Am I the only one who now sees Al Gore as an object of levity? I started giggling this evening when the D-student who couldn’t even make it through divinity school popped up on my television screen testifying yet again before Congress on matters scientific – i. e., his favorite topic: anthropogenic global warming. Like a desperate man with an inferiority complex (if we promise not to rescind his Nobel and his Oscar, maybe he’ll just go away), he keeps coming back to remind us of how much he knows when we know he knows very little.
This time the subject of his discourse was Venus and how hot it is (from carbon dioxide, of course). Steven Milloy saw the comedy as well:
Incredibly, not a Senator on the Committee questioned — much less burst into outright laughter at — Gore’s absurd point. In fact, each Senator who spoke at the hearing, including Republicans, offered little but fawning praise for Gore. It’s hard to know whether the hearing’s lovefest was simply an example of the Senate’s exaggerated sense of collegiality, appalling ignorance and gullibility about environmental science, or fear of appearing to be less green than Gore.
It is true that atmospheric CO2 warms both Venus and the Earth, but that’s about where the CO2 commonality between the two planets ends. While the Venusian atmosphere is 97 percent CO2 (970,000 parts per million), the Earth’s atmosphere is only 0.038 percent CO2 (380 parts per million). So the Venusian atmosphere’s CO2 level is more than 2,557 times greater than the Earth’s. And since the CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing by only about 2 parts per million annually, our planet is hardly being Venus-ized.
No matter. Al is in the global warming business and not even the next Ice Age will get him out of it. And as for audience of esteemed legislators listening to his babble, I have a suggestion that might help the financial crisis: fire all of them.
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34 Comments
1. A Clay:Let’s not forget that Venus is a lot closer to the Sun, the ultimate source of all planetary warming. Gore has enriched himself monetarily and reputationally through global warming propaganda making. As a result, can’t trust him, won’t listen to him.
Jan 30, 2009 - 1:02 am 2. bgates:the D-student who couldn’t even make it through divinity school
Gore is wrong because his ideas don’t withstand scrutiny, not because of college transcripts from 40 years ago. James Hansen made it all the way through a PhD program. Doesn’t make him right.
Jan 30, 2009 - 2:48 am 3. Paul:Algore wouldn’t know the Periodic Table if you rolled it up, soaked it in water, left it out overnight Virgina to freeze and then beat him over the head.
He couldn’t talk three minutes about the element Carbon, its structure and its chemical attributes.
He is the Lysenko of our times.
Jan 30, 2009 - 6:01 am 4. hermie:Unlike the Goreacle’s belief, good science is never truly settled until all plausible theories are examined, questioned and alternatives debated and disproved. A ‘consensus’ by politically and financially-motivated groups will not make 2 plus 2 equal 5. This was a lesson from the old Soviet Union, which determined what was good science by the party membership of the researcher.
Jan 30, 2009 - 6:16 am 5. davidingeorgia:Mr. Simon…Gore is anything but funny because he and his fellow acolytes, koolaid-drinkers and hucksters (one of whom is now the new president’s science advisor, btw) are in a position to act on this nonsense, and virtually everything they have on their to-do list will take a bad economy and turn it into an utter disaster. No, with all due respect, I have to say that that’s not the least bit funny.
Jan 30, 2009 - 6:51 am 6. JH Spyker:Roger, are you sure you want to quote Steven Milloy, a man on the take?
Jan 30, 2009 - 7:20 am 7. Objectivity Fedora Poses Rhetorical Question [Dan Collins]:[...] Return to Protein Wisdom homepage « Despite the Spin, “Recovery” Bill a Huge Gift to Republicans [Dan Collins] | Home | January 30, 2009 Objectivity Fedora Poses Rhetorical Question [Dan Collins] Am I the only one who now sees Al Gore as an object of levity? [...]
Jan 30, 2009 - 7:25 am 8. David Thomson:“Roger, are you sure you want to quote Steven Milloy, a man on the take?”
Everybody is “on the take.” We all have to earn a living. The real question is this: does it influence their thinking? Is their any evidence to suggest that they are now propagandists of those who provide them with financial assistance? And why limit your concern to Steven Milloy? What about all those individuals receiving money from institutions advocating the theory that global warming is the preeminent threat of our era?
Jan 30, 2009 - 7:54 am 9. billypaintbrush:Milloy ‘exposed’ in The New Republic? Pretty well discredited source. Seems like avoiding the message to kill the messenger, but we should ignore Gore, the messenger with his preposterous message? As Al grows wealthy from his proselytizing, we should pretend he is not on the Take?
Jan 30, 2009 - 8:16 am 10. James:Hi Roger,
Gore’s reference to Venus is nonsense for another reason which no-one mentioned. The temperature on Mars is somewhere between -220F and +60F depending on the location and season. Its atmosphere is 97% CO2.
What does it take to get a congressman who can ask a question?
James
Jan 30, 2009 - 8:23 am 11. Mike_K:The point here is not Gore’s college success (or lack of same) or the science. It is the appalling ignorance of almost all Senators. Many years ago, I was part of a small delegation to speak with Senator Durenberger about health care. He told us that not one other Senator had any knowledge of the simplest matters concerning health care. All those bills are written by staff and the Senator is in charge of looking good on TV and raising money. If their staff does not tell them, they know nothing about any given subject and feel no need to learn. Tom Coburn seems a rare exception and Judd Gregg, who should forget that overture from Obama, is pretty level headed. Most are rich fools.
Jan 30, 2009 - 8:25 am 12. LSD:It’s not true that Al Gore is only focused on global warming. The kids of Southpark know that he is the foremost expert on the manbearpig threat.
Jan 30, 2009 - 8:38 am 13. Charlie (Colorado):JH Spyker, before you bany about accusations of being “on the take” you might want to consider that Al Gore himself stands to profit mightly from a “cap and trade” scheme, or anything else that ends up making a market in “carbon offsets”.
Jan 30, 2009 - 8:52 am 14. Boris:Venus is a good example for people who don’t understand the greenhouse effect, so I’m not sure why Roger and Milloy have a problem with Gore’s take on this.
Mars’ atmosphere is far more thin than Earth’s or Venus’–and then there’s the distance from the sun as well.
In short, our studies of Mars and Venus further confirm what we know about CO2. Adding more of it warms the surface.
Jan 30, 2009 - 9:13 am 15. Chemman:Anyone remember Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy”. If I were of a prophetic nature I would say we were in the early stages of a similar culture.
Jan 30, 2009 - 9:15 am 16. tim maguire:No, Roger, you are not the only person who sees Al Gore as an object for levity. He has become an embarassment to the global warming community. As you may have noticed, the believers have started complaining when Al Gore gets mentioned during warming debates.
Boris, Venus is a good example for people who don’t understand the greenhouse effect? Are you serious? Venus, having over 250,000% greater CO2 concentration tells us nothing about the greenhouse effect as it may play out on Earth. Cute that you tried to use Mars as supporting your point. Typical warmenist thinking–a cooling Antarctic proves global warming, oh wait, the Antarctic is warming! That proves global warming! Oh wait, the methods are a joke? Doesn’t matter.
Mars, Venus, whatever happens anywhere, it always proves global warming.
Jan 30, 2009 - 9:55 am 17. Boris:What are you talking about? All of our observations of Mars and Venus are consistent with atmospheric physics as we know them on Earth.
Jan 30, 2009 - 10:13 am 18. Jim:I meet Al Gore. He has bad breath. Better to listen to him from a distance.
Jan 30, 2009 - 10:36 am 19. Lightnin' Hopkins:In the Crazy World of Albert Gore, he is the god of hell fire and he’ll take us to burn.
I hadn’t checked Rush’s ‘Algore Doomsday Clock’ in a long time. Presently, there is only 6 years, 11 months and some 27 days left until the cataclysm. Repent now, wicked energy users.
#12 LSD: “Excelsior!”
Jan 30, 2009 - 1:03 pm 20. glenn:“In fact, each Senator who spoke at the hearing, including Republicans, offered little but fawning praise for Gore.”
That’s because none of the
Jan 30, 2009 - 3:03 pm 21. Mike_K:Senators “questioning” Big Al are any smarter than he is. But Al will wind up rich in the carbon offsets business and I guess that makes him smarter than me.
Al was born rich because his father, the Senator, got huge benefits from Armand Hammer, who also funded the early Soviet Union. This is a bit inflammatory but the basic facts are correct.
Jan 30, 2009 - 3:10 pm 22. LSD:18. Lightnin’:
YES! Because this is super serious! In fact, I don’t know how long we are going to be around as a species!
Jan 30, 2009 - 4:43 pm 23. Webutante:If you think the world has problems with Gore, how would you like to have him living right around the corner?
Jan 30, 2009 - 6:29 pm 24. PC14:“Manbearpig. Half man, half bear, half pig.” That was one funny South Park goof.
But Al would probably agree with those fractions and explain it as some sort of synergy thing.
Jan 30, 2009 - 11:25 pm 25. ic:fire all of them, and make them pay all back taxes and interest.
If we had a strong enough telescope, we could see little (or big?) Venustians, and Martians driving their gas guzzlers, spilling CO2 into their atmospheres. The real problem with us is we don’t have a strong enough telescope to see how the Venustians and Martians suffer from the consequences of their green house effect. It’s not Gore’s fault that he can see the Venustians and Martians and is brainy enough to learn their lessons.
Jan 31, 2009 - 12:49 am 26. Paul:“..consistent with atmospheric physics as we know them on Earth.”
Well, then. It’s settled.( A big Borat NOT!)
Jan 31, 2009 - 3:07 am 27. Boatbulder:Damn–That bastard Bush let the capitalists rape and plunder Mars and Venus too!
Jan 31, 2009 - 2:48 pm 28. Sandra C:What’s unforgivable about all this is that the year ‘OwlGore’ won the Nobel Prize, he won it over a REAL hero: A Christian lady (my sincere apologies for not remembering her name right now… Trudie something?) who smuggled something like 2,500 Jewish babies and young children out of the Warsaw ghetto and got them to safe places to wait out the war. This saintly lady wrote down all the information about the kids and where they went and buried them in jars in her back yard. She trained her German Shepherd to bark whenever she had to drive up to the guard gate so the barking would cover any sound the child might be making while hidden in the bottom of her large medical bag. She was caught eventually, tortured, had both her legs broken but survived the war. She went home and dug up the jars to try to reunite the children and their parents, but of course, the majority of those kids ended up with no parents, courtesy of the gas chambers. When she died just a few years ago, one of the ladies taking care of her was “one” of her rescued babies.
And ‘Owlgore’ won over this wonderful woman with a slide show, views from a recent movie, and false information! Obscene, obscene.
We should have a script written to document this woman’s life and have a movie made, but most of Hollywood is so into the threatened global world thing. This woman saved more people than Schlinder, why hasn’t there been more publicity about her?
Jan 31, 2009 - 8:54 pm 29. kcom:This whole climate scare (or should I say hyperventilation?) started with Venus. It was roughly about the time that we discovered Venus had a very hot, crushing atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide that this madness was born. (Goodbye Ice Age scare.) I’ve always thought of it as a form of medical student disease, equivalent to the situation where medical students convince themselves they have the symptoms of the diseases they are studying, leading to much unnecessary anxiety. It’s no surprise to me that Gore was talking about it. Of course, not all analogies are good analogies and comparing a planet with 97% CO2 to one with 0.038% CO2 is fraught with danger. But just as 24-year-old medical students can convince themselves they have diseases basically only seen in 70-year-olds, there are some on this planet who can convince themselves that we have “Venus disease” even when the natural history of the two planets is entirely different. Especially if they are light in the analytical thinking department and lacking in the fundamentals involved. (Which is true of Gore and the senators – and, sadly, most journalists, too, for that matter.)
Ice Age scares went away and were replaced with the global warming scare.
Feb 1, 2009 - 7:52 pm 30. Tomarev:This post is the perfect display of how irrational hatred and stupidity can combine into a lethal mixture.
Global warming doesn’t exist because….Al Gore is an idiot.
Feb 2, 2009 - 12:39 pm 31. LarryD:Not mentioned yet is the “little” detail of Venus’s atmosphere being over 90 times the pressure (and therefore density and mass) of Earths current atmosphere.
Earth hasn’t had an atmosphere like Venus’s for over 2 billion years.
However, Earth’s atmosphere has had CO2 levels about ten-fold higher within the last 50 million years. No greenhouse runaway resulting in an extinction event, the average global temperature was only about ten degrees Centigrade higher.
Feb 2, 2009 - 3:16 pm 32. Colonel Robert Neville:Dear Tomarev: Ironically ya right. And not just cos Gore IS a dimwit, but enough of a clever conman to become rich over the utter lies and mass elite manipulation of the fraud of Global Warming, which means massive faux capitalist riches for Gore and his fake followers, and Global Socialism for the rest of us masses.
In twenty years time GW will be unmentioned cos the usual phony’s will have a new fanta$y. Maybe back ot “Global Cooling?!” Y2k, Western population explosion that never happened, minerals, oil, food etc, etc running out, blah blah. All balls.
Why can’t I get a written guarantee from any GW believer? Cos it’s all bullshit.
Colonel Neville.
Feb 2, 2009 - 10:50 pm 33. Information on Issues for Conservatives (II4Cons): Global Warming « Conservative First:[...] “The Gore That Came in from the Cold“ [...]
Mar 6, 2009 - 10:42 am 34. Charging Elephants .com » Information on Issues for Conservatives (II4Cons): Global Warming:[...] “The Gore That Came in from the Cold“ [...]
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