Yes I can admit it . . .
And no, I'm not proud.
I was actually a big Al Gore fan. No joke, I thought he was the greatest thing since the IPod.
My how things change. Time, and age, tend to render a person wiser and better able to see things for what they truly are---and with age, it can be sometimes embassing to look back on the beliefs you had during your first forays into adulthood and the real world. That idealism, the thoughts of fighting for causes based upon some superior moral model too complex and complicated for anybody ordinary to grasp, eventually gives way to the realizations that the world around you isn't as black and white, and as easily cataloged, as your adolescent brain would have you believe.
I read the book "Earth In the Balance", and from that moment on I was an Al Gore convert. I already held strong convictions about the environment, positive reform, and humanities roll in destroying nature, but that book took those beliefs to the next level.
In those pages were graphs and charts--pictures of ecological devastation that brought back thoughts of that Indian guy on Saturday morning commercials I'd see while watching Scooby Doo or Tom and Jerry--y'know, the one with the Indian chief standing with a tear running down his face as he stood in stoic silence, gazing upon a river choked with pollution?
Yea, that one. I thought you might remember it.
Single-mindedly, I carried the thought that man was bad for the environment, destroying the planet, and that big business and greed were to blame. I memorized the statistics, I could draw the pie charts, I could beat back all the arguments claiming our Earth was in great shape. I was . . . enlightened. And more then that, I wasn't afraid to let anybody know that I was enlightened--and that they were stupid if they didn't understand, or held different beliefs, then I held.
Now, as the years have rolled past and I'm better able to think for myself, and better able to understand how facts, agendas, and marketing can be changed to fit any certain viewpoint, I've come to the stark realization, albeit a very freeing notion, that I was full of shit.
So is Al Gore.
As I've been able to step back, removing the passion and emotion from myself, I've been able to weigh things in a much more objective way. And as I've dug further into the environmental movement, and the dangers that movement poses to our very freedom, I've tried to discern the facts from the twisted and mangled portrayals.
My hero, the saviour of our planet, is nothing more then a snake oil salesman who has an amazing ability to present important data in a misleading way to fit his agenda. The other issue is the blatant hypocrisy with which he chooses to live his life. This man will lecture you on all the things you need to do, the sacrifices you need to make, the taxes you need to pay, to do your part in saving our planet--then he'll take a limo to the airport, board his private jet, and in the matter of two hours equal the greenhouse gas output of the average American family--over the course of a year!
Sure, he'll claim he has to do these things that fly in the face of everything he tells you that you need to do because he's been called to serve the earth--and that makes it okay not to live what you preach.
He'll show you huge chunks of the polar ice caps, chunks the size of Rhode Island, breaking away and splashing into the ocean--all due to global warming--but yet he'll fail to inform you that this is a normal occurrence that happens nearly every day as the seasons change in the Arctic. He'll fail to tell you that as the seasons change the polar ice cap expands and contracts, and this is the reason you get to see the dramatic footage on television.
Facts?? Why should facts matter??
To Al Gore, they simply don't matter at all. In fact, facts are just a nuisance one needs to avoid, or simply deny, if they stand in the way of getting your point--and your legislation--across.
With his last book, "An Inconvenient Truth", Gore crushed any doubt that humans were responsible for global warming and the coming environmental crisis resulting from our sinful indiscretions. His overwhelming proof, the Cu de Tet, was a graph that overlapped CO2 emissions with a graph showing the rising temperature of the planet---and, low and behold, the graphs were practically identical. The correlation of the data was stunning and indisputable--and there was no other conclusion that could be derived except that all the CO2 humans were spewing into the atmosphere was causing the planet to warm to catastrophic, and unprecedented levels.
It was freaking amazing---Al Gore had just done what no real scientist in the history of humanity could figure out. Greater then that though, Al Gore could, and would, save the planet and save us from ourselves.
But, oh those pesky facts . . .
There was an Inconvenient Truth to all of it, and that truth was the one Al Gore didn't tell you about in the book, or during any of this subsequent lectures---and it's a very important truth.
While it's true that as the global temperatures have risen CO2 has risen in direct proportions as well--yet, that doesn't tell the whole story, and to tell the whole story would be to render Al Gore's entire argument, and agenda, a moot point.
What Big Al didn't tell you--the Inconvenient Truth--is that in his evidence, and verified by climatologist across the world, is that the temperature rises happened prior to the rise of CO2!!!
That's a blatant omission of the most important fact in the entire argument.
It wasn't CO2 which has caused the earth's temperatures to rise--and I'm not getting into all the data showing earth temperature rises and falls on a normal basis, and that the temperature rises--if there truly is one, and that's in doubt as well, are the cyclical nature of a living organism. The earth is always going through temperature fluctuations--and it always will. The point of the matter is that it was the rising of temperature first which then caused the rise in CO2, as a byproduct of higher temperatures.
Boy, Al, that sure sucks--doesn't it?
The point of this post is there is a new movie coming out in 23 days, called "Not Evil Just Wrong", that explores the eco-movement in the world today, and sheds some light into the not so warm and fuzzy things going on with regards to this movement.
Check this one out--I think you'll have an eye opening experience.
