Binge & Purge

Here's a hilarious bit of finger-pointing in the wake of the bursting of the "climate change" bubble. Walter Russell Mead admits (1) that climate change movement is in tatters (2) efforts at reaching a comprehensive climate accord are dead (3) the MSM can no longer cover for the lapses in research and judgment amongst climate change advocates and (4) *someone* must take the blame. WRM nominates an obvious whipping boy: How Al Gore Wrecked Planet Earth

Frankly, I blame Al Gore. Unlike naive scientists who know little about life beyond the lab, or eco-activists whose concepts of the international political system come from writing direct-mail solicitations to true believers in rich countries, the former vice-president had decades of experience with high politics. It was his job to provide the leadership that could channel the energy and concern of this movement into an effective political program. Perhaps there’s a story we don’t know yet about how Mr. Gore labored quietly and in vain for many years to explain to his fellow global greens about the difficulties and intricacies of the political process. Perhaps he reminded them that it takes 67 votes in the US Senate to ratify a treaty, and that the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol were preemptively rejected 95-0–such a thorough beating that the Protocol itself was never even submitted to the Senate while he was in office. Perhaps he tried to explain to them that a global movement for a treaty was setting itself up for a colossal and comprehensive failure and begged them to take a more realistic course. Perhaps he urged them to be their own harshest critics and to make sure that any information and projections that came out the movement and institutions like the IPCC should be scrubbed cleaner than clean. Perhaps he begged them to make sure that the IPCC was staffed and led by competent, thoroughly vetted and full-time people whose tempered judgment could lead the institution through the inevitable storms it would face.

That could have happened, but I don’t think it did. I think Al Gore failed the climate change movement and that his negligence and blindness has done it irreparable harm.

Blame Al Gore? The fact that he was the leading spokesman for "climate change" should have been enough to make you realize that it was a fraud. Gore may have been in Congress. He may have been Vice President. He may have come within a whisker of being President. But that was hardly evidence of any special insight or intellect, and it certainly wasn't a sign that he could understand the climate change data in his famous slide show. The boring truth is this: Gore was the privileged son of a Senator who managed to flunk out of law school and divinity school and whose main private sector employment was as a journalist. He had no competence in science or engineering. He was good at cherry picking data, mixing it with scary animation and pictures of polar bears, and then telling a story - because that's what it was - about how the earth was doomed (doomed, I tells ya!) if we didn't immediately give the government complete control over energy consumption. I don't know, some of us found the theory, the solution, and most of all the spokesman to be implausible.

In August 2008, I spent two hours stuck in a cab listening to Gore speak in front of the Invesco Field crowd that would later hear Obama's Acsension/Acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for president. Gore went on and on (and on) in his best faux-professorial tones about how the planet was dying, that the climate was in crisis, and that the ice caps would melt in short order. It was ludicrous (not to mention dull), but Gore was dead serious and the Invesco crowd was riveted. One wonders if they (or Gore) have any regrets as to the colossal waste of time the climate change controversy turned into.

Oh, and is Gore ever going to give back his Oscar and Nobel?