So, I understand the 15th of October is ‘Blog Action Day‘. A day designated for all bloggers on the web to participate in a single-topic barrage to get the word out about something really important. This year’s topic: The Environment.
OK. Here it goes…
I am all for the environment. I live in it, after all. And if you have been following along you will note that I was particularly disgruntled when I witnessed a smoker trashing up my local convenience store. I really do care.
I want my world to be clean, and generally free of trash, crying indians, and used vacuum cleaner shops that display their wares along the street corner near my home. Carry out what you carry in. Go easy on the water, and let’s ease back on some of those emissions where we can.
At the same time; let’s not all get worked up into a frenzy and start a global panic. I am ever more convinced we don’t need to start making laws and putting more people into jail because we think the sky is falling. And this brings me to my point:
Is it just me, or does anyone else get the feeling this was all coordinated by Al Gore as a gigantic publicity stunt?
As you have heard, Al just won the Nobel Peace Prize. An award specifically designated for those who generate or promote peace in some fashion or another. Never mind that Gore’s actions did nothing in particular to ‘promote peace’, and have otherwise been rather divisive, his take on the planet’s impending doom has been declared ‘questionable’ by most, and outright deceitful by others.
For the most part, I like Al Gore. He was our Vice President, and certainly deserves a certain amount of respect for being willing to spend his time running the country against all odds. He is also a board member over at Apple, my favorite computer outfit. He can’t be all bad. But I have been a bit annoyed lately. It seems to me that most of what he does is extremely self serving.
His documentary, for instance; An Inconvenient Truth, should rather be titled ‘A Somewhat Lenient Truth‘. Global warming is the result of man, is the message. I am certain he couldn’t be farther from the truth. Science is showing that our Earth has been in a constant warming pattern since the ice age, and that we also happen to be in a 15-30 year swing pattern that has us in an opposite panic every other decade. In fact, prominent meteorologist Dr. William Gray is inclined to think that in 15 years or so we will be worried about Global Cooling. I have already seen some headlines stating so.
In what I am certain was a well timed counter punch, angry father Stewart Dimmock sued his local school for showing An Inconvenient Truth without a ‘bias warning’. He won; a judge ordered that the film be accompanied by a flyer containing nine points on which the film could be misleading. The fact that this news hit the streets just days before Al was awarded The Prize makes this whole week look like one big conspiracy.
Apple surprised me this week. Not by their show of support for boardmember Al, but for the language they allowed to creep onto their site on his behalf (or perhaps at his behest?). They said ‘…put his heart and soul… into alerting… us all on the climate crisis.’ Their reference to ‘climate crisis’ was a little too definitive for me, and caught my eye. I thought it would have been more appropriate to say something like ‘alerting us all to the importance of climate awareness.’
The Nobel Peace Prize committee has taken their hits this week, too. And not just because of Al Gore, but rather because the award to Al Gore has reminded us again that the Nobel Peace Prize has less to do with peace, and more to do with political lobbying. Al has done a lot to raise awareness of climate issues, but many of them have been debunked. How does that relate to ‘peace’?
Anyway, I wanted to throw in my two cents today, in somewhat of a counter measure to all the hype there will no doubt be for the ‘climate crisis’. We could certainly stand to clean this place up a bit, but I think Al Gore deserves a light hearted Arrogant Jerk award for playing it up like some kind of doomsday message, and ignoring many of the facts in order to promote his own aspirations of popularity. We’ll see what he does with it later (I really cannot imagine he will try to run against Hillary. Does anyone really want to just throw away their money like that?).
If you want some non-political information about ‘global warming’, check out http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse
Have a nice Blog Action Day.
I have really enjoyed reading some of your “Arrogant Jerk” blog posts. You write in an amusing way and you have a good grasp of the issues.
I wrote an article which, by some accounts, was not flattering to Al Gore. I have, however, done significant research on the naysayers to man made causes of global warming. As a rule they are not valid sources for good science regarding this matter. Only four out of seventy, who I studied, had any affiliation with climatology whatsoever and fewer still had presented any peer reviewed papers (by other scientists) on the matter. The scientific consensus, barring those with little knowledge of the matter, is that man has, indeed, created a very real problem and that problem is global warming. Personally, I ain’t changin’ my lightbulbs but the fact remains that we emit far too many green house gases.
One additional point is that climate conforms to the chaos model. Simply put: Introducing a variable (man made greenhouse emissions), that was otherwise not naturally occurring, into a dynamical system (weather) introduces chaos (global warming/cooling). While a “warming” will occur, initially, the net result might be an ice age like you ain’t never seen before – let’s just call it the “White Planet” scenario. Physicists (real folks with real degrees who REALLY study this stuff) are not sure why the Earth is not already an ball of ice.
Im getting so tired of AL GORE acting like the spoiled little brat he is why dont he go live on NINNY ISLAND so he wont be such a pain in the neck to us all