Close window | View original article
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 The Grammy was revoked.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.