Former US Vice-Pres. Al Gore has provided a fine example of all that's wrong with debate over global warming.
In a Jan. 15 speech in New York, he took his global-warming apocalypse to new levels of distortion.
Calling President George W. Bush a "moral coward" for taking money from people and groups that agree with him on political issues, Gore said the president broke "a solemn promise made to the country that carbon dioxide would be regulated as a polluting greenhouse gas."
That "solemn promise" was a miscreant line buried in a position statement and sensibly ignored when someone noticed it implied that Americans polluted by exhaling.
Gore excoriated "wealthy, right-wing ideologues [who] have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies in the oil, coal, and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudoscientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public mind about global warming."
In this one breathless statement, Gore invoked class warfare, demonized dissenters, diverted attention from science to the politics of campaign finance, insulted scientists, and condescended to the public.
This is—there's no other way to say it—fanaticism. And it comes from the political founder of global-warming alarmism.
If science didn't already provide reason to doubt the need for drastic and immediate response to observed warming, Gore's words do.
They reflect certitude inappropriate to the subject. Global warming is complex and not well understood. It commands study and affords room for disagreement.
In fact, it's from disagreement among reasonable adults that understanding of global warming will grow.
But Gore and his followers will have none of that. They want action now, and they don't want any questions about what they say the action should be.
Global warming does raise the possibility of future catastrophe. It deserves serious attention, which might someday demonstrate the need for serious response.
The subject can't receive that kind of attention as long as one side suppresses debate, insists on costly action that might well be unnecessary or wrong, and uses disagreement not as a way to pursue truth but as a political cudgel.
(Online Jan. 16, 2004; author's e-mail: [email protected])
