It takes more than nine inconvenient untruths, however, to deflect the Nobel Peace Prize committee from its political purpose. For aficionados of irony, last week was a deeply satisfying experience. To see the humbugs of the Nobel committee embracing the charlatan Gore to endorse his falsification of reality in what has become, globally, the flagship politically correct cause was as morally illuminating as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
{gallery}gore{/gallery}
Scotland on Sunday
October 14 2007
GERALD WARNER
THERE is a beautiful congruency about Al Gore receiving the Nobel Peace
Prize 24 hours after a High Court judge had declared it illegal to
screen his 'man-made' climate change propaganda film An Inconvenient
Truth in schools, unless accompanied by contradictory information to
correct its scientific falsehoods. The judge identified nine scientific
errors that would mislead pupils.
It takes more than nine inconvenient untruths, however, to deflect the
Nobel Peace Prize committee from its political purpose. For aficionados
of irony, last week was a deeply satisfying experience. To see the
humbugs of the Nobel committee embracing the charlatan Gore to endorse
his falsification of reality in what has become, globally, the flagship
politically correct cause was as morally illuminating as the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
So-called anthropogenic climate change has nothing to do with science
and everything to do with political control of mass populations. In
this edifying work, the primary instrument is the lie. That is why, in
deference to the Orwellian principle, the word "truth" has been
conscripted to propagate one of the great untruths of our time. If you
doubt for one moment that global warming is a political, rather than a
scientific, phenomenon, ask yourself why a failed American presidential
candidate is leading the charge. Tony Blair must be beside himself to
see this role already spoken for.
The Nobel charade has long been one of the best comic turns on the
planet. Hypocrisy was built into its origins. Albert Nobel spent the
last decade of his life developing weapons technology: cannon,
progressive powder and rockets. If not actually the father, he was at
least the grandfather of the V1 and the great-grandfather of the ICBM.
Yet he is remembered for his Peace Prize. That is administered by a
Norwegian committee - the other four Nobel prizes are awarded in Sweden.
The ethos is the same. The day before Gore was awarded his prize, the
literary equivalent was given by the Swedes to Doris Lessing, who ticks
all the boxes on the progressive clipboard. To win a Nobel prize you
need impeccable liberal credentials. Do not look to become a laureate
if you have voiced any inconvenient truths that infringe the canons of
political correctness. Yet even by the standards of Nobel, this buffoon
represents an imposture too far. Gore was discredited even before the
diploma was awarded.
The nine falsehoods in his film identified by the judge were: Gore's
assertion that the sea level would rise 20 feet "in the near future";
that low-lying Pacific atolls have already been evacuated; that the
Gulf Stream will shut down; that graphs showing a correlation between
an increase in CO2 and a temperature rise over 650,000 years were "an
exact fit"; that the disappearance of snow from Mount Kilimanjaro was
due to man-made climate change; that the drying up of Lake Chad is due
to global warming; that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming;
that polar bears were drowning "swimming long distances - up to 60
miles - to find the ice"; and that coral reefs were bleaching as a
consequence of global warming.
The almost incredibly flimsy arguments adduced by Gore in support of
what the judge denounced as "alarmist" allegations were illustrated by
the fact that the total count of polar bear fatalities was four and
they turned out to have been drowned by a storm. The core ice samples
featured in the film actually showed that increased CO2 emissions have
historically followed 800 years after periods of warming, rather than
preceding them. There is no other instance of any significant
scientific theory becoming orthodoxy in the face of so many flaws and
contradictions as those that discredit the man-made global warming scam.
Of course, global warming is occurring - it always has, interspersed
with compensatory periods of cooling. Already the UN-controlled
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the
Nobel Prize with Gore, has taken the precaution of unobtrusively
revising its 2001 prediction of sea level rises downwards by 52.7%, to
preserve a minimal scientific credibility.
Science, in any case, is peripheral to the grand peur being generated
around supposedly man-made climate change. This is politics, showbiz
and big money. The politics is about social control. Climate hysteria
is the new religion, to the extent that some extremists even prate of
'Gaia', the earth goddess - reminiscent of the last resurgence of
paganism in Europe, when Robespierre enthroned a prostitute on the
altar of Notre Dame as the Goddess of Reason.
More materially, there are the green taxes: a dripping roast for
politicians and state control freaks. Yet the profits will by no means
be confined to governments. Climate hysteria is big business and nobody
knows this better than Al Gore. He has used the climate issue to
reinvent and enrich himself. This is the fantasist who 'invented' the
internet (in competition with the late Kim Il-Sung, the North Korean
fruitcake) and who claims that Erich Segal's sugary Love Story was
based on himself and his wife Tipper, despite the fact that she, unlike
the Ali MacGraw character, is still robustly with us. Can you not hear
Blair grinding his teeth in envy?
He has other grounds for envy. Gore claims in his film that he has
given his climate presentation 1,000 times. Since his speaking fee is
$100,000, that would suggest he has made $100m from such appearances
alone. His documentary asks Americans to conserve electricity in the
home. To his embarrassment, a locally-based think tank, the Tennessee
Center for Policy Research, claimed that last year his household
consumed nearly 221,000 kWh - more than 20 times the national average -
and that the combined electricity and natural gas bills for his
Nashville estate in 2006 was almost $30,000.
Gore boasts that every time he boards an aircraft he buys a carbon
offset. That is the most morally repugnant aspect of the climate
fascists' programme, whereby African dictators confiscate their
subjects' light bulbs, return them to tallow candle power and bank the
proceeds in Switzerland. Is there a Nobel Prize for Hypocrisy?
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1641212007