A CONVENIENT CLIMATE SCIENTOLOGY,
Among the egregious whoppers in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth was the claim that there were exactly zero scientific papers questioning projected catastrophic man-made global warming. Therefore, Gore continued, the amount of media coverage given to skepticism was entirely disproportionate. In fact, the mainstream media had already mostly wrapped itself in the mantle of the climate crusade, but for Gore even one scintilla of skepticism was one scintilla too many.
Well, the word is in from liberal peer movie reviewers about Gore’s follow- up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and it’s two righteous thumbs up! While they admit it’s a bit of a snoozer, there is not a trace of doubt that An Inconvenient Truth — a masterpiece of alarmist agitprop inflicted on an entire generation of schoolchildren — was bang on, and that weather is getting worse. Meanwhile the transition to a low-carbon economy is proceeding apace, whatever roadblocks thrown by the likes of that Neanderthal denier Donald Trump.
Peer review of climate science has rightly come under attack for often being warped by ideology and government funding. Liberal peer film review apparently involves no fact checking at all. Then again, as Gore relentlessly claims, we are dealing with a “moral issue,” thus any questioning is clearly funded by ExxonMobil and/or the Koch brothers, and puts you on the side of the slave-traders and those who supported apartheid and would have denied women the vote. Record temperatures and bad weather mean the scientific case is closed.
But have the snows of Kilimanjaro disappeared, along with summer sea ice in the Arctic? Has there been a decline in polar bear populations due to a spate of drownings? No, no and no. In the earlier movie, Gore confidently announced that carbon capture and storage was “A big solution you’re going to hear a lot more about.” It’s been an expensive disaster. Still, didn’t the flooding in Lower Manhattan caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 vindicate Gore’s catastrophist insight? Hadn’t he presented a simulation of Lower Manhattan underwater? Well yes, but that was due to the fact that the land ice of Greenland and/or Antarctica had suddenly, and massively, dropped into the world’s oceans and raised sea levels 10 or 20 feet. The devastation caused by Sandy was due to the coincidence of a severe storm and high tides. It had happened before.
An Inconvenient Sequel is not so much a sequel as a rehash. Same old shots of earth from space. Same old “Nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” although now “every storm is different.” One significant development highlighted in Sequel is that Gore has trained thousands of True Believers to spread the Gorespel of climate Scientology.
“Talking truth to power” is a perpetual, self- appointed mission for left liberals, who believe that they have a monopoly on truth and virtue while their greedy, short- sighted obstructionist opponents have a stranglehold on power. The actual example involves Gore — Michael Moore-style — entering the Trump Tower and disappearing into an elevator. He has subsequently claimed that he spent months trying to persuade Trump to see the light. One doubts that Trump could stand Gore for minutes, let alone months.
The former Veep is portrayed as a significant power broker at the 2015 Paris climate conference, working the phones in order to find some way to bribe India to use more solar power. He claims India had just seen monsoon rains not witnessed in a thousand years. In fact, 2015 was a year of below average rainfall in India.
The peer movie reviewers also swallowed Gore’s claim that wind and solar are becoming ever more economically viable. Never mind the Toronto Star falling for Gore’s “hard evidence,” even The Wall Street Journal’s reviewer gushed that “he brings good news along with the litany of tempests and record temps — the growth of wind and solar power on exponential curves that were unimaginable a decade ago.” But according to the International Energy Agency — which, as a global bureaucracy, is gung-ho for bureaucratic climate policies — wind and solar will account for no more than three per cent of global energy use in the year 2040. Some transition.
Gore’s “hard evidence” on solar consists of one chart showing the declining cost of solar panels, and another off- thechart chart (he doesn’t use a mechanical hoist to dramatically point to the top this time) showing the growth of solar installations in Chile. In fact, Chile disastrously overstimulated solar capacity, which, without corresponding transmission infrastructure, led to the price of solar electricity dropping to zero. Facts schmachts.
By far the most significant development in energy in the past decade, which of course is mentioned nowhere in the movie, is the revolution in fracking, which has led to a surge in U.S. oil and natural gas production, and much lower global prices, which have been a boon to manufacturing and job creation. Ironically, it is also the gas boom that has been largely responsible for the U.S. leading the world in reducing CO2 emissions.
In the real world, where truth isn’t magically absorbed from a cinema seat, the transition is in terrible trouble. Ontario is among the classic examples. And how has Premier Kathleen Wynne dealt with the problem of soaring costs (for zero benefits)? By shoving the bill onto future generations. You remember, those about whom Wynne, Gore and the liberal peer movie reviewers claim to be so morally concerned.
WE SEE HOW GORE HAS TRAINED THOUSANDS OF TRUE BELIEVERS TO SPREAD THE GORESPEL