On journalism, global warming and Al Gore.
Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 9/5/14
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London’s Daily Mail has served up some reporting on former vice president Al Gore that you likely won’t see here in America. Here are two examples.
In a story dated May 6, 2013, the Mail tells us that Al Gore is a very wealthy man – wealthy enough, in fact, to be mentioned in the same sentence with 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. According to the Mail, Al Gore has a net worth of about $200 million, compared to Mitt Romney’s $250 million.
And it turns out that Gore got rich in pretty much the same way that Romney did. Gore sat on corporate boards – like Romney, exercised the resulting stock options – like Romney, was a principal in an investment firm – like Romney, and sold a company at a sizable profit – like Romney. The difference is, no one on the left and none of the eastern establishment press (but I repeat myself) has ever painted Al Gore as a real life Gordon Gekko.
But Al did something else. He made a bunch of money as the world’s Chicken Little-In-Chief on the subject of global warming. By offering an apocalyptic vision of a world about to snuff itself out beneath a blanket of suffocating man-generated carbon dioxide, the former veep was able to parley an all but unreadable book called An Inconvenient Truth into an all but unwatchable movie. (Oh, and a Nobel Prize.)
Gore was always at pains to tell us that the proceeds from the book and the movie went to the non-profit Climate Reality Project (that he founded). But the $175,000 a pop speaking fees that the book, the movie, the Nobel Prize and his former VP status made possible went straight into Al’s pocket.
Which segues nicely into the second example of the Daily Mail’s journalism on Al Gore.
In a story last week, the Mail called Gore out on a prediction he made in 2007. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Gore said,
“The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff. It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years.”
Which, seven years later, confronts Al Gore with an inconvenient truth.
According to the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center, an area the size of Alaska that was open water two years ago is now a solid sheet of ice. One estimate from the Danish Meteorological Institute places the increase in the polar ice cap at 63 percent. I’ll bet you haven’t seen that story in an American paper.
Al Gore’s wealth affords him a 10,000 square foot mansion that costs more per year to heat and cool than a lot of families make. His SUV reportedly sits outside those $175K speaking gigs idling with the air conditioner running so as to avoid the inconvenient truth of a hot car.
From which we can learn two things.
First, with respect to wealth, there is no greater hypocrite in the solar system than a rich liberal. And second, with respect to journalism, the reporting of the Daily Mail may offer a clue as to why American newspapers are dying while British newspapers continue to thrive.
Too bad poor Al Gore never actually made it.
He sold one of his possessions to AlJeezera TV; poor guy.
Actually the research on his Global Warming was not accurate( they left out some of the data so it would pass muster).
BUT research, by definition, is duplicatable, blind, repeatable, etc.
This type of’ research’ falls into the category of advertising for the benefit of those concerned.
And , indeed, it is so.
Research is my major. Many grants that support higher learning institutions are awarded on this faulty logic. But, because these grants support a worthy cause, they are not trumpeted as false.
Actually truth is not heralded anymore just the culture of celebrities. The successful scam is laughed off by many.
I look forward to your columns every week, Paul, and I forward them to friends. Each week you make your point so well. This one on Al Gore tells us a lot about snake-oil-salesman-Al and his media enablers. Both are shameless hustlers, but are failing. Global warming is the laughingstock of the nation, thanks to those who pull back the curtain they way you do.
ANYONE with a little bit of COMMON SENSE and before the revisionist history was being taught in school would know that global warming was a hoax from the beginning. Since the creation of the earth, it has gone through cycles of heating and cooling. This was before man began to emerge with any kind of effect on his environment at all. What we contribute to any kind of global effect is so minute, you can’t even register it. Some will disagreee with me on this, but I stand by my statement. Al gore was an opportunist, always was and always will be. He is also an over inflated ego which at any time can have a pin prick to deflate him as with any liar. Liberals can not accept that anyone is smarter than they are and there may be something to that as they HAVE been able to force their ideas and agendas upon the masses without much of a resistance. I am just grateful I was taught by people who believed in real historical facts and not the revised version, plus I was never gulible enough to buck my common sense!!!
I’m a Texan and one thing I know is that we don’t take anything on faith. Not the ridiculous Al Gore, nor the ridiculous column above. Sea ice is not increasing, it’s diminishing, and has been for a while. The fact that the thin ice sheet is larger than it was last year has nothing to do with the fact (yep it’s a fact) that the ice sheet is significantly smaller than it was 50 years ago. So changes from year to year don’t matter so much as changes from decade to decade and century to century. And there ain’t much doubt about that friends. Just cause this fella is on TV don’t means he knows nothing.