay. Yet since viewers are asked at the end of his 2006 An Inconvenient Truth movie– “Are you ready to change the way you live?”–he might be well advised to rethink his own answer.

That movie, accompanied by a book of the same topic and title, demonstrates Gore’s remarkable disregard for factual accuracy. One glaring misrepresentation among many presented two graphs, one depicting CO2 increases separately aligned above another indicating temperature rises over a 650,000 year period. They were represented to purport a direct causal fit, suggesting that increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations produce warming. Yet if those two plots had been less craftily positioned, one directly superimposed upon the other, a clearer and different observation would have emerged. Yes, there is a general correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperatures, but one where temperature changes lead, not follow CO2 fluctuations. This is because cold oceans absorb CO2, and gradually release it when they warm due to natural causes.

Scientifically unsupportable and misleading statements prompted an October 2007 ruling in London’s High Court that An Inconvenient Truth can be shown in secondary schools only if accompanied by guidance notes for teachers to balance Gore’s “one-sided” views. Following extensive evidentiary review, the judge cited nine specific errors. Included are unwarranted global warming claims predicting a 20 foot sea level rise, flooding of low-lying inhabited Pacific Atolls, and a likely shift in Gulf Stream currents; and attributions of the disappearance of Mt Kilimanjaro snow, drying up of Lake Chad, Hurricane Katrina, drowning polar bears, and coral reef destruction due to human causes.

In comments regarding his findings, Sir Michael Burton pointed out that the “apocalyptical vision” presented in the film was politically partisan, and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change: “It is built around the charismatic presence of the ex-vice president Al Gore, whose crusade is to persuade the world of the dangers of climate change caused by global warming…It is now common ground that it is not simply a science film—although it is clear that it is based substantially on scientific research and opinion–but it is a political film.”

Al Gore received a Nobel Peace Prize for making the world aware of a crisis. Ironically, the real crisis is one he contributed much to create–one of mass hysteria promulgated through deceptively contrived alarmist propaganda. Still, this could not have been possible were it not for an extended band of collaborators. Herein lies an exceedingly larger scandal–a conspiracy of silence on the part of many trusted scientists who knew differently, yet said nothing to expose the greatest economic and political hoax of our time.