{Posted on a Hobowars.Com gang forum, on my Q&A thread in December 2007}
Q: Why did Al Gore get a Nobel peace prize for telling us something we already know?
A: Actually, he got the prize for being an effective advocate for something we are merely convinced that we know. I often joke that he must be the only person more stupid than Bush who has ever run for president. You will also catch me say things like, “The biggest cause for global warming is Al Gore” and “Gore is the Paris Hilton of the scientific community.”
Nobel would be spinning in his grave. He basically decided to turn a quasi-religious environmentalist viewpoint (barely a bona fide theory) based mostly in fear into an international political money-making scam by declaring a “consensus” in a scientific community before actually asking them. Almost none of the signers of the original “study” were scientists!
It’s a far worse hijacking of science than “creation science” back in the 1990s (the forerunner of “intelligent design” ), because the politics took over the scene so fast that almost every scientist with any credibility became a “dissident” overnight and either kept quiet to save their jobs or get mocked by the media and a religiously zealous public looking for the next desperate self-justifying cause.
If you really believe something so scientifically incorrect as “global warming is caused mostly by CO2 and man makes most of that”, ask a real (unafraid) scientist to explain the basics statistics of oceanography, meteorology, greenhouse gasses and effects — and look at evidence such as the Vostok core sample data yourself instead of just reading articles ABOUT it.
In 20 years, the global warming scare will be one of the biggest embarrassments of our time. By then we will be probably just as stupidly afraid of the next ice age. That is, until the next bad hurricane (Hurricane Gore?) comes along and we change our uneducated minds once more, in a perpetual Chicken Little Dance of “The Sky is Falling!”
This secular version of Armageddon was around when I was a child (then changed briefly to concerns of cooling, then back again quickly, because they couldn’t find a way to blame that on ourselves or some big evil corporations). According to what “everyone already knew”, New York City would have been underwater in the late 1990s. But in all things, people have memories even shorter than their ability to process facts from propaganda.
{Addendum, 2008}
Boston Globe reports it NOT a record year as predicted, not the last 10 years having any increase in warming. Read it HERE.
Also, please note that the 1998 figure was a mistake by NASA that someone outside the scientific community caught and notified them. They corrected to show the “hottest year of the 1900s” to be in the 1930s, not the 90s. However, the news will keep reporting this error (not unlike the erroneous idea of a man-made hole in the ozone later determined to be sunspot-based) for many years to come.