Michael Barone Takes on Preacher Gore

Michael Barone goes where most mainstream media will not go. He compares Al Gore to an Old Testament prophet who considers himself above criticism:

Al Gore likes to present himself as a tribune of science, warning the world of imminent danger. But he is more like an Old Testament prophet, calling on us to bewail our wrongful conduct and to go and sin no more.

He starts off with the science. The world’s climate, he reports, is getting warmer. This accurate report is, however, not set in historic context. World climate has grown warmer and cooler at various times in history. Climate change is not some unique historic event. It is the way the world works.

Not this time, Gore says. What’s different is that climate change is being driven by human activity — to wit, increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Which means, he says, that we have to sharply reduce those emissions. But what the scientists tell us is that some proportion of climate change is caused by human activity and some proportion by natural causes — and that they can only estimate what those proportions are. The estimates they have produced have varied sharply. The climate change models that have been developed don’t account for events of the recent past, much less predict with precision events in the future.

To which the prophet replies, with religious intensity, that all debate should be over. Those scientists with inconvenient views should be defunded and silenced. We should replace scientific inquiry with faith. We should have faith that climate change — “global warming” — is caused primarily by human activity. And we should have faith that the effects will be catastrophic, with rising oceans flooding great cities and pleasant plains and forests broiled by a searing sun.

Even the New York Times bridles at this. After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists — not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls — charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

When you read the fine print of even the scientific reports that Gore likes to cite, you find the same thing. Gore foresees a 20-foot rise in sea level — 240 inches. The IPCC panel report foresees a maximum of 23 inches. Gore says that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this.” Geologist Don Easterbrook says there have been shifts up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

There's more here - read it all.

Mark Steyn also has a go at Gore in a brief comment at The Corner:

Have you seen this Rasmussen poll? Only 24 percent of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on global warming, 47 percent say he isn’t.

Hmm. Is the famous Gore effect about to kick in? You’ll recall that, as soon as Al decided that Howard Dean was an unstoppable force and announced he was endorsing him, Dean imploded, went berserk in Iowa, and that was that. Could it be that Gore is about to do to “climate change” what he did to the Dean campaign? Another week or two of Al’s proselytizing and that polar bear on the ice floe will be like Mad How in the New Hampshire primary – adrift and heading south and howling incoherently.

I wonder if Gore will soon have one of those Jimmy Swaggart "I have sinned" moments?