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Imagine something along the lines of "Kiss my hard drive!"--but with a bucket of bile thrown in for good measure.
Seems that the former vice president drives a bunch of you into a tizzy just by showing up. And awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Gore simply sent a lot of folks straight over the ledge.
The depth of their anger is hard to fathom. But it's there on display each time one of our headlines carries Gore's name. Perusing the reactions left on our TalkBack forum, I came across this post from "tech_junky48" in a CNET News.com blog a colleague posted after the Nobel Committee's decision:
"Global warming = more drought and more severe weather in some places. No, No, NO! There has not been any more severe weather in the last century then in the century before. The climate is changing, because, by definition, it is unstable. We are not causing it...More (global warming) scams --> gullible alarmist people --> exploitable people --> more pointless money drain."
Travis Ernst offered a similarly pungent critique.
"(Gore) is full of hot air and has a following of worshipers. He did NO research on his own, deserves no award other than for scaring people and causing undeserved panic."
I came across hundreds of similar dismissals of Gore as another blowhard populist out to score easy rhetorical points at the Bush administration's expense. Obviously, Gore is a career politician and former standard-bearer of his party. And I'm sure he's not naive about the political weight this issue might carry into the 2008 presidential election.
But at what point does the growing body of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature on the subject trump the snarky put-downs? The latest report to examine the causes and potential effects of climate change was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change study. Check it out in your spare time. It makes for sober reading.
Speaking with News.com last month, Lorraine Bolsinger, who runs a group inside General Electric to make environmentally conscious products, said, "People who say, 'I don't believe it' or 'I don't see it,' they kind of are outliers at this point. I think it's much more mainstream," she said. "We're past the point of debating the science."
Unfortunately, it's great sport to deride "Al Boring," the man who nurses an eternal grudge because the world forgot that he invented the Internet. Pardon my sarong, but it turns out that Gore has a legit claim to the mantle, according to both Vint Cerf and Newt Gingrich. In this month's edition of Vanity Fair, they credit his legislative spadework for creating the right preconditions.
Here's what Gore actually said in 1991: ""During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative"--politico-speak for leadership--"in creating the Internet."
But as the magazine recounts, Gore received a bum deal from an unforgivably lazy media, which retailed the bogus "I invented the Internet" claim to the point where it became parody.
That past was prologue for the unyielding criticism directed at Gore for attacking official indifference to evidence connecting man-made carbon emissions to global warming.
Some of this no doubt is related to antipathy left over from the 2000 presidential race. The election's outcome and all that followed in the subsequent years widened our left-right divide to the point where any attempt to examine this issue turns into a mosh fight.
You saw the same thing happen after An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for best documentary of the year. The grumbling about what some saw as Gore's pseudo-science and bent for popularizing turned into a full-throated roar after a British High Court ruled that there were nine inaccuracies in his documentary.
"Ah ha--gotcha!"
Actually, there was less here than the headline suggested. Claiming that Gore's film contained "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush," the father of two students filed a lawsuit because he objected to the showing of the film in schools. But a British High Court judge refused to go along. In his decision, he instead said British schools should show the documentary along with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.
Lost in the mushroom cloud of instant outrage was the judge's more significant conclusion that Gore's film was "broadly accurate" and built a "powerful" case that human activity causes global warming.
Let's see: nine errors over the course of a 100-minute documentary. I'll leave you to make the call.
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
See more CNET content tagged:
global warming, Al Gore
It's so "morally imperative" that he'll lecture to you about it - for a hefty fee, in venues where the press is excluded.
Gore's only imperative to make lots of money for
freaking out because human-generated carbon emissions were
supposedly causing ?global cooling??
For that matter, what about the fact that humans only generate
<0.02% of all carbon emissions?
What about the fact that global warming?which undoubtedly
exists, but isn?t what most people think it is?has generated a
climate where we no longer have potato famines and ?year[s]
without a summer? (e.g. 1783 and 1816, where the Earth?s
naturally cool temperature combined with volcanic winter)?
And finally, what about the fact that our current global
temperatures are almost identical to temperatures seen around
the year 1200? Were human-generated carbon emissions to
blame then, too?
Face it, people: ?global warming? is just another buzzword. Yes,
the Little Ice Age is over, but the next big on is as little as
10,000 years away. Global warming is only here for a little while,
and frankly, I?ll take an extra 0.2˚C over millions of people
starving, any day.
50's and 60's.... at least 500 between US, russia, UK, france etc,
don't recall the exact figure.
Probably created a tiny nuclear winter.
Do you think for one minute that if these green technologies were widely available that he would choose to NOT make use of them when he could? Do you make use of them? Have you given up all carbon based pollutants? Could you even if you wanted to? (if you could, please let us know where is this perfectly enviromnetally sound community you live in?)
I can not afford a new Hybrid, as much as I would like one, but the last time I did get a car (used) you can bet that gas mileage, and long term maintainability were the biggest factors. When I had to move I chose a place powered by methane produced from the local landfill.
Even if global warming was not occuring, these things are efficiencies, as are most green technologies, and worth persuing, and can even be very profitable in the long run. If the global warming message was not out there, would I have even had the option of chosing a place run on clean methane power? Would anyone have built such a thing?
If no one can speak out about environmental concerns without being perfectly environmentally sound themselves, then no one could speak, because none of us are perfect. We are talking about a problem that affects us all, Gore included.
I ask what have you done for your environment today? What have you done to raise awareness? Oh thats right, you think its all bull, and are valiantly trying to raise that awareness, right?
Please let us all know what good your message of awareness does for society, that is so much better than what living with environmental conscienceness, and responsibility does?
beyond this; ever wonder why they find fossilizations of long extinct rainforests on the south pole? the cycle is simple; before each ice age, every last square cube of ice melts off the face of the earth.
until we stop being so short sighted and realize that just because we all remember snow, doesnt mean there was and will always be snow, we won't get it.
forgot to mention, the ocean is in the lowest 15% of its levels in earth's history, if it rises, it's much closer to earth's average. this isn't about saving nature, it's about saving our own sorry arses, lets not gussy it up any other way.
How paranoid do you have to be to think the global warming issue
is communism in disguise....
It's a long term investment and risk management issue, warming
will definitely affect economies, think about drought and cost of
saving cities from flooding.
http://www.larryelder.com/Gore/goredubiousrecord.htm
Gore scored lower than Bush in many areas including science and math.
Most liberals have low academic scores anyway because they tend to think with their emotions rather than logic, reason, and critical thinking.
PS, Bush got a 1206 on the SAT. Gore got a 1355.
You can argue afterwards about how it got started, who saw it first and how to clean up the mess. Let?s fight the problem, not each other, or surely the next question will be who the best swimmer is.
Because that is essentially what many Climate-change deniers seem to be doing....
affair with this person? He lied about inventing the internet. He
lied about the movie "Love Story" being about him and Tipper. He
lied about global warming.
To sound boringly hip, its not just in tech that he has no "cred," its
that he has no "cred" at all. Anywhere.
Let's hope we can do better. Quite frankly, what makes Al Gore difficult to believe is the solutions he offers, and those being suggested in his beloved Europe, are prepostorous.
The solution to global warming, is trade-in credits, so that we stop using more energy. We can use the same amount that caused the problem, and that fixes it? C'mon...what are the odds such a complex problem can be solved with a few measures that are clear feel-good, pat myself on the back cause I contributed...in the usual liberal, not in any significant way...
it's going to be solved by liberal gestures and posturing... thats where the believability just doesn't exist.
Al Gore wasn't so worried that he dropped his $10,000 a month utility bill.
First, he claimed that he set world records for track & field events. Wrong!
Then, he claimed to invent the Internet. Wrong AGAIN!
Recently, the preposterous claims about global warming. Has anyone ever heard of the "Global Cooling" scares the very same whacked-out scientists made during the mid 1970's?
In fact, we are actually NOT in a warming phase, but a cooling one. The magnetic poles have shifted on this planet DOZENS of times over the last 100 million years or so. Doesn't anyone watch the History channel, the Discovery channel or the National Geographic channel? They ALL have had numerous programs on these and many more relevant phenomena. Can they ALL be that wrong?
Or perhaps it is Al Bore who is wrong. He found a small core group of left-wing radical liberals who share his same political bent, and will anything and everything to share his whacky ideas and outright lies. There are even MORE scientists who have come out with better research that refutes every single point Al Bore has ever made concerning the environment.
And don't get me started on his sheer hypocrisy. First, it was his "PMRC" crap in the late 1980's. Putting down John Denver, Twisted Sister, Barry Manilow and Frank Zappa as "drug using deviants" and "sexually repressed psychopaths". What the...? And you wasted our precous tax dollars reaming out John Denver for his song "Rocky Mountain High" because YOU thought it was about drugs, and Barry Manilow for "Mandy" because YOU thought it spoke about premarital sex? What the...?
And even more shocking, your family has owned slaves in its long history, AND ran a "Big Tobacco" farm for hundreds of years. "Yessa, massa, I gonna git yo' grits and pipe tabaccky fo' you!" Don't act pious and holier-than-thou, then actually CONTRIBUTE in a HUGE way to air pollution, then go around and ***** about air quality! What the...?
Of course, don't forget the phoney "Carbon Credits" scam he created. He flies around in LOTS of jets, 200+ days of the year. WOW! What a HUGE carbon footprint THAT makes! Yet, he literally pays HIMSELF in a phoney company he set up to "buy carbon credits". Google that, you will find more back story info on that.
Back to the point in question: the Internet.
FACT: Al Gore's Date of Birth was March 31, 1948. That makes him 59 years old, as of November, 2007. In 1961, when the very first REAL scientist was solicited by the United States Government to create the ARPNET for DARPA, the core of the Internet, Al was just hitting puberty at the tender age of 13. Yep, he was in Junior High School when the Internet was invented.
In fact, it took many, many people over 20 years from 1959-1980 to create the Internet. In the early 1990's, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. Al was still in the U.S. Senate fighting those evil liberal musicians at that time. Just exactly WHEN did he find the time t become a world-class computer programmer?
According to a secretary who worked for Al Bore back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Al didn't even know how to USE a computer, and he didn't even OWN a computer. WOW! How can you create the Internet without a computer, Al Bore?
Please explain THAT one little snafu for the entire world, PLEASE!
Here are several relevant links that are actual, factual RELIABLE and TRUTHFUL resources that can be trusted concerning Al Bore's lack of contributions, and the many names of people who are dedicated programmer's and scientists who actually DID create the Internet. Read it and LEARN:
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/inventednet.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_invented_the_Internet
http://www.catalogs.com/info/gadgets/who-invented-the-internet.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
http://www.tech-faq.com/who-invented-internet.shtml
To completely refute the claims that Al Bore never actually SAID that he invented the Internet, here is the actual transcript with his liberal buddy Wolf Blitzer, from CNN's "Late Edition", where he DOES claim to have invented the 'Net: http://www.sethf.com/gore/
To quote: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
So, Al Bore, you have been proven to be a complete LIAR, a charlatan and an opportunist.
PLEASE go crawl back in the whole you hid in after you were soundly thrashed in 2000 by Geroge W. Bush, who actually IS a decent, hard-working and HONEST man, something you will never, ever be.
And for you liberal writers attempting to re-write history and immortalize such a utter scumbug such as Al Bore, SHAME ON YOU! You just lost all credibility and have now become completely irrelevant.
Instead of focusing on Gore's claims, they bring up Frank Zappa and the age at when Gore hit puberty. These are not people who care about the subject, they don't have a rational response to the issues Gore raises, and they simply aren't people who are serious, or who should be taken seriously.
Some people have registered thoughtful, serious questions about some of Gore's claims. Those people won't be found commenting on CNet. All you're going to get here are the ones whose head explodes every time Gore's name is mentioned.
sweatheart or something?? You might want to look into some
anger management classes.
Luvvit !
Maybe need to include spelling lessons at right-wing, sock-puppet, comment factories.
Now, how can I read your tech articles, Charles Cooper, without being skeptical? You've bought into it again.
have also drunk the kool-aid. Why else would you care that there
are so many who challenge Al's viewpoint? Bassboat
I like to think I have healthy skepticism of both left and right. I decided to invest some time in trying to get a feeling of man's potential affect on the climate - at least I would know how the numbers were arrived at. Since our civilization's primary energy source is oil, clearly the energy and the by-products of the use of oil are the most likely contributing factor in our ability to effect climate. I'm sure lots of people have done similar and better calculations - again I did them for my own edification. Here's the exercise that I came up with for my own understanding of the scale of our oil energy use as compared to major natural energy releases: I took the total world oil consumption as reported on several internet sites (83 million barrels/day as of 2004). I converted the number of barrels of oil per year into tons of T&T (10 tons of oil/ton of T&T) explosive force. Again all these numbers are easily searched on the internet. Then I searched the calculated explosive force of several major volcano eruptions - Mt. St. Helen (24 mega tons of T&T) and Krakatoa (40 mega tons of T&T). You can check my math, but it looks like with our current oil consumption - we have the equivalent of one Mt. St. Helen's eruption of energy released every 21 days or about 17 per year. We go through enough oil to make a Krakatoa energy release about every 35 days in oil energy equivalents - 36/year. I realize that there are huge differences in atmospheric particle and gas releases the subsequent weather affects between petroleum energy use and explosive volcanic eruptions, but I have to admit I was very surprised at the amount of just "unnatural" energy that our hydrocarbon usage is releasing into our atmosphere. While this exercise over simplifies the problem and actually proves little as to whether our hydrocarbon usage directly changes the climate, for me it does nothing to decrease my concern over man's collective hydrocarbon energy use affects on the environment and the climate. It does make me feel that we are far worse off than I thought we were.
Even so, I still can't jump on Al Gore's bandwagon - or join anyone else's environmental hand wringing fest. Again its not that I don't believe we have an affect on our environment. Its that if we are so concerned about the planet and its natural environment then why do we focus on the symptoms - rather than the cause of these problems. Being technically trained as a marine scientist and spending lots of time traveling the world in my job - I assure you we are quite literally flaying large tracts of critical natural environment - daily, continuously in every growing amounts. However, its obvious to me me that there is one primary cause of global environmental destruction. Whether you talk about indirect affects of man like climate change, or direct affects like clear cutting the rain forest with chain saws and bulldozers, or clear cutting the oceans with huge industrial net fishing efforts. Its man kind that does these things for man kinds needs. Its our species that is the cause. Its us. We are the collective cause. Our carbon foot print - is just our foot print and measuring it is meaningless unless we do something to reduce mankind's needs. Unfortunately,there's just to damn many of us. Do we have to be up to our necks in our own refuse before we admit it?
Until I hear one environmental group... until I hear one political party, one politician, say that we have to have a global human population management strategy and an implemented plan - I'll have to conclude that no one is serious about trying control mans abuse of this planet, the quality of his destiny and even his future on it. If and when someone - some group comes up with a human population management plan - if it doesn't include a plan of how you manage a declining world population economically, (no economist that I know will touch this subject) I will continue to be just as cynical as I am today about anyone's real concern over the environment - or our future generations.
As a species, we tend to avoid taking the tough challenges until they are thrust upon us in catastrophe. My own opinion is that as a species we aren't intellectually ready to manage our own population in an effective - and especially not in a civil way. The US was briefly the most educated population in the world. Yet today, almost half of us still believe in ghosts in spite of absolutely no scientific evidence to support the belief. Probably because 90 % of can't even define the scientific method. More than 80% rely on "faith" as indoctrinated by over 40,000 different religious flavors each claiming to be the only truth - as opposed to relying on the logic available from the scientific method for solving problems and directing their lives. As a result we are both "spiritually" and technically capable of reducing our population only by warfare. Unless disease reduces human population dramatically and soon, I think our collective stupidity, greed, and or our starvation will push some group(s)to eliminate large numbers of others in the very near future. Global warming is a symptom of a much greater problem that isn't even being discussed.
That may be so - but we'll only know for sure in retrospect. In the meantime, I prefer to trust the research of the experts. And from what I've seen, the OVERWHELMING number of scientists working on this subject believe there is a link between man made carbon's spread and global warming.
Like you, I'm quite fed up - and bored, frankly - by both the right wing and left wing interpretations of the data. But until the bulk of scientific thought about global warming shifts, I'll remain convinced that there is a problem here.
As for your comment about humanity's "collective stupidity," sadly, I couldn't agree more. Let's hope that we're both wrong on that score.
I commend your approach to this subject. In fact the most important statement you made was about the increase of human population and its impact on the planet through deforestation, agriculture, etc. Our role in global warming is not understood. Our role as predators is well understood and our need for resources increases daily with our population increasing globally.
Many species, including our own experience population growth during periods of plentiful food only to succumb to huge die-offs when conditions change climatically or by inadequate food supplies. Disease and starvation always decrease a species chances for reproduction. We are not immune as a species from theses conditions. Birth control is a more effective tool for 'saving' our environment than anything being discussed politically in this country, or anywhere else in the world.
There is a huge difference in theory and fact. Anyone can present a
theory but fact is absolute. While I support evolution it is not a fact,
global warming for the past few years may be a fact (evidence from
readings) but it is only a theory as it applies to long term trends
(remember global cooling from the 1970's or are you too young for
that...I was in graduate school at the time of that fiasco)
Al Gore is an opportunistic politician making money and getting
kudos from those too naive enough not to know better.
We were supposed to have a near record year for tropical cyclone
behavior but turned out to be the third lowest in the last 100 years
and in some of those earlier years there may have been events that
were never recorded.
- Disappointed
- by esaarwkj November 2, 2007 10:11 AM PDT
- This article, from an executive editor, just seriously lowered my opinion of CNet's Tech Creds.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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