Al Gore lets loose

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Jan 23

You might remember Al Gore.  His Academy-award winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” was judged in a British courtroom to be a monument of lies.  He won a Nobel Prize for his campaigning about the climate crisis before the facts caught up with him..  The Spectator occasionally publishes climate change opinions by a local writer who prides himself on having been trained by Al Gore.

In a Q&A session at the World Economic Forum currently being held in Davos, Switzerland, Al Gore was asked about action on climate change.  His incontinent and emotional response is as follows:

“The accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.  That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, creating the droughts, and melting the ice, and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees – predicted to reach one billion in this century.  Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees – what about a billion?  We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world.  We have to act!

So, in answer to your question I would say, we have to have a sense of urgency much greater than we have yet had, and we need to make some changes.”

I’m not going to fact check Gore’s poetic and fanciful claim about Hiroshima heat trapping, because even IPCC AR6 says it isn’t true; the earth releases as much heat to outer space at night as it receives from the sun every day, namely 239 W/m², give or take.  The oceans aren’t boiling, and no one says they are.  In the 62 years since 1960, the upper oceans, i.e. from 0 to 2000 m in depth, have warmed only 0.15℃.  And expressions like ‘atmospheric rivers,’ ‘rain bombs,’  and the like are all poetic inventions of recent vintage, and are nothing but new names for old things.  California, for example, has alternated between drought and flood for over a millennium, and this proclivity is what prompted the still incomplete 1960s California water project, intended to capture enough water in flood times to carry through the periods of drought.

Melting of ice and rising sea levels are two of Gore’s hobby horses.  At his 2007 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Gore predicted the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free by 2014.  Of course, that never happened.  As for rising sea levels, that simply isn’t happening fast enough, and is at best a few millimeters a year.  In 500 B.C., The Netherlands was a low, swampy area, and the Zuider Zee wasn’t recorded until about 800 A.D.  Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age, and a slow rise today cannot be unequivocally attributed to the evil doings of man.

The predictions of a billion climate refugees by 2100 is another fantasy.  The crisis of today is of economic refugees and because the West chooses not to enforce it borders.  The whole business of climate refugees suggests that peoples of the third world have no agency, that they are as helpless as a feather in the wind; and this ugly bit of unwitting racism is common among condescending liberals making a show of moral vanity.  Note that Gore essentially agrees with the aims of the xenophobia and the political authoritarian trends, namely that the West doesn’t want or need the refugees! (“We would lose our capacity for self-goverence!”)

There’s no doubt Gore want’s people to act with more haste and urgency because if you’re going to do something stupid, you can’t act fast enough.  It is especially congenial to say such things like “We have to act!!” at a body with pretentions to world governance.

Al Gore was, and remains, an embarrassment to the climate change movement, and his incontinent and emotional exclamations at the WEF discredit a body that deserves discrediting.

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