On January 26, 2006, former Vice President, current climate alarmist and centimillionaire Al Gore told the Associated Press's David Germain that "unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return." .
Tuesday, as DC and much of the Northeast finishes digging out from a serious and possibly historic weekend snowstorm, will be the tenth anniversary of Gore's "planetary emergency" warning. The "global warming" true believers in the establishment press will never hold Gore accountable for his nonsense, which is why going to alternative sources such as the editorials at Investor's Business Daily is so necessary. On Friday, IBD called Gore out, identifying "Five Ways We Know Al Gore’s Been Running A Global Warming Racket" (links are in original; bolds are mine):
Ten years ago Monday, Al Gore said we had only a decade left to save the planet from global warming. But Earth has been doing just fine. Why do we listen to this man?
... The terrible truth for Gore is that there is no planetary emergency. Not one of the dire predictions he and the rest of the alarmist community made has come to pass. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that they have been running a racket. Here’s how we know:
One, Earth hasn’t warmed in nearly 20 years. Yes, 2015 supposedly “smashed” the previous temperature record. But actually it was the third-warmest year on record — or maybe “not even close to the hottest year on record,” says James Taylor of the Heartland Institute.
The global average temperature, a devilish thing to determine anyway, depends on what temperature readings are being used and who is “adjusting” the data to fit their political purposes. The scientific community cannot be trusted to provide honest numbers.
... Two, predictions that climate change — the rebranding of “global warming” when it turned out that predicted warming wasn’t happening — would cause catastrophic weather damage haven’t panned out.
German insurance giant Munich Re says losses from natural disasters were lower in 2015 than in 2014 and lowest since 2009.
Three ... He cannot claim that his deadline has been extended because some governments have forced their citizens to cut carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 levels keep climbing and now exceed 401 parts per million in the atmosphere. It is simply not the dangerous greenhouse gas we’ve repeatedly been told it is.
Four, in the mid- to late-2000s, Gore repeatedly predicted that an ice-free Arctic Ocean was coming soon. But as usual, his fortune-telling was wrong.
... Five, Gore’s movie, which somehow won an Oscar, was found by a British judge to contain nine errors.
Gore's warning was also paraphrased in 2006 by AP reporter Jaclyn Schiff in a story still present at CBS News ("politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said").
Gore has been proven wrong about his "planetary emergency" prediction. He is now in the same league as Paul Ehrlich, whose book "The Population Bomb" predicted "the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth." Of course. More statism is always the answer.
Gore is as wrong on "climate change" as Ehrlich was on the impacts of world population. Yet both retain their credibility with the press and leftist politicians. Why? Because the "dramatic measures" they offer as solutions to their made-up "problems" involve massively increasing the power of the state, especially leftist politicians control over individuals' every lives. The truth can't be allowed to get in the way of that ongoing effort. They have most of the press at their beck and call to help convince us that "This time, it's different."
No it's not.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
