When I lecture on political philosophy, I often begin with Plato and Socrates. Plato was the man who claimed he chronicled Socrates’ “paripatetic” lectures, in which he’d walk about Athens and bug people to engage him in straw man philosophical debates that would make him look really bright. Sometimes Socrates was on the ball, and other times (many) he was off base. One of those was his argument, offered in Plato’s “The Republic”, that the “ideal polis” would be run by an oligarchy of brilliant, “justice-knowing” “Guardians”, who would dictate to everyone what the “ideal form of Justice” was. And how did these Guardians get to rule and create this “most just city”? They engaged in “the Noble Lie”. Yeah. They were born with gold in their systems, and you, you silly plebe, were born with a lesser metal in yours… How perfectly political – the ideal city for “justice” was based on a lie.
So please welcome again Climate Guardian AL GORE, one of many who continues to shamelessly spout dusty falsehoods about climate, temperature, and weather! (Cue snooty golf applause, clinking silverware, and champagne flutes.)
Yep, Guardian Gore is at it again, as James Murphy notes for The New American, this time coughing up some whoppers that manifestly run counter to facts. One of the slew of celebrities, political gland-handlers, and occasional “unbiased” news people like Andrea Mitchel speaking at the “Global Climate Action Summit” between September 12 and 14 in utterly clean San Francisco (where the tragedy of the environmental commons is on such great display the city can’t stop its homeless from turning the streets into toilets), Gore told the audience:
This is the first time in history that two major storms are making landfall from the Atlantic and Pacific simultaneously.
Which, of course, was false.
Cato Institute atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue swiftly offered the real story on Twitter, saying:
Al Gore just (fraudulently) claimed without any evidence that we’ve never had hurricanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific making landfall at the same time.
Maue got the impression that Guardian Gore was basing his false claim on a Sept. 9 NBC (so trustworthy!) “report” by Dennis Romero which erroneously stated that the phenomenon of storms churning in the Atlantic and Pacific at the same time was rare, and that such activity was seen by “in-the-know” observers as consistent with anthropogenic climate change.
Maue noted that the NBC report “completely missed the mark on ongoing hurricanes and their rarity — without any evidence. (It’s not rare at all.)”
Gore also claimed:
Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation and we’ve got to connect the dots between the cause and the effect.
The problem is that Pastor Gore is engaging in classic propaganda without actually citing facts. In fact, damaging storms have decreased, and, as honest reporters have been saying for years, the number and intensity of striking hurricanes themselves is at its lowest in 50 years. As James Taylor wrote for Forbes in 2013:
During the past five decades, an average of 5.6 major hurricanes struck the United States per decade. During the preceding five decades, and average of 8.4 major hurricanes struck the United States. Major hurricane strikes occurred 50 percent more often 50-100 years ago than they have during the past 50 years.
But what of the Pacific Islands? Surely there has been a rise in cyclonic strikes in the region due to anthropogenic climate change over the last hundred years…?
Such claims are unsupportable. Why? Because data on cyclonic storms during the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century is virtually nonexistent. The people living in those areas did not have the resources to measure the storms the way Americans and Europeans did. (This chart from the East Pacific, reveals the many “zeros” on the stats running from 1851 to 1948. And this reveals a similar data hole in the West Pacific from 1851 to 1883.)
And, or course, the “severity” of US-hitting storms is low. Higher-intensity US hurricane strikes are at a remarkable low-point, as this National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (unconstitutional) chart shows.
As Murphy writes:
It’s not the first time Gore has used “alternative facts” in his zeal for promoting the climate-alarmist agenda. In his 2006 “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth, Gore was guilty of making several false claims regarding climate science. In 2007, a British court ruled that the film was political propaganda, not science. The court further ruled that the film contained at least nine factual errors.
For proof of how Gore plays with data to leave people with certain incorrect impressions, look at the graph he offered in the film. In it, he shows a chart of time on the horizontal axis and temp and CO2 measured on the vertical. Magically, the graph starts just prior to when the internal combustion engine came into general use in the US, and it appears to show a strong correlation between rising CO2 emissions and increasing temps. The only problem is that, if Gore’s graph (based on the infamous Michael Mann “Hockey Stick” graph) had started a few decades earlier, the temperatures would have been much higher, because the planet was warmer, and he started his graph in what is known as “The Little Ice Age”.
Additionally, Gore’s graph reveals something he never acknowledged. On it, he shows two lines, one indicating estimated CO2 levels over time as drawn from isotope levels in ice samples. The other line is temperature (enjoy trying to find a way to measure temps from 300 years ago with any exactitude, but Gore and the Guardians will do so without any embarrassment). Based on Greenhouse Gas theory, one would expect the CO2 graph to rise and then to see a subsequent rise in temperature.
But that isn’t what is on the graph. In fact, on Gore’s own graph, the temperature line changes first, years before a change in CO2. (You can see the image here, with CO2 in red and temp in light blue.)
But pay no attention to any of this information. Don’t bother reading “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years”, which offers a much more plausible and scientifically solid explanation for temperature fluctuations, based on solar activity.
Just listen to Gore, as he pushes for more control over an already too-manipulated economy that politicians seem to think is their playpen.
Gore has given people absolutely no reason to trust him, but he still rages – just like the multitude of storms he claims are raging on the planet, and are not.