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Go Home Gore?

THE SPINE OCTOBER 12, 2007

Gore?

BY TNR STAFF

You wanna get the blood of the editors of Commentary flowing ... or of the
Wall Street Journal? Just mention Al Gore. Or global warming. There are
two articles in Thursday's Times that will get their hysteria up ... about what they
usually characterize as Gore's hysteria. It's odd -- isn't it? -- that these
ordinary journalists (like me) have the science down pat. They know the
one scientist here and the other scientist there that believe Greenland
will disappear not earlier than a zillion years from now. What a relief!

The fact is that the scientific consensus is in accord with the
propositions that Gore has articulated. God knows, even George Bush seems
to have come around. As economist Sir Nicholas Smith observed, "It wasn't
until January that President Bush was at all clear there was a problem; now
he's sounding as if he's a leader in the response to this problem."

There's speculation that Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany who is
also a physicist, may have helped persuade Bush to accept a serious
proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 50% by 2050.

Will Gore win the Nobel Peace Prize (a "green" peace prize) to be announced
tomorrow?

If he does, the clamor for him to run will certainly increase.

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23 comments

I don't really believe Al Gore did anything about Global Warming, except bang the drum. He really didn't do any of the science, really didn't accomplish anything as a Senator or VP. Now he is a Nobel Laureate. The irony is that Bill Clinton practically bought and paid for his Peace Prize by selling out the Jews to Yasser Arafat, and he is out in the cold. Jimmy Carter, the famous failure got one. Mohamed ElBaradei has one after his failures. It is hard to understand the motivations of the Noble committee. Sometimes I think they just want to stick it to the Americans. Some times they get it right. They gave one to Elie Wiesel. Congratulations to Al Gore.

- CRS9TNR

October 12, 2007 at 7:09am

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Al Gore is being rewarding for damaging the United States. Our enemies perceive him to be another Jimmy Carter and Yasir Arafat. Gore is a dishonest and contemptible human being. He is also a quintessential example of the moral and intellectual corruption of the Harvard University leftist community. Marty Peretz should be deeply ashamed.

- thomsondavid

October 12, 2007 at 7:34am

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Well he has it Marty. Although I'm not sure what they're worth as I wasn't even shortlisted for the Literature award. One would have thought my genre defining posting on this site would have warranted that alone. Anyway, lets see how he plays it.

- The Ignorant Populist

October 12, 2007 at 7:43am

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- hsaper7

October 12, 2007 at 8:57am

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It is beyond me how you can dislike Carter so much and love Gore. After all, the two are quite alike, though I will admit that Carter is worse. We are both old enough to remember when the scientific consensus was that the earth was getting cooler. In any case, there isn't even any proof that a slightly warmer earth will necessarily be a bad thing. It has happened before and the earth and its inhabitants survived quite nicely. Besides that, there is very little that we can do since the part caused by humans is small and even that little bit is very hard and very expensive to correct. China and India will continue on their merry way no matter what anyone else does. Gore now has his prize and we can only hope that he now fades into the ever warmer sunset.

- hsaper7

October 12, 2007 at 9:05am

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Okay, you got your Nobel, Al. Now will you please run for President? hsaper- A slightly warmer Earth may in fact be quite pleasant. We'll have nice, balmy winters in DC. The problem is that an abrupt change to the climate will disrupt life around the globe to an unforeseeable but no doubt nasty degree. Yes, the Earth has been warmer and cooler before. But it never changed in the course of a century or two. Nor was there a massive, mostly immobile human civilization around.

- ratnerstar

October 12, 2007 at 9:23am

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I am impressed, however, on how you encapsulated two decades worth of anti-climate change arguments into one paragraph: it's not happening, it's happening but it's good, it's not good but we can't stop it. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I guess.

- ratnerstar

October 12, 2007 at 9:26am

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"It is beyond me how you can dislike Carter so much and love Gore." Al Gore,Jr. is a member of the Harvard elite. That's all you need to know. He sluts on behalf of the Democratic Party. The man has no intellectual integrity. He refuses to respond to his critics. This is just another reason why one should hold Harvard in utter contempt.

- thomsondavid

October 12, 2007 at 9:30am

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Global warming is such a dominant issue that steady effort by Al Gore and the UN panel is crucial, and the Nobel committee made a good choice. The debate at this point is about politics and communication, not science, and I'd like to see Gore continue to plow away at this sort of thing, rather than run for president. It is definitely his niche.

- redemption438

October 12, 2007 at 9:47am

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"Al Gore

- thomsondavid

October 12, 2007 at 9:58am

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It's recognition that Gore richly deserves having put the issue of global warming on the national agenda in a big way. And I believe he has learned the hard way that he is not real good at being a candidate and is smart enough NOT to run for President.

- JackR

October 12, 2007 at 10:02am

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Congratulations to Gore for the award. Who would have imagined that seven years ago, when Gore's victory was stolen from him by the cabal surrounding George W. Bush, one day, not too far in the distant future, Gore would be the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, and a Nobel Peace Prize... while his erstwhile rival would be hunkered down at 1600 Pennsylvania, mired in near record low approval ratings, stuck in a disasterous war made of his own choice, no exit available for him or his party, and truly held in utter disregard by most of the world and about 65% of his own country. As someone once said, success is the best form of revenge. btw, Gore is not going to run. I gave up that ghost months ago...

- MrCookie1

October 12, 2007 at 10:02am

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Your animus toward Harvard is such that it makes me wonder whether you might have applied for admission and been rejected. Hell hath no fury like a td scorned.

- JackR

October 12, 2007 at 10:06am

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re: thomson... I think you hit it right on the pointy head... this blister finds a way to eel Harvard into nearly every post. Way beyond tiresome...

- MrCookie1

October 12, 2007 at 10:27am

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great week for the Nobels, Doris Lessing, someone whom I read a great deal of when I was young won the Literature, and Gore the Peace. Just a great week. really, truly great. hsaper7, are you in the market for shore front property? I can sell you some real cheap, of course in a few years it will be underwater, but you can be like TD and pretend it is an illusion. honestly, you post was meant to be ironic right?

- blackton

October 12, 2007 at 10:32am

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Will you be around to sell it, Blackie? Congrats to Al - he can sit with Rigoberta Menchu at the reunion dinners.

- butchie b

October 12, 2007 at 11:14am

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islands like Kiribati are going down now. I have a friend from there, the outlying islands, home to hundreds of people are disappering, tides and storm fronts inundate them making them uninhabitable. yeah, yeah, hundreds of people so what? let them move to the big island, and when that goes down, well who knows since it is a whole country that will be lost.

- blackton

October 12, 2007 at 12:49pm

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Kiribati is a country like RI is a state. An accident of history. I pay attention to Lomborg before Gore, because as far as I can tell, Lomborg is not a political figure. Nor an adherent of statism uber alles to solve our problems. Not so Mr. G.

- butchie b

October 12, 2007 at 1:30pm

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huh? Kiribati is an accident of history? funny I always thought they were islands. This is affecting real people there who are losing their homes, places their ancestors lived in for thousands of years, the least we can do is acknowledge it, since we have no desire to do anything to prevent it. And what of Bangladesh and the millions of people at risk there? they have nowhere else to go.

- blackton

October 12, 2007 at 1:50pm

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Whether we want to do anything about or not we (Americans) can't, because India and China, to name two, are going to continue to grow and want the life we have. We should adapt to climate change, such as it is and may be, while making it lucrative to solve the problems, if problems they be. The climate has changed before, and it will do so in the future. Adapt.

- butchie b

October 12, 2007 at 2:13pm

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so why pay attention to him? from a review of his book: Funny how Lomborg thinks we can solve malaria without tackling global warming, even though mosquito habitat is being expanded to the point that they're worried about a resurgence in England. Does he know that insects reproduce according to degree days; above a certain baseline, increases in temperature speed their rates of metabolism and reproduction. The tropics aren't crawling with a larger proliferation of year-round insects because there's something in the food, it's the heat. Temperate regions have fewer insects because not only is it cooler overall, our cold winters kill a lot of them off outright and slow their spread. Malaria will migrate northward and higher in altitude as the earth warms, and there isn't enough DDT anywhere to prevent that. It's even more hilarious that he thinks we can secure the world's fresh water supplies without addressing climate disruption. The snow pack that provides much of the world's water is decreasing, droughts continue to advance desertification, and underground aquifers are being drained far faster than they can be replenished. And warmer air, yay chemistry, holds more water than cooler air. So our atmosphere will be more humid and we'll get less rain, even as the heat pulls moisture from the ground where we'll be needing to grow our food. Then when it does rain, the increased moisture capacity of the air will make for more flooding events. Good times, farmers always love it when it doesn't rain for long periods of time, then unpredictably floods. Lomborg's not a scientist, and the person he turns to for a favorable book review on this complex, scientific topic is an author of medical fiction who's also fallen prey to delusions of environmental literacy. Lomborg wants everyone to calm down, but .... - many animal and plant species are dying off or radically altering their behavior and habitat, - farmers in developing nations are already falling prey to increased drought, - sea levels are already endangering some island nations, - the arctic permafrost is melting, - scientists studying glaciers are alarmed to see them melting much faster than they'd previously thought they would, - hurricanes have increased their intensity, and major insurers are backing away from offering coverage, - the Pentagon's own threat assessment of likely global warming scenarios (which are conservative and almost optimistic according to recent data) indicates that climate disruption poses a serious security risk, - and Americans can see in their own gardens that plants are thriving outdoors in regions where they couldn't before. The world is changing, and fast. And it's doing so in a way that will permanently reduce our future ability to use our resources productively, as opposed to responding to ever larger disasters. And he entirely misses the boat on economic productivity, because the new technologies and industries we need to create to have a carbon neutral society would generate a wave of new jobs. New manufacturing jobs, new construction and retrofitting jobs, new transportation jobs, new environmental restoration jobs, and all the economic activity that those positions would support. We're talking about good, middle class jobs that allow for a decent living on a high school or trade school education, exactly the kind that have been disappearing for years, that would have to be created in every city, town and region of the US in order to make the necessary changes. Lomborg wants us to accept an ever-diminishing world, a slow crash in our standard of living and an always widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, a world where every city is a Third World city and there is no middle class. But transforming our industrialized economy into a sustainable economy, one that doesn't destroy the only habitat we have, could ensure prosperity and abundance for generations to come. The only downside to that sustainable world is that our industries would have to be transformed, and some would lose power, like the coal industry. Looking at how they treat their own mine employees, I don't like to think how little they care for the rest of us. So what I want to know is whether Lomborg is a twit not to want a world where there could really be enough for everyone, or is he just another useful shill for the energy companies who've spent millions of dollars lying to the American public? This is the only country on earth where that sort of ridiculous public relations scam has been successfully tried, and also the only country on earth where the public has been lied to enough about the consequences of global warming to take someone like Lomborg seriously.

- blackton

October 13, 2007 at 5:51pm

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love ya buddy, but that bland "adjust" makes me understand exactly why young people are so turned off by our generation. More Let em eat cake solipsism, ugh.

- Wandreycer1

October 14, 2007 at 6:23pm

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Hey butchie, why do you cherry-pick? The Nobel peace prize was also awarded to Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama. Are you telling us these are bad people? If not, why do you cherry-pick the frauds like Rigoberta Menchu? It would be as if liberals like me said that all US Republians are fucked-up evil imbeciles and thieves, just because the current US president and vice-president are just that, or because Nixon was a demented evil crook. Of course, that would neglect good Republican presidents like Eisenhower or Bush-father. Since we are not doing that, nor should you - your current tactics are intellectually dishonest. As for Lomborg, spare us the embarassment of futhe quoting him: the man is, scientifically, a non-entity. Would you have brain surgery performed on yourself by a an accountant or a truck driver? No? Then don't let us bureaucrats like Lomborg give lessons about science.

- sleepyavl

October 14, 2007 at 8:44pm

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