Guest Post by AWR Hawkins:
Former Vice President Al Gore is the most recognizable face of the anthropogenic global warming movement. He has authored books, starred in a documentary, and spoken innumerable times on the supposed threat global warming poses to life’s very existence.
Gone is the dry, stiff Gore who bored us to death in presidential debates during the 2000 election cycle. His passion for global warming has so enlivened him that he speaks of isotopes and carbon emissions with a fervor befitting an old-timey revival preacher talking about brimstone and fire. London’s Times Online actually went so far as to claim Gore’s passion “invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill” when Gore spoke on global warming at Oxford University in July 2009.
But putting aside the fact that Gore has honed his public speaking skills, the fly in the ointment is that he’s a fraud. Like the very global warming movement to which he has attached himself, he’s a snake oil salesman whose sales pitch is laced with scare tactics designed to push the public into embracing a radical, carbon-free agenda that rests on a combination of half-truths and outright fabrications.
And Gore’s fraudulence is not only seen in the fact that he pawns a lie, but also in the fact that he refuses to abide by the very lie he pawns.
After all his whining about the dangers of fossil fuels and coal-powered electricity plants, and after assuring us we can be “carbon free” by paying attention to “where we set the thermostat, [and] keeping [our] a/c and furnace filters clean,” Gore’s 2006 utility bills for his Nashville home topped $30,000.
His home energy use was literally 20 times the national average.
But Gore is as blind to his own hypocrisy as he is to reality. And he apparently doesn’t want to take the risk of being corrected. He has refused to engage in an honest debate about the doomsday claims he’s made since he grew concerned over the threat human beings posed to “the spotted owl and the snail darter” in 1992. This was obvious when Gore finished speaking to 500 “environmental journalists” in Madison, Wisconsin, on October 9, 2009. After the speech, Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer “[asked] Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.”
Gore dodged the question. So McAleer pressed further, and Gore had McAleer’s microphone turned off.
In other words, the same fraud Esquire magazine referred to as a “lunatic” for claiming “the Earth’s got a fever” is also a full-blown scaredy cat when it comes to undergoing a critical examination of his science claims.
And while everybody has known this, most have put up with Gore’s incoherent ramblings — until now.
In the wake of Climategate, his continued global warming proclamations and his refusal to debate are simply untenable. Thus after Britain’s Lord Christopher Monckton recently challenged Gore to a debate, Monckton afterwards added: “If you don’t dare [debate], I want you to remain silent about [global warming] forever from now on.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has grown so tired of Gore’s unwillingness to debate that they are openly mocking him — offering to pay him $500.00 if he’ll debate Monckton. But with all due respect to CEI, there’s no reason to believe a scaredy cat like Gore, who is positioned to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” will expose the error of his ways to a sound thinker like Monckton.
Instead, he’s more likely to make himself even harder to reach in order to be sure he doesn’t have to defend his global warming assertions. There’s a good chance this was the motive behind the cancellation of his scheduled appearance at the Copenhagen climate conference later this month. Although people had already paid $1200.00 to meet the former vice president, the outcry over Climategate may have persuaded Gore that allowing people to get close enough to shake hands would be tantamount to allowing them to get close enough to ask tough questions.
Regardless of Gore’s motivation in backing out of Copenhagen, it’s understandable that he avoids debate at all costs. He is, after all, a fraud — about whom Bob Carter of Australia’s Marine Geophysical Laboratory, said: “Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic.”
AWR Hawkins is a conservative writer who holds a Ph.D. in military history from Texas Tech University.
