Al Gore Returns
By
Nathan Ferguson
on March 2, 2010 
(photo credit World Economic Forum under Creative Commons license)
With a complicated and confusing tempest in a teapot that climate deniers have dubbed climategate and recent media headlines like “Snowmageddon”, many people have been wondering, “where is Al Gore?”
The former Vice President published a New York Times op-ed piece on Saturday titled, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change” in which he confronts his climate skeptics. In summary: It would be “an enormous relief” if climate change was NOT real, but as we fall behind China and Europe in the cutting-edge energy technology that will be the job-creation engine of the 21st century, the ice keeps melting, the seas keep rising - and January was the hottest on record.
He takes a jab at those who confuse local weather, in the guise of East-coast snow storms, with global climate:
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm…
Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.
And notes that even if all that were true, it wouldn’t change a couple of harsh realities that we’re facing now, and have been avoiding facing for more than 40 years:
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
And on the IPCC “climategate” scandal:
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
Al Gore is a little melancholy. Not because of bad publicity - he’s used to that. But because we’ve spent years bickering and arguing over minor points, and failing to act. And that has real-world consequences:
China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.
And he ends with a call to arms, rallying us to do the right thing:
We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.
Lee Ann Thompson
Peter Maier
Captain CrazyBeard (aka Jungle Chemist)
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