Factotum spreads global warming panic, Gore rebrands self as optimist
YEN MAKABENTA
First word
THE letter to The Manila Times of John Leo C. Algo concerning my column on global warming (“Face the facts: Globe is not warming, it is cooling,” Times, July 21, 2016) is laughable. He insists on spreading alarm about global warming among us, but his employer, Al Gore, according to The New York Times and the Daily Caller, is rebranding himself as an optimist and has virtually abandoned global warming.
Algo, who is apparently a foreign operative, claims to be part of an organization called Climate Reality Project Philippines.
The Climate Reality Project, I have discovered through the magic of googling, is a non-profit organization founded and funded by Al Gore. It claims to be driven by passionate individuals from all over the world who have come together to solve the greatest challenge of our time. Their mission is to catalyze a global solution to the alleged climate crisis by making urgent action a necessity across every level of society.
Climate Reality Project Philippines is a local chapter; it claims to be made up of over 500 Filipino climate leaders trained personally by Gore. It is active in high-level climate policy lobbying.
Gore funds the global project with his earnings from his 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and his recent success in green energy investing.
The Gore organization reinforces Charles Krauthammer’s observation in the Washington Post, that global warming is a church with its own dogma, and army of priests, propagandists and believers.
Gore has arguably profited the most from his advocacy of global warming and environmentalism. He has reportedly amassed a fortune estimated at $200 million.
But now, according to the New York Times, Gore is rebranding himself.
Prophet of possibility
According to the New York Times, Al Gore is done with presenting global warming as the ultimate doomsday scenario, and is instead trying to reinvent himself as a “prophet of possibility.”
Gore sounded the alarm on manmade global warming with the release of his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. In the film, Gore warned that Pacific Islands were drowning from global warming and polar bears were dying as Arctic sea ice melted off.
In 2008, Gore famously predicted the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013 — a prophecy that never came true.
In an interview, Gore told the NYT he is done being a prophet of doom, and is instead trying to rebrand himself as someone who is optimistic that investing in green energy can solve global warming.
Gore has seen support for his views rising within the business community: Investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar is skyrocketing as their costs plummet.
“I think most people have been surprised, even shocked, by how quickly the cost has come down,” Gore says. Such changes, he says, represent a sharp break with the past, not a slow evolution
All of this means, he adds, that the worst effects of climate change can be blunted. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. “We’re going to win this.”
At the end of an optimistic talk about climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he and the singer Pharrell Williams announced a Live Earth concert which was to have been held on all seven continents on June 18.
In the meantime, Gore pursues a frenetic schedule of training programs around the world. He has met with large groups in Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, India and elsewhere to present local versions of his climate change slide show. Those who attend, in turn, make the presentation to their own countrymen, spreading the word far more broadly than his documentary ever did.
Gore today is a less visible leader of the environmental movement in the United States. His voice is still being heard, as a global leader in opinion shaping climate change.
Mr. Gore has also become very rich. He co-founded Generation Investment Management, a firm that takes positions in companies that manage themselves along principles of sustainability, including the effects of climate change.
Alarmism campaign
This success has also been the subject of howls from those who find much to dislike about Gore. His old foes eagerly take aim when his name comes up. Sen. James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has called climate change “the greatest hoax,” now heads the Senate environment and public works committee. When asked his view of Mr. Gore, he issued a lengthy diatribe against the former vice president’s “alarmism campaign.” Through a spokeswoman, he said in part, “Al Gore’s immense wealth is largely due to his shameless and incessant promotion of the liberal global warming agenda.” He added that the federal climate policies Mr. Gore endorses “would infuse his business ventures with large sums of taxpayer dollars and set him up to become the first climate billionaire.” Mr. Inhofe has challenged Gore to reduce the carbon footprint of his Nashville mansion and extensive travel.
Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, says Mr. Gore has become a symbol of climate change, which is both good and bad.
“Al Gore cannot ever reinvent himself from the fact that he became one of the country’s most polarizing political leaders.”
Clueless on Gore rebranding
Algo appears to be clueless about Gore’s rebranding. Like most warming fanatics, he reads only his own propaganda or dogma on global warming and climate change.
He did not address my first column on global warming, (“New York Times slammed; climate change a myth,” MT, June 21, 2018). I quoted at length a column by syndicated US columnist Cal Thomas, who reported and commented on 30 years of the global warming scare. He cited the verdict of various scientists and critics on the warming panic.
In the case of my second column, he did not address the eight predictions of Al Gore that have been totally proved wrong, and the 31,487 scientists who signed the Petition project questioning the science behind global warming. Algo merely insisted on repeating their dogma, saying:
“Climate change is coming and has come for everything and everyone. We must face the new reality: the world is warming.”
If Algo is a foreigner, I want to tell him bluntly: “Talk if you like, but do it in your own country.”
Algo’s talk might work among the unsuspecting.
Nobel laureates blast climatology
But how will he fare with two Nobel prizewinning scientists who have blasted climate change and global warming as fraudulent.
In May this year,1993 Nobel Laureate Dr. Kary Mullis declared that climatology is a joke. He pointed out that there is no scientific evidence whatever that our CO2 is, or can ever “drive” climate change. There is also no published empirical scientific evidence that any CO2, whether natural or manmade, causes warming in the troposphere. Mullis earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1966; he then received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. His Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded in 1993.
For his part, Professor Ivar Giaever, the 1973 Nobel Prize winner for Physics, trashed the global warming/climate change/extreme weather pseudoscientific claptrap during the 2012 meeting of Nobel laureates. He said climate science is pseudo-science. He told Barack Obama he was “dead wrong” about climate change.
I think the climate change commission should be stricken out of the national budget. Its budget should go to the planned department of disaster management and resilience. It will be handling real-life problems, not imaginary ones.
yenmakabenta@yahoo.com
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