Love ya, Al

I know for some of my readers the global-warming topic is as fresh and exciting as yesterday's underwear (your own, JC.) But I want some sort of record of my non-belief, so that when my children are grown and everyone is claiming they never bought into the AGW hype, I'll actually have proof.

I stumbled onto a site that isn't especially new with a point-by-point discrediting of Al Gore's Nobel-winning Inconvenient Propaganda. Al and I have had our differences since I voted for him to be President (wait til you tell your kids that you were once forced to choose between Al Gore and George W. Bush - history will prove them to be a couple of the biggest buffoons ever to walk the halls of the White House.) I've even called him a bold-faced mother-fucking liar.

Amazingly, this assessment underestimates just how self-serving An Inconvenient Truth actually is. Aside from the $60 million gross and the $100k that Gore charges for public appearances to stoke AGW fears, Gore is an owner and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a corporation that offers consulting for dealing with carbon cap-and-trade legislation. Seems like a wasted investment if the U.S. never implements such legislation, don't you think?

The bottom line remains the same. The warming that we are experiencing is often overstated, not unusual in the history of the Earth, and is almost entirely caused by factors that are not man-made. Solar activity (at an 11000-year high) and oceanic currents (like the PDO and ENSO - see the discrediting link for details) explain the temperature fluctuations over thousands of years without cherry-picking data or discarding contradictory evidence.

Man can adversely affect the environment, and it's important to understand and mitigate the consequences of overpopulation, overfishing, overfarming, deforestation, diverting waterways, etc. But focusing on non-solutions like carbon caps and ethanol only exacerbates man's environmental impact (how much forest is being cleared right now, worldwide, because of artificially inflated corn and grain prices?) To steal a quote from Ponder the Maunder:

You will not stop malaria or other diseases by reducing atmospheric CO₂. But if you spend all of your resources on reducing CO₂ then all of the other environmental problems created by man will not be resolved.

But never fear, Generation IM and its bloated, Bill-Gates-wannabe leader will save us from ourselves. And make Al a boatload of money at the same time.