Tag: al gore

‘Help us, Al Gore! You’re our only hope!’ – Salon, and *God* help us all.

I hadn’t realized that the Left was this worried about Hillary Clinton: “It’s time to draft Al Gore: If Democrats want to win, it’s clear neither Hillary nor Sanders is the way.” Salon, of course. Mother Jones would rather have Sanders and Gawker’s too busy outing people for no recognizable reason.  Now let me see if I can read the actual article without collapsing in helpless laughter…

…Barely. It’s amazing how people can look at the same data and come to different conclusions, isn’t it? I mean, I look at Al Gore and I see a profoundly emotionally stunted man (one made that way by a domineering father) who received a life-altering shock in 2000 (losing an election that he was programmed to win) and responded to it by first having a carefully-ignored mental breakdown, then by reprogramming himself into a crony capitalist and fear-monger for a neo-Apocalyptic cult that gets more and more tawdry looking every year.  And, oh yeah, the entire divorce and alleged adultery thing.  But Salon… ah, Salon: it sees a potential Democratic Presidential candidate that’s superior to any other Democratic candidate out there.

What should frighten the dickens out of Democrats is that both Salon and I might be correct.

Al Gore fails the Democrats for perhaps the final time.

Death of a dream, as Hot Air‘s Allahpundit would have said if he had written the HA post that I got this link from. Death of a dream:

Former Vice President Al Gore is having a moment – but he’s not running for president.

Despite a spate of recent media attention about the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee potentially challenging Hillary Clinton in 2016, those close to him tell msnbc it’s not happening.

…Not that Al Gore was any more likely than Hillary Clinton is to actually eke out a win in 2016.  But if he had run then the Democrats might have been able to allow themselves the addictive luxury of false hope. Instead, they get to run Hillary Clinton.

FOREVER.

Al Gore: ALIENS! ALIENS causing global WARMING! They’re stealin’ our carbon!

OK, some quick science (explained well here at this site).  The atmosphere of Venus is utterly inhospitable for life as we know it: too hot, too much carbon dioxide, and almost completely lacking in water vapor.  And all three characteristics are due to a combination of two factors: the lack of a magnetic field on Venus, and the solar wind (which is also considerably stronger, that much closer in).  Because there is no magnetosphere, the solar wind interacts with the Venusian atmosphere much more strongly than it would otherwise; this has the effect of stripping out hydrogen from the atmosphere.  No hydrogen = no water vapor.  No water vapor = no hydrosphere, pretty much no opportunities to turn carbon dioxide into something else.

You’re probably remembering this situation as the ‘runaway greenhouse effect:’ an argument that we used to hear a lot more of in the context of global warming before it became clear that we were unlikely to replicate Venusian conditions* unless we first figured out how to turn off Earth’s magnetic field**. At any rate, that’s why Venus is so danged hot.

It is not because of aliens, Mister Gore. Continue reading Al Gore: ALIENS! ALIENS causing global WARMING! They’re stealin’ our carbon!

Spam Gore Spammity Spam Global Warming and Spam.

Oh, my, but this is funny.

In 2009, at its peak, Gore’s group [the so-called ‘Climate Reality Project’] had more than 300 employees, with 40 field offices across 28 states, and a serious war chest: It poured $28 million into advertising and promotion, and paid about $200,000 in lobbying fees at the height of the cap-and-trade energy bill fight on Capitol Hill.

Today, the group has just over 30 people on staff and has abandoned its on-the-ground presence — all of its field offices have since shut down — in favor of a far cheaper digital advocacy plan run out of Washington. Advertising expenses have decreased from the millions to the thousands, and the organization no longer lobbies lawmakers. Donations and grants have declined, too — from $87.4 million in 2008 to $17.6 million in 2011, and many of its high-profile donors have drifted away, one telling BuzzFeed she now sees the group’s initial vision as “very naïve.”

Slick and omnipresent television ads from the group’s early years, produced by the same agency that made the Geico Auto Insurance gecko famous, have been replaced by smaller web-based programs. One ongoing effort, “Reality Drop,” helps activists post boilerplate comments to blog entries written by climate change skeptics.

So, basically, Al Gore is now a spambot.

Moe Lane

PS: No, I don’t really think that I need to respond further. I mean. SPAMBOT.

PPS: I saw this on Twitter, but I don’t remember from whom, sorry.

#rsrh I do not worry about an Obama Cleveland scenario…

…that being a “Obama loses in 2012, goes away for four years, and runs again” kind of situation.  And I do not worry about it because of two words: Al. Gore.  To be highly accurate, yet brutally honest, about it… in 2001 Al Gore more or less had a psychotic break in response to the stunning news that the people did not understand that Gore had been designed by his father to lead America to a brave new future.  Not being a clinical psychologist – heck, I had to look up ‘psychosis’ in Wikipedia – I can’t really say that this explains Gore’s steady erosion ever since; but, speaking as a partisan political hack… oh, yeah, the guy totally wigged  out and is in the middle of a death spiral to full-bore madness.

And I think that something similar might happen to Barack Obama, once he loses.  If it does not – and I don’t actually like seeing people go clinically insane – it will probably be mostly due to the anchors of his family, particularly his wife.  But even if Obama does not go Full Metal Gore, he is going to do and say some dumb, yet personally things that will make sure that they do not tap him in 2016. And by 2020 Obama will be stale, stale, stale. Continue reading #rsrh I do not worry about an Obama Cleveland scenario…

‘The Failure of Al Gore.’

This article by Walter Russell Mead on Al Gore’s habitual and stunning eco-hypocrisy is frustrating: finding just one part to excerpt is difficult, and I can’t reproduce the whole thing.  But, a taste:

Al Gore’s lifestyle is a test case for the credibility of his gospel — and it fails. The tolerance of Al Gore’s lifestyle by the environmental leadership is a further test — and that test, too, the greens fail.

The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs.  If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus.  If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush.  Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves.

Or, as Glenn Reynolds (H/T, by the way) likes to put it, “I’ll believe that this is a problem when the people me telling me that it’s a problem start acting like it’s a problem.”  – Only, if you’re going to wait for that to happen then I suggest that you pack a lunch.

Moe Lane

A mini-Ice Age?

Better throw some more logs on the fire.

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

[snip]

The Sun normally follows an 11-year cycle of activity. The current cycle, Cycle 24, is now supposed to be ramping up towards maximum strength. Increased numbers of sunspots and other indications ought to be happening: but in fact results so far are most disappointing. Scientists at the NSO now suspect, based on data showing decades-long trends leading to this point, that Cycle 25 may not happen at all.

The magic phrase ‘Maunder Minimum’ was used – which suggests that we might be looking at another Little Ice Age.  Which, depending on who you ask, either: caused a bunch of wars; made a bunch of wars much worse than they would have been otherwise; or is not to be mentioned in polite company.  Personally, I was hoping that we’d avoid this: after all, cold is death and heat is life.  Better to be warm and wet, than cold and dry.  But then, I have kids, and I worry that the current short-sighted, willful denial of science by our self-appointed elites may be condemning my children – and everybody else’s – to a future of poverty and dearth.

On the bright side, a colleague of mine suggested that the perfect name for a hypothetical new period of decreased sunspot activity would be the “Gore Minimum.”  In terms of irony alone, that would be perfect.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Al Gore is writing another book.

So sayeth Jimmie Bise of the Sundries Shack.  It’s going to be a prediction of the next decade.  Indirectly, Jimmie references Andrew Malcolm, which leads me to a puzzler: is this comment of Andrew’s funnier?

The publisher describes the upcoming tell-all tome as “an X-rated look at the seamier side of American public life where empty-headed liberal celebrities with hypocritcally huge carbon-footprints and this year’s spouse receive immense sums of money simply for showing up at glitzy ceremonies to exchange meaningless awards.”

The working title is: “A Convenient Truth.”

No, not really.

Or this?

The book was acquired by a new Random House editor, noted talk-show guest Jon Meacham, who recently led the Newsweek print edition into oblivion.

I’m sure that it’ll be fine, though: remember Al’s poetry?  Because I did.

Moe Lane (crosspost)