Al Gore Does the Milli Vanilli
Shouldn't awards based on fraud and lies be revoked?
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Tools:
In the late 1980s, a musical duo out of Europe took America by storm. The group Milli Vanilli featured two up-and-coming young singers who rocketed to superstardom. A hit record, platinum singles, and a Grammy award seemed just the beginning of a long and glorious career.
Then, almost without warning, the entire edifice came crashing down. As Wikipedia records:
The first sign that the group was lip-synching happened in late 1989 during a live performance on MTV at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut. As they performed onstage live in front of an audience, the recording of the song "Girl You Know It's True" jammed and began to skip, repeating the partial line "Girl, you know it's." over and over on the speakers. They continued to pretend to sing and dance onstage for a few more moments. Then they both ran offstage.
The two headliners were attractive, yes, and good dancers; but not the singers. The music had been recorded using other, uncredited musicians. As a whole, the act was... a fraud!
Repercussions were dire. The Grammy was revoked. Their music distributor dumped them. Their profits vanished into a wave of lawsuits demanding refunds for concert tickets, records, and everything else sold under false pretenses.
One of the two "singers" spent time in jail and rehab, eventually dying in a hotel room by the customary celebrity fate of drug overdose; the other leads an obscure life as a DJ and occasional performer, his chance at fame and riches but a fading memory.
Al Gore's rise to wealth and power has lasted longer because unlike Milli Vanilli, the American media has no interest in revealing his fraud to the world. Where American journalists hounded Milli Vanilli and drove them in shame from the public stage, they have circled the wagons to protect His Greenness from awkward questioning.
Yet, slowly, the truth has emerged. Two years ago, the High Court in England found his Oscar-winning documentary to be as stuffed with lies as Milli Vanilli's credits.
We've all heard of his hypocritical lifestyle and mammoth carbon footprint - the massive house, the gas-guzzling Learjet, the idling limousines and the gargantuan yacht. And, of course, the very concept of carbon offsets, source of Gore's wealth, is so riddled with fraud that even the sympathetic FTC had to investigate.
Just as Milli Vanilli's fame was founded on their music and they collapsed together, so Al Gore's prominence is based entirely on the "scientifically proven" fact of man-caused global warming - which, thanks to Climategate, is now a proven fraud. The very reason anyone listens to Al Gore is demonstrably false: the phony scientists at the University of East Anglia had to make up numbers to "show" a warming trend that, in reality, isn't there.
At first, Mr. Gore took an option that the Milli Vanilli celebrities didn't have: he hid. The recent Copenhagen conference, billed as the last best hope for mankind on earth, would seem the kind of place where His Goreness would reign as king. Indeed, he originally planned to appear and collect his laurels at a $1,200-per-ticket victory lap; with news of Climategate causing journalists to ask skeptical questions, this appearance was abruptly canceled.
One can hide only so long, though, and he eventually deigned to respond to journalists. The days of the worshipful interview are apparently over; the scribes of England and Australia, at least, have awakened from their slumbers to do their actual jobs. Quoth Gore in response to questions about the Climategate emails:
I haven't read all the emails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.
And the columnist's response?
The truth is that the most recent Climategate email is from November 12, 2009 - just a month ago.
The email in which IPCC leader author Kevin Trenberth privately admits "we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't" is dated October 12, 2009. Only two months ago.
The infamous email sent by CRU chief Phil Jones, ordering four other Climategate scientists to "delete any emails" that sceptics had asked to check, dates from just last year...
Was [Gore] lying or just grossly mistaken in telling you they were old news of no account?
What else has he got wrong - deliberately or otherwise - while terrifying the world about a warming that actually stopped, or paused, in 2001? [emphasis added]
An excellent question, that, and one which other commentators are finally investigating:
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: "These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
"It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," Dr Maslowski said. "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this."
What? You mean those poor polar bears might not actually be doomed? Might they not be endangered? Oh, that's right, there are twice as many polar bears now as there were when Al Gore was a kid.
Al Gore's empire was built on lies and anyone who depends on Al Gore is passing on the lie - even in the most unlikely places. One might hope that a toy store would be immune to propaganda, but alas, Build-a-Bear Workshop's website is indoctrinating little kiddies in alarmist lies:
Santa: Yes, my dear, we know, the climate is changing. There's bound to be a little melting.
Ella the Polar Bear: It's worse than that, Santa, a lot worse! At the rate it's melting, the North Pole will be gone by Christmas!"
Santa: My, my. All of this gone by next Christmas? I don't think so.
Ella: No sir, not next Christmas, this Christmas! The day after tomorrow!
The Day After Tomorrow... where have we heard that line before? Oh yes, that movie about global warming causing a new Ice Age. But that was just a movie; it never claimed to be reality, unlike Al Gore and Milli Vanilli, and never pretended to be spreading facts like Build-A-Bear.
Milli Vanilli had their Grammy revoked on account of their fraud. Will Al Gore lose his movie's Oscar for the same crime? Hollywood being what it is, we wouldn't hold our breath... but stranger things have happened, and at least someone is trying.
No matter how you try to conceal it, the truth will out eventually.
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Tools:
What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
You are correct that the nonexistence of reliable data proving global warming is not, in and of itself, proof that global warming is not taking place. It is, however, ample proof of the POLITICAL fraud that is global warming alarmism, and that the claim that global warming has been scientifically proven as of today is a hoax.
In a logical, rational world, we would cease all political action relating to climate change, while doing a full and transparent re-analysis of all relevant data, and then perhaps we could come to some properly-supported conclusions. Unfortunately, the elected politicians and all too many politicians masquerading as scientists are in too deep to allow their already-reached conclusions to be questioned.
(To continue playing devil's advocate)
However, it is NOT true that "climategate" disproves global warming, and not even true that it disproves the models, methods, and proofs used by the scientists associated with East Anglia. What is obvious is that a deep mistrust has arisen between proponents and skeptics. There is not doubt that they have subverted the peer review process and kept hidden their data and models. This is wrong, but the motivations are understandable. Any model complex enough to describe global weather patterns will have a weak spot, which their opponents are certain to exploit, attempting to weaken the global warming theories. Their motivations are not necessarily more devious than wanting to delay this (in their eyes) unnecessary delay. That this in a perfect world would be the desired outcome, their opponents helping to strengthen their models, is besides the point.
That various "fixes" have been applied to the data is apparent. Neither is this necessarily proof of a nefarious plot. Ask a statistician if they apply fixes to their data to account for known anomalies, and I am certain they will say yes. What again is necessary is that these fixes can be accounted for and, through scientific process, be either justified or discarded.
There are scientists who in the past have ignored data that does not agree with their hypothesis, or otherwise subverted the scientific process, and who have later been proven right. This is hopefully not the case here, but I'm not about to make up my mind based on some hyperbole on the internet.
The politics involved are another issue, and here I'm sure we will not disagree on much. My point here is that the sentence, "the 'scientifically proven' fact of man-caused global warming - which, thanks to Climategate, is now a proven fraud" is quite wrong. For this to be true, we are going to have to look a little beyond what these scientists have SAID, to what they have DONE. If you can prove that any of their fixes is nothing more than an attempt to make cooling look like warming, then we are well on our way.
However, if you're read my previous article
http://scragged.com/articles/lies-damned-lies-and-embarrassed-globe-warming-liberals.aspx
you see where I cited snippets of the actual code used in the IPCC/UEA modeling software, which specifically states "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and simply adds hard-coded figures to the totals to force the projected temperatures to go up, instead of down which they'd otherwise have done. If that isn't proof of an intentional hoax, I don't know what is; and since that's where the famous "hockey stick" came from, yes, I class the entire affair thus far as a fraud.
I stand by my article as written and clarified further above.
This so-called "greenhouse" effect isn't. It's been proven several times (example here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf). CO2 is a a "trace" atmospheric gas. It can only absorb (or reflect, convect, radiate, or whatever else you think it might do) so much energy. This isn't conjecture, but application of physics.
A doubling of CO2 will have a negligible impact on global temperatures. IF the earth is warming, then the warming is NOT coming from emitting CO2, but some other source.
My money is on the sun...
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/01/03/world/international-us-china-weather.html
The wave of cold across north China is expected to continue through the first part of the week. The national meteorological office warned that temperatures in the nation's far north could fall to around minus 32 degrees Celsius (-26F).
Beijing is likely to shiver at about minus 10 degrees Celsius in daytime and colder at night, touching decades-old records.
The accumulation in Seoul broke a one-day record of 25.6 cm (10 inches) and is expected to grow, said weather officials, who have been keeping records for about 70 years.
We are all sick of the exaggeration and even outright lies made by the likes of Al Gore, but that only gives more reason to avoid lies and exaggeration ourselves. If using hurricane Katrina to spur on global warming hysteria was ridiculous, then how ridiculous is claiming that a particularly cold winter in some areas disproves the whole thing? Record breaking? Hardly, at least if you are basing your claims on the article you quote (dawson). "touching decades-old records" could mean that it was last this cold in the early 90s. That's not very significant when discussing trends over the last century.
I'm looking at the article linked to by Fennoman. Looks interesting, if not exactly my area of expertise.
I couldn't agree more with your call for an independent review. So why aren't we hearing similar calls from the global-warming crowd.
Regarding current weather, you are of course absolutely right that no one cold day proves anything, and anyway "record-setting" cold doesn't mean so much when records only go back a century. Turn that around, though, and "record-setting" warmth also doesn't prove anything much, for the same reasons; and record-setting cold must at least logically call into question the thought that the entire world is getting warmer.
We Can't Wish Away Climate Change
By AL GORE
The truth about the climate crisis -- inconvenient as ever -- must still be faced.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html
His truth would seem to differ a bit from reality. He says:
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel's scientists - acting in good faith on the best information then available to them - probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
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.
The East Anglia scientists said there had been no warming but would not admit it until their emails were hacked. Now Gore is denying that. Oh, well.