By Peter Schweizer, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do):Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy

August 10, 2006

Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."

Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

Click here for the full text of the column: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

The August 3 New York Times op-ed by Bob Herbert titled “Hot Enough Yet,” makes several dubious global warming claims. See: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03herbert.html?hp Herbert promotes the idea that the recent heat wave that has swept across the United States is another example of human caused catastrophic global warming. But the facts do not support this latest example of climate hysteria.

Claim: Herbert implies that the recent heat wave hitting the eastern United States is somehow evidence of global warming.

Fact: The recent heat wave hitting Mid-Atlantic States is nowhere close to breaking record temperatures set in 1930 – nearly 60 years before fears of human cased catastrophic global warming began. "That summer has never been approached, and it's not going to be approached this year," said the state of Virginia’s climatologist Patrick Michaels. See: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200608/NAT20060804c.html

In addition, even climate alarmist, NASA scientist James Hansen, rebuffs any attempts to tie any single weather event to global warming. "I am a little concerned about this, in the sense that we are still at a point where the natural fluctuations of climate are still large -- at least, the natural fluctuations of weather compared to long-term climate change," Hansen, director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters in April 2006.

Claim: Herbert wrote: “We should keep in mind, as Al Gore has pointed out, that of the 21 hottest years ever measured, 20 have occurred within the last 25 years. And the hottest year of this recent hottest wave was last year.”

Fact: According to official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the global average temperature did not increase between 1998-2005. “…this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” noted paleoclimate researcher and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia in an April 2006 article titled, “There is a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998.” See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html

Claim: Herbert wrote: “But with polar bears drowning because they can’t swim far enough to make it from one ice floe to another…”

Fact: Polar Bears are not going extinct because of the supposedly melting ice, according to a biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the arctic government of Nunavut. “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See here: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146433819696&call_pageid=970599119419

Claim: Herbert wrote: “…with the once-glorious snows of Kilimanjaro about to bring down the final curtain on their long, long run…”

Fact: A New York Times recent article debunked Herbert’s claims, noting that there is ‘dubious evidence’ that Kilimanjaro is melting due to global warming. “The ice on Kilimanjaro has been in retreat since at least the 1880's, with the greatest decline occurring at the beginning of that period, when greenhouse gas concentrations were much lower,” says the New York Times article of July4, 2006 by Philip M. Boffey. “The National Academies panel judged that Kilimanjaro's glaciers "may be shrinking primarily as a continuing response to precipitation changes earlier in the century," Boffey noted.

Claim: Herbert wrote: “…with the virtual disappearance of Lake Chad in Africa, which was once the size of Lake Erie, it may be time to get serious about trying to slow this catastrophic trend.”

Fact: The disappearance of Lake Chad primarily has been caused by human overuse of water, not global warming. “The lake’s decline probably has nothing to do with global warming, report the two scientists, who based their findings on computer models and satellite imagery made available by NASA. They attribute the situation instead to human actions related to climate variation, compounded by the ever increasing demands of an expanding population,” according to the April 26, 2001 National Geographic titled “Shrinking African Lake Offers Lesson on Finite Resources.” See: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/04/0426_lakechadshrinks.html ).

Claim: Herbert wrote: “I think the single most effective thing most ordinary Americans could do to become more informed about global warming — and the steps we need to take to fight it — is to go see Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and read his book of the same title.”

Fact: Gore has been criticized by many scientists for his incorrect and misleading presentation of science in his movie. “A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.” – wrote Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal. For more scientific critique of Gore see here: http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257909

In April, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister questioning the basis for climate alarmism. The letter noted, "’Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural "noise." See web link: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605

Climatologist James Hansen's article "The Threat to the Planet" is featured on the front page of the July 13 New York Review of Books, which carries the label "Fiction Issue." How appropriate. In his review of three alarmist books on global warming and of Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," Mr. Hansen stresses all kinds of catastrophic consequences of higher temperatures. Echoing the horror movie "The Day After Tomorrow," He has sea level rising 20 feet by 2100, inundating most of Florida and a good many East Coast cities. By contrast, the U.N. panel of climate scientists, often claimed to represent a "consensus," manages only about one-foot rise by 2100. Question: Is Mr. Hansen "out of the mainstream," a closet "skeptic," or even -- to use Gorespeak -- a "denier" of the consensus?

Mr. Hansen, you recall, is the NASA scientist who complained -- most recently on CBS "60 Minutes" -- of being "gagged," "muzzled" and otherwise put upon by the Bush administration. He also accepted a quarter-million dollars from the Heinz Foundation of Teresa Heinz Kerry and campaigned for John Kerry and against George Bush in Iowa. No connection between these two events, of course. After all, it's ketchup money, not oil money.

The main problems with Mr. Hansen, and others like him, are not the wild claims of coming disasters. No one in his right mind pays attention to these anyway. No, it is the fact that nowhere does he demonstrate that the current, rather modest warming trend is human-caused. He just assumes it: Temperatures are rising, and so is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sorry, that's not good enough. Not when he calls for far-reaching policies that would throttle energy use and the national economy.

Climate models are not evidence and correlations are not proof. The climate of the 20th century warmed sharply before 1940 when CO2 levels were low, and cooled until 1975 while CO2 rose rapidly. Clearly, natural climate fluctuations dominated. So how important is the human contribution to warming since 1975? There is no consensus: Scientific opinions vary from 0 percent up to 100 percent, with most somewhere in between. Tellingly, however, the patterns of warming do not agree with what is expected from the greenhouse effect of CO2.

There is a similar lack of consensus among economists. Some think that warming would be beneficial; others take the opposite view. But here we have relevant historical data. The planet (or at least the northern hemisphere) was much warmer in medieval times than today: Viking settlements in Greenland; no climate calamities; no inundations. The ice sheets survived the warming, and so did the polar bears.

The "Little Ice Age," which followed the Medieval Warm Period and lasted till about 1850, was a real calamity, however: harvests failed, people starved, disease was rampant. So if cooling is bad, and if warming were also bad, why would our present climate just happen to be the best?

Click Here for the Editorial: http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060731-085007-4855r.htm