I see your point, but I'd say there is cherrypicking data on both sides. In terms of motives, certanily Gore and many scientists have been personally enriched by promoting global warming.
Sure humans have affected the climate, but I'm scared by the level of religious language and fanaticism:
"Repent of your carbon emissions!"
"The world will be destroyed in ten years!"
It used to be like 75 years but I guess people didn't really care so now they employ all these fear tactics. New York will be under water in our lifetime? Seriously? Many alarmists employ the same language that Pat Robertson does about the second coming and that Bush does about the terrorists.
As soon as I think I'm being manipulated by fear I get really skeptical. Al Gore IS a politician and his messianic message is demagogy as much as anything.
There's a danger in personifying overall concern about global into a single spokesman, Al Gore. It's a fallacy to try to discredit everyone who believes in climate change by simply tearing down Al Gore himself. It's a convenient way of not confronting the facts on either side of the argument.
Al Gore's involvement has made a lot of reflex conservatives who previously had no opinion on the matter into global warming skeptics. They figure since a prominent Democrat is saying it, they should be saying the opposite.
Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize, not one of the scientific prizes. The Peace Prize is entirely political. Yasser Arafat (a famously corrupt and dishonest politician) also got one, so their standards are obviously not very high. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/
Question: If Al Gore believed it himself, would he live in a 12-bedroom mansion with a heated swimming pool? Would he jump on a plane at the drop of a hat? Would he sell carbon credits to himself?
Regardless of the merits of the climate change argument, Al Gore is in it for the political mileage and that's all.
I'm old enough to remember when the Green lobby was worried about global cooling, a new Ice Age. The things they prescribed - massively increase regulation and taxation - strangely are exactly the same despite the problem being the opposite! Doesn't that seem odd too? Almost as if it was never anything to do with the environment...
Klein observes that Chait’s riff here is the equivalent of those people who attack Al Gore for being a global-warming crusader even though he rides in cars and uses light bulbs. Of course it is; the point of such attacks is, first, to deride anyone who says anything that makes us feel uncomfortable, and second, to establish that we need listen to radical truths only if they’re spoken by people who live lives of saintly renunciation. Since such people are very rare, this guarantees we won’t be frequently disturbed.
That is a ridiculous counterargument. No-one is asking Al Gore to wear a hair shirt for our sins. All he has to do is walk the walk, just as he advocates that we do. How often do you think the other 11 bedrooms of his mansion are slept in? How often is his pool swum in? These things are pure ostentation. It's not even like his pool is solar heated!
Why does he need to walk the walk? What does his walk have to do with his argument? Who's going to wake up in the morning and say, "you know, I was on the fence on this whole climate change thing, but if Al Gore is going to drive a Honda civic, I'd better sell my Hummer?"
If Al Gore thinks it is so dangerous to live the way he does, why does he continue to do so? Why does he not himself do, what he wants to coerce everyone else to do? For crying out loud. It screams hypocrisy!
Here's another version of the analogy: you say that eating Big Macs will cause other people to die and cities to sink into the ocean, and that I should limit my intake of Big Macs because of this. It's OK if I continue to eat some Big Macs, though as long as I pay you a tax or buy Big Mac credits from your company and I let you regulate what I eat. If I don't pay the tax you have imposed on Big Macs, I will be thrown into jail. If I then resist going to jail, you will have the police kill me.
In light of those claims, I find it strange that you (the fictional Ron-Al McGore) are not really changing your eating habit of at least 4 Big Macs at every meal.
Your analogy is close, but flawed. Instead, I suggest the following as an analogy for your argument:
Al Gore is arguing for an across the board tax increase. He thinks that everyone should pay more taxes. On the other hand, he's not donating his money to the government. If Al Gore really thought it was a good idea to raise taxes, wouldn't he pay them whether the government mandates it or not?
That illustrates more clearly the fact that action on global warming is collective, the same way that taxes are. In fact, you could probably implement action on global warming as a tax increase, by requiring people to purchase carbon credits. I hope you see why it's not required for you to donate extra money to the government in order to argue for a tax increase. Given that, I hope you see why it's not required for you to preemptively stop consuming carbon to argue for government action on global warming.
Citizen consumption is almost irrelevant when it comes to CO2 emissions. Criticizing people for having big houses or driving SUVs misses the point. We need a change in our energy sources away from coal. We have cost-effective technologies already, yet still 40% of our emissions come from burning it to create power.
And at this point in the troll thread it's probably too late to point out that Al Gore has apparently gone out of his way to power his house with renewable energy. [1] Because, you know, of what use are facts in a character assassination?
But the point is that Al Gore is not advocating that you live like a hermit. He's advocating that hermits live like hermits on renewable power, that lawyers live like lawyers on renewable power, and that millionaires live like millionaires on renewable power. Which he does, to the extent that the infrastructure makes it easy. And then, because he's neither a back-to-nature homesteader nor a backyard engineer, he wisely invests his time and energy in what he is good at: lobbying for better infrastructure so that we can all create less CO2.
The irony is that if Al Gore did live like Saint Francis he would be less effective. He would be accused of being some kind of scary hippie socialist. That script is just sitting on the shelf waiting to be used. "What does Al Gore have against the average middle-class millionaire?" would be the cry. "He wants to force you to live like a hermit even after you make ten million dollars!" Or maybe they'd just make fun of his hair. That never gets old.
[1] Wikipedia entry on "Al Gore". I'm not about to descend farther into the research chain, dodging propaganda all the way. Talk about a waste of CO2. It's not like facts are going to do any good in this thread anyway.
It's pretty clear that if Al Gore believes himself he should do whatever is in his power to change the global system. Since the alternative is to hole up and get nothing done, that means flying around, giving talks, and contributing to a (vanishingly) small increase in emissions with the hope of effecting large change.
By your argument you could discount everyone who is arguing that global warming is real by saying that they are driving and flying and emitting carbon. Face it -- in the US today you have to drive and fly to do anything, including trying to change that fact itself.
I don't know anything about his residence, but that is anyway a complete ad hominem attack. The characteristics of his home have nothing to do with the merits of his case.
It's clear that he believe that he himself should remain in the public arena despite being rejected by the democratic process. There's no evidence that he believes anything else, given the disconnect between his lifestyle and what he advocates for others. There is absolutely no reason (it's not like he can't afford it) that he couldn't be powering that mansion of his with wind or solar, and that's just one example. There's no reason that the profits from his carbon credit company couldn't be spent on alternative energy research. The evidence is that it's all self-promotion.
"many scientists have been personally enriched by promoting global warming":
Can we name concrete names of those rich scientists, please? I'm pretty sure Jim Hansen's gains have been limited to the risk of losing his job and of not being allowed to publish his results.
And saying that "it used to be 75 years but people didn't care so now they say the world will be destroyed in 10 years" is spectacularly dishonest. First, scientific facts change. If you follow the research you'll know that evidence is accumulating that effects like deglaciation are happening faster than models used to predict.
When better data become available, scientific predictions will change. Arguing that this proves that science is flawed or scientists are dishonest is like calling people changing their mind about something with more information "flip-floppers" -- but it's the only rational thing to do.
Second, who is saying that "the world will be destroyed in ten years"? As far as I know, reputable scientists are saying things like "unless changes are made within ten years, we will reach a point where it will be too late to stop climate change from reaching a point with likely bad effects". That's a very different thing. Those bad effects won't happen for a long time, like 50-100 years, because of the thermal inertia of the planet, but that also means we must start slowing down now. It's like driving a car, you'd better start slowing down before you get to the curve, trying to do it when you realize you're heading off the road is too little, too late.
Oh, and Al Gore is not a politician. He holds no office, and does not work for a political party. I guess it would be fair to call him a lobbyist, but his financial gain is much less than that of other "lobbyists" like the wall street people. In my eyes, he has way more credibility in his current position than any of those who have large financial stakes in influencing people.
I don't have time to research all of the people that call themselves "scientists" that have invested in carbon credit companies. But, according to this: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=545... Al Gore "buys" his credits from a company he owns a financial stake in.
You're right, these predictions are going to change. They are going to change forever because there are infinitely many variables that go into the climate. For someone to take guesses at what the values are for 70 of them and call that model "science" is bull crap.
Anyone doing anything with even a small connection to climate change would not have got funded without the bandwagon. Lots of scientific careers hinge on this gravy train.
By that logic, cancer is a myth. Do you have any idea how many careers hinge on trying to cure cancer? It's a scientific conspiracy! They have to keep the cancer gravy train going.
The evidence that cancer exists is pretty conclusive. The evidence that the climate is changing in an unusual way isn't.
I live in England, wet, dark miserable England - yet in Roman times there were vineyards and olive trees here. Are you going to tell me next that the bad old Roman Empire was emitting clouds of toxic waste?
"The evidence that cancer exists is pretty conclusive. The evidence that the climate is changing in an unusual way isn't."
I don't agree with that statement, but it's a valid argument for a climate skeptic. "The scientists are just trying to keep the gravy train going" is not a valid argument, because it applies equally to all heavily researched areas. So please, don't use that specific argument again, and understand why it is incorrect.
Any debate on England and Rome is entirely beside the point.
Scientists are not a single homogenous group. If a tenured meteorologist says the climate is changing, then we should listen. If someone tacked "effects of global warming on..." to their study on "the mating habits of water voles", something that would not otherwise have been funded, then we should be skeptical if that person's name later shows up as one of the scientists supporting the global warming theory.
Channel 4 did a documentary on this phenomenon not long ago.
If you could die at any moment and one person says, "have fun" and another person says, "be a christian or you could spend eternity in hell!", what would you advise?
Actually that's an interesting point. There is a significant amount of the latter in the world. For that reason alone I believe it merits consideration. But attention is not necessarily your agreement. Consider it & come to conclusions as objectively as you can.
Do you trust the scientific process that has led to an overwhelming support for climate change theories in the scientific communities? Do you think that there is sufficient possibility that the process has been corrupted?
Reproducible experiments & falsifiable theories lead to overwhelming support. Supposedly, imperfectly and in the long term.
I'm not saying take it at face value. I am saying that in the absence of a personal ability to test & verify & delve into the research, your best bet is a bit of meta research.
Sure humans have affected the climate, but I'm scared by the level of religious language and fanaticism:
"Repent of your carbon emissions!"
"The world will be destroyed in ten years!"
It used to be like 75 years but I guess people didn't really care so now they employ all these fear tactics. New York will be under water in our lifetime? Seriously? Many alarmists employ the same language that Pat Robertson does about the second coming and that Bush does about the terrorists.
As soon as I think I'm being manipulated by fear I get really skeptical. Al Gore IS a politician and his messianic message is demagogy as much as anything.