Al Gore on Civil Rights Movement

There comes a time when the unrelenting propaganda is so over the top that one becomes offended.

Tying in the civil rights movement as a comparable is saddening. That was the ending in the USA of an imposed human condition that lasted for thousands of years in which one tribe enslaved those of another tribe as a matter of course. That behavior is still extant around the globe but modern economic development is slowly eroding it away. Most ethnic victims will have a far easier time to escape the trap because of the US achievement.

In the end it was all made possible by the modern economy and nothing else. The political war was the necessary effort needed to remove the last holdouts. Billions today have already escaped informal slavery systems such as peonage. The rest will escape in the next two generations. That is how important the civil rights movement was as a global symbol. No one can do less and join the modern world.

The CO2 issue will be solved also by a few economic tweaks and the best tweak is to simply subsidize biochar in the third world of subsistence farming. It will solve more problems than ever created, and Mr. Gore needs to get on the solutions bandwagon rather than the turn off the economy bandwagon which will merely prolong the so called disease.

March 06, 2009

Al Gore: Global Warming Struggle Akin to Civil Rights

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/al_gore_global_warming_struggl.html
Deborah Hallberg

We've seen it before: Al Gore portraying global warming as a moral issue. Now he's gone one step further. He's compared the global warming crisis to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s.

The former vice president spoke at the recent Wall Street Journal's ECO:nomics summit, where he described his 10-year plan to get the country off carbon-based fuels as a "generational investment" and chastised the country for failing to take action.

But where he showed his desperation was where he compared global warming alarmists to civil rights activists, and global warming skeptics to southern segregationists.

"When Bull Connor turned those hoses on the demonstrators - peaceful, nonviolent demonstrators - a lot of kids asked their parents, hey, tell me again why that's not wrong? When their parents couldn't really give them good answers, that's when the tipping point came there. And I think we're close to a similar situation now, where enough people are saying, in all sincerity, tell me again why we shouldn't be solving this?"

He even made a reference to Bob Dylan's civil rights anthem, "Blowin' in the Wind," though he stumbles over the lyrics:

"How long will it take? Bob Dylan wrote the song, How many ... I can't remember the words, but you know, How many times will we have to go through this before people realize that civil rights are a birthright in this country, and shouldn't be denied on the basis on skin color?"

But Gore's effort to demonize the skeptics did completely escape scrutiny. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish environmentalist and author of "Cool It: The skeptical Environmentalist's Guide ot Global Warming," was in the audience and challenged Gore to a debate on the issue.

"I want to be polite to you," Gore said, in turning him down. "The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand' issue," he said. "It's not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake," he added.

Bjorn Lomborg and Global Warming Excress

Bjorn Lomborg has weighed in with a recent column on the ongoing global warming debate essentially decrying the rather strident and poorly supported positions of some of the more exuberant promoters of the global warming ideology. I also find it difficult to mistake a natural upward adjustment in the the apparent average temperature regime of the Northern Hemisphere for the End of the World, particularly when it appears to be offset with an equivalent minor downward shift in the Southern Hemisphere.

I also have great faith in the public's ability to discern aberrant nonsense for what it is, and those that cannot are usually pretty good at canceling each other's votes out.

What Bjorn does do is argue rather persuasively that a warmer Northern climate may actually be a Good Thing. Simply the reduction of the winter death rate is a benefit.

In the meantime the wack crowd would have a massive rise in sea levels and are predicting a temperature shift of over 2 degrees or pick your number.

In the real world, it is believable that the shift in the Northern Hemisphere is around 1/2 a degree over the past century depending on how the calculation is made. It is believable only because surplus heat is slowly eliminating the perennial sea cover of the Arctic.

I think that we can all agree that the Arctic is the area most affected and also the place where this heat is expended. I think that we also can agree that the sea ice effect extends to a maximum of thirty degrees south.

A back of the envelope calculation then suggests that a half degree shift in northern temperatures will mean at least a seven fold shift of 3.5 degrees in the arctic and more likely a ten fold shift of 5.0 degrees.

The reverse is also true and probably had a lot to do with the determination of the half degree shift in the first place. Obviously a shift of 2.6 degrees would give the Arctic a short violent tropical summer before it crashed back into winter.

I think it is far more likely that we are actually looking at the optimal shift right now and that it will not shift any more. This does not mean that changes in the Arctic are over. In fact they have just begun. That half degree shift is much more effective than anyone realizes as yet.