The "Live Earth" Self-Deceit Show

Roy W. Spencer

One obvious irony of this past weekend's Live Earth concerts is that it took an event that increased energy usage to get people around the world to participate in "saving the Earth."

This was no accident - the majority of enjoyable human activities require the generation of energy. For the First World, these activities might include transportation, computers, TVs, heating and air conditioning. For the Third World, it might mean simply having electricity to refrigerate food and so prevent deaths due to food-borne illnesses.

When Al Gore told us that 2 billion people on seven continents might hear the concerts, he didn't mention that nearly 2 billion more lack electricity, let alone the Internet or TV. Where's the concert to campaign for electricity for all?

Instead, folks in the developed world who feel guilty about pollution decide it's time to do something drastic - like throw a worldwide-rock concert.

Of course, Gore could have helped to raise awareness of global warming by asking people to walk, not ride, to concerts where all acts would be during the daytime (no lighting required), and all music would be acoustic. But who would come? It's much more interesting to watch Madonna have simulated sex with electric guitars and amplifiers.

We love our conveniences, which in three short generations have gone from being extravagances to basic human rights. Would you rather go to a banquet to raise awareness of world hunger, or go for three days without eating instead?

Gore asked those attending Live Earth to sign a seven-point pledge to do things that will decrease our greenhouse gas emissions and thereby reduce global warming. But how many of us really know what that means?

Sure, we can put pressure on our elected representatives to enact laws that will reduce emissions - but how many of us know that we are, in the process, agreeing to pay the extra costs?

Gore tells us that a few simple lifestyle changes will prevent 100 million tons of carbon emissions. What he doesn't spell out is that that's enough to prevent future warming by one thousandth of a degree.

The inconvenient truth is that it's easier to talk green than to be green.

It is a matter of simple physics and basic economics that, no matter how much you think the world will warm in the future, there is nothing substantial we can do about it without new energy technologies. The global demand for energy is simply too great.

Switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars; turning off the light when we leave a room - these are attractive options because we can do those things. We believe we are thereby earning our salvation from the eternal fires of some global-warming hell. We can pat ourselves on the back and say we are "doing something" worthwhile. Really. Al Gore said so.

For issues that really matter, pop-science subjects like global warming are dangerous. When politicians exaggerate scientific theories to convince people to divert part of their wealth to one kind of activity, it's at the expense of other, more beneficial activities.

In fact, Gore asks his disciples to help force policy changes that will, in the end, hurt the poor the most - both here and in the Third World. Interested in helping humanity? Then campaign for clean water for all. It is vastly cheaper. Or demand that all poor African countries be allowed to use DDT to eliminate malaria (without the threat of economic sanctions), just like America and Europe did a century ago.

If it makes you feel better to perform energy-saving rituals, go right ahead. But don't be deceived into thinking you're doing anything that will help humanity.

If we're really interested in a carbon-free future, we should support technological progress: safer nuclear power, carbon sequestration during the burning of coal and the eventual development of new energy sources.

But energy technology research requires wealth, and wealth requires access to abundant, affordable energy in the context of free markets. Contributions to Al's Church of Carbon Offsets might be tax-deductible, but investment in technological progress will earn far greater dividends for all of humanity.

Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book "Climate Confusion" is due out this winter.

Top Forecaster Blasts Gore on Global Warming

A top hurricane forecaster called Al Gore "a gross alarmist" Friday for making an Oscar-winning documentary about global warming.

"He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about," Dr. William Gray said in an interview with The Associated Press at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, where he delivered the closing speech.

A spokeswoman said Gore was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Nashville Friday; he did not immediately respond to Gray's comments.

Gray, an emeritus professor at the atmospheric science department at Colorado State University, has long railed against the theory that heat-trapping gases generated by human activity are causing the world to warm.

Over the past 24 years, Gray, 77, has become known as America's most reliable hurricane forecaster; recently, his mentee, Philip Klotzbach, has begun doing the bulk of the forecasting work.

Gray's statements came the same day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approved a report that concludes the world will face dire consequences to food and water supplies, along with increased flooding and other dramatic weather events, unless nations adapt to climate change.

Rather than global warming, Gray believes a recent uptick in strong hurricanes is part of a multi-decade trend of alternating busy and slow periods related to ocean circulation patterns. Contrary to mainstream thinking, Gray believes ocean temperatures are going to drop in the next five to 10 years.

Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," has helped fuel media attention on global warming.

Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor who had feuded with Gray over global warming, said Gray has wrongly "dug (his) heels in" even though there is ample evidence that the world is getting hotter.

Gore's Faith Is Bad Science

Michael Barone

Al Gore likes to present himself as a tribune of science, warning the world of imminent danger. But he is more like an Old Testament prophet, calling on us to bewail our wrongful conduct and to go and sin no more.

He starts off with the science. The world's climate, he reports, is getting warmer. This accurate report is, however, not set in historic context. World climate has grown warmer and cooler at various times in history. Climate change is not some unique historic event. It is the way the world works.

Not this time, Gore says. What's different is that climate change is being driven by human activity -- to wit, increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Which means, he says, that we have to sharply reduce those emissions. But what the scientists tell us is that some proportion of climate change is caused by human activity and some proportion by natural causes -- and that they can only estimate what those proportions are. The estimates they have produced have varied sharply. The climate change models that have been developed don't account for events of the recent past, much less predict with precision events in the future.

To which the prophet replies, with religious intensity, that all debate should be over. Those scientists with inconvenient views should be defunded and silenced. We should replace scientific inquiry with faith. We should have faith that climate change -- "global warming" -- is caused primarily by human activity. And we should have faith that the effects will be catastrophic, with rising oceans flooding great cities and pleasant plains and forests broiled by a searing sun.

Even The New York Times bridles at this. After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists -- not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls -- charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

When you read the fine print of even the scientific reports that Gore likes to cite, you find the same thing. Gore foresees a 20-foot rise in sea level -- 240 inches. The IPCC panel report foresees a maximum of 23 inches. Gore says that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this." Geologist Don Easterbrook says there have been shifts up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

Science says that we should learn more about possible bad effects of climate change and calculate rationally how we can mitigate them. As the economic journalist Robert Samuelson points out, there is little that we can feasibly do in the short term to reduce carbon emissions, though over the long term we may be able to develop substitutes for carbon fuels.

As the environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg points out, the Kyoto Treaty that Gore helped to write (but which the Clinton administration never asked the Senate to ratify) would produce very little reduction in climate change at very high cost.

But religious prophets are not concerned about costs. Gore calls for an immediate cessation of new carbon-burning facilities. In other words, stop economic growth. But stopping economic growth in the developing world means consigning millions to miserable poverty. And we know what stopping economic growth in the developed world can mean.

Read the history of the 1930s: fascism, communism, world war. There are worse things than a rise of 1 or 2 degrees Centigrade.

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth. But science tells us that the Earth and its climate have been constantly changing.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up. When temperatures dropped in the 1970s, there were warnings of an impending ice age. When they rose in the 1990s, there were predictions of disastrous global warming. This is just another example of the solipsism of the baby boom generation, the pampered and much-praised age cohort that believes the world revolves around them and that all past history has become irrelevant.

We're told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

Taking a Closer Look at Al Gore's Truth

Philadelphia Enquirer

The post-Oscar attacks on Al Gore for living in a mansion that consumes 20 times as much energy as the average American house were enjoyable, but unfair.

Gore's consumption of fossil fuels has nothing to do with the arguments he has been advancing about climate change. After all, his thesis is empirical, not subjective.

It doesn't matter a lick whether Al Gore is a hypocrite. What matters is whether or not he is right.

Gore proposes essentially four assertions, which build conditionally:

(1) Earth's climate is getting warmer; (2) man is responsible in substantial part for this change;

(3) this change will result in net harm; and (4) this change can be reversed by man.

Let's take them in order.

Here is what we know for certain about climate change: In the last 100 years, the average temperature on Earth has risen 1 degree Fahrenheit.

This is not unprecedented. Throughout history, the planet has gone through temperature cycles. There have been "warm periods" and ice ages.

To take just one example, Swiss climatologists believe that the glaciers in the Alps have melted into near nothingness 10 times in the last 10,000 years.

As recently as the 1970s, global cooling was considered by many scientists to be a major imminent threat, with the book The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age doing the work of today's An Inconvenient Truth.

Given the history of fluctuations in temperatures, to what degree is man responsible for the current rise? That depends on whom you ask and when you ask them. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it believes that human activity has been a primary driver.

But this verdict is not final: The IPCC recently explained that its initial work on climate change overestimated man's impact by as much as 25 percent. Who knows how it will change its estimates in the future.

Meanwhile, other scientists say they believe the sun is responsible.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany note that the sun has seemed to be burning more brightly for the last 60 years, which may account for the increase of 1 degree.

But as British scientist Nigel Calder notes, theories about climate change that don't finger man as the culprit are met with hostility or blank stares in the parts of the scientific community most heavily invested in Gore's theses, such as the IPCC.

Which brings us to the third part: If global warming is real, what would the net effect be? Gore says it would be very bad indeed. Taking his cue from the former vice president, the announcer of the Academy Awards telecast gushed that "Davis Guggenheim and the cast were scheduled to shoot in New Orleans the night before Hurricane Katrina hit, an event that brought home the threat - and the impact - of global warming." If global warming causes more storms like Katrina, that would be trouble.

But as a recent piece in Slate acknowledges, "the hurricane-warming link isn't settled at all. Rather, it's a very contentious debate between two groups of scientists - computer-modeling atmospheric scientists versus meteorologists."

Gore, however, goes further. In promoting the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, he told the press, "I hope this movie will provide many opportunities for in-depth conversations about what this issue is really all about."

The movie depicted a series of super storms that cause a near apocalypse and bring about, in a matter of days, a new ice age.

Given this promiscuous doomsaying, it's no surprise that some scientists have begun to quietly complain about Gore. A number of them went on record with their complaints to the New York Times last week.

Kevin Vranes, a University of Colorado climatologist, worried that Gore had been "overselling our certainty about knowing the future."

Gore warns about a 20-foot rise in sea level; the IPCC panel estimates "that the world's seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches - down from earlier estimates."

Ever apocalyptic, Gore says that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this." But Don Easterbrook, a geology professor from Western Washington University, notes that within the last 15,000 years there have been shifts up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

What's more, some broad historical evidence, such as that presented by Thomas Gale Moore in his book Climate of Fear, suggests that Earth's "warming periods" have been accompanied by advances in human civilization. As the saying goes, past performance is not an indication of future gains. But if the climate were to warm gradually, it's not obvious why man wouldn't adapt and flourish again, as we have in the past.

Of course, none of that matters if the final condition of the Gore hypothesis doesn't hold. Can man stop the changing of the climate?

Again, the science is conflicted. Gore certainly believes we can. Others are less certain. Climate-change alarmist Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defense, recently said he believed advanced technology from extraterrestrial civilizations offered the best hope to "save our planet" from the perils of climate change.

Art Bell and Whitley Strieber take a backseat to no one in their worries about climate change. They wrote the book The Coming Global Superstorm, on which The Day After Tomorrow was based, and they, too, fear it may be too late. Bell is host on a radio show about UFOs and the paranormal. Before hooking up with Bell, Strieber wrote five nonfiction books about having been abducted by aliens.

Nothing wrong with any of that, of course. We all have to believe in something.

But when you compound the probabilities, the claims of environmentalists such as Gore begin to look less and less certain. In fact, in their unwillingness to brook dissent or countervailing theories, they seem less like scientists and more like the fundamentalists they otherwise scorn.

Saunders: Gore's Crusade Ends at His Front Door

Debra Saunders

Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was billed as "a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it." But right after the movie won an Oscar for best documentary, America learned that Gore's crusade ends at his front door.

A conservative think-tank, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, released a press release that showed the Gores spent $30,000 a year on energy for their suburban Nashville home -- and burned 221,000 kilowatt-hours last year, or 20 times the national average. The reaction of Gore's spokesperson is instructive. Kalee Kreider told ABC News' Jake Tapper, "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue, so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent."

Kreider is right, in a way. Gore is the most effective global-warming advocate in America. Yet somehow Gore has little problem doing a lot of the very thing he tells the rest of the country not to do -- that is, burning more energy than is necessary.

The message comes across loud and clear: The Gores are rich, and rich people are going to burn a lot of energy. They won't let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyle.

That's why "Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David can boast on the movie Website that she is "committed to stopping global warming," denounce people who drive SUVs -- and still fly in private Gulfstream jets. (Having been blasted in the press for her high-flying ways, David told ABC last year that she was cutting back on her private-plane travel. Talk about commitment.)

And let us not forget two other California pioneers on climate change -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, both owners of multiple SUVs and users of private planes.

Fear not, however, because Gore, like those wonderful folks who put on the Oscars, is "carbon neutral." As Kreider told ABC, the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero."

I used to figure that rich sinners, who bought "indulgences" from the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, would be ashamed of the bargain that other churchgoers looked upon with scorn and derision.

But lo, on Academy Awards night, the stars were quite impressed with themselves for participating in a "carbon-neutral" event. Cozy up to the Natural Resources Defense Council, and all those private flights, limo rides and multiple homes disappear. Almost like special effects.

I know that the word on many readers' lips is: hypocrisy.

But the real issue is that the most effective spokesman for global warming apparently doesn't think he has to show personal leadership on his signature issue by curbing his energy consumption. The same goes for Feinstein and Schwarzenegger, who are happy to push for laws that make other people cut their emissions, but are far too affluent to cut back themselves.

"With the future so open to doubt," Gore wrote in his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance," "we routinely choose to indulge our own generation at the expense of all who will follow."

Now Gore has a spokesperson who explains his indulgence -- er, offset -- policy. And it apparently doesn't matter that Gore's behavior signals to global-warming agnostics (like me) and to global warming believers that the climate situation must not be that dire after all.

In fact, watching Gore's conspicuous consumption, you have to wonder whether he really believes in global warming at all.

Conan O'Brien on Gore Rumors

"The rumor in Hollywood right now is that Al Gore may announce he's running for president during a speech at the Academy Awards. Yeah, that's right, folks. They found a way to make Oscar speeches even more boring."