Gore speaks! [updated]

Since the release of the ClimateGate emails, and the steady flow of revelations since about the dishonesty and frank incompetence of the IPCC Team, sightings of Al Gore have been as rare as confirmed appearances by the Yeti – only more venal, and much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more embarrassing, and mostly from the back as enablers so frequently allow him to avoid inconvenient questioning.

So having disappeared for several months, and become a figure of fun even to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show audience, the Senior Denier-In-Chief is back – back denying that anything has changed since he put his head below the parapet as the ClimateGate bullets started flying.

The New York Times is his latest enabler, publishing one-thousand words in which he talks up his stock portfolio, and denies anything just happened over the last few months to expose the incompetence and shoddy science of the IPCC and its fellow travellers upon whose wave of warmism he has ridden to become the world’s first carbon billionaire.

It’s a beautifully crafted piece of denialism.  The fraud of “consensus” has been exposed to daylight, but Al Gore would like you to carry on looking the other way.  Like he does.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, said on February 27 that “this apparent (global warming) consensus misled not only the media and the public, but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC.”  Dr. Singer summed up the entire global warming hoax as based on “temperature data (that) had been manipulated.”

Gore wants to continue the hoax.

Christopher Booker reckons, “'A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC: The emerging errors of 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental.”

Gore denies there are significant errors.

Bret Stephens says in the Wall Street Journal that the sound of ClimateGate “is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.”

Gore denies there are any cracks in the manufactured “consensus,” and no slowdown in the creation of billion-dollar edifices based on this climate fraud.

It’s his own edifice Gore’s Times piece is designed to protect –and that’s all you can really say about it. He doesn’t believe any of it any more than you do. As physicist Lubos Motl says, it’s “an op-ed that is bound to become a subject of jokes.”

He argues, in essence, that the World is about to end, and it’s Fox News that’s to blame.

And he concedes that the IPCC has made “at least two mistakes,” mentioning specifically “a flawed” overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, which we now know was based on little more than gossip; its unjustified hype about non-existent flooding in the Netherlands; and the law-breaking refusal of Phil Jones and his East Anglian colleagues to supply their scientific evidence when requested under the UK’s Official Information Act, which he downplays as “hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics.”

But he appears blithely unaware (or at least hopes that you are) of other revelations of IPCC lies errors that have appeared since he last stalked the world stage, including:

• the extent of sea ice around Antarctica, which has been increasing, not decreasing,
• Amazon rainforests,
• African agriculture,
• attribution of extreme weather damages,
• the corruption of the IPCC’s chief “scientist” (who is not a scientist but a railway engineer),
• revelations of manipulations of the modern surface temperature record in China, in Alaska, in Australia, in Antarctica, in Orlando, in Sweden, in New Zealand, in South Africa . . .
• revelations of manipulations of the historic temperature record,
• revelations of lost data,
• IPCC’s scientists were forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

And that’s not all he ignores. The IPCC’s beleaguered “keeper of the records,” Phil Jones admitted to the BBC’s environmental reporter, Roger Harrabin that “from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming” – something Al Gore is still at pains to deny – and that talk of science being settled is nonsense. [Asked by Harrabin to comment on the claim that ‘the debate over climate change is over.’ Jones responded: “I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well.”]

There is no way that The Goracle could not know any of this, since the fallout from all of it overshadowed and  all but blew apart the Copenhagen climate conclave.  He just hopes that you don’t.

He hopes that the bandwagon can keep right on rollin’.

Too late, Al.

Al would like to think that the worst scientific scandal of our generation can be swept under the carpet so he can continue to pontificate all the way to the bank.

It can’t. It’s too late.  All that’s left, or should be, is to mop up the damage that’s been done scientifically, politically, and philosophically.

As philosopher Stephen Hicks says, “A sad thing about the ’Climategate’ or ‘Warmergate’ scandal is that we will now have to revise the textbooks and add our own politicized scientific culture to that sorry list [of scientific fraud],” including examples of the destructive effects of the politicization of science from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

    “We learned successfully why and how to separate politics and religion.
    “Will we be able to learn the exact same lesson about politics and science?
    “The lesson is not only about politics. The core lesson [that anyone with a brain and an honest use of it should be able to draw] is about the corruption of philosophy (especially epistemology), which has enabled an entire generation of journalists, activists, and politicians to be intellectually disarmed by a group of frauds — or to become enablers in disarming those who would challenge the frauds. A postmodern philosophical culture indeed. . .
    “Lysenkoism was ‘science’ in the service of an established political regime, while the Climategate people are ‘scientists’ in the service of establishing a new political regime. . .
     “I’m hoping Climategate will be a cautionary tale about politicized science rather than the end of science.”

Let’s hope so.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt reckons The Goracle’s op-ed “reveals just how religious is his mission, and just how theocratic would be any government he and his global warming followers controlled:

    ‘From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.’

“He will use the law to redeem your soul. To which the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witchhunters would have said: ‘Amen.’ ”