the religion of Gore
From First Things >>>>> http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=923
The global warming/climate change noise machine has reached a crescendo this week with Al Gore’s trip to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize, our colleges sponsoring “Focus the Nation” weeks to promote the self-evident moral truth of combating warming, and above all the U.N.-sponsored Bali conference meant to produce a treaty to succeed the soon-to-expire Kyoto. Just in time for Bali, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development issued a new crisis report listing the ten cities most due to be flooded by warming-induced sea level rise. Nine are in Asia; the other one is Miami.
The 10,000 or so government delegates and journalists gathered at Bali are not discussing science–”the science is settled” is the alarmists’ mantra–but politics, pure if not simple. Alliances have been shifting in some curious ways. Australia had a government change just before the conference, whereupon the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, immediately signed on to the Kyoto treaty, committing his country to large cuts in CO2 emissions. Just a few days later, he backtracked embarrassingly when he realized the economic cost to Australia, but he was welcomed at least provisionally into the fold of the group favoring mandatory emissions cuts, a group led by the European Union.
That seemed to leave the United States almost alone among developed nations in rejecting Kyoto in favor of voluntary targets. But then some surprises: Canada, whose government led by Steven Harper has been backing away from the previous government’s commitment to Kyoto, began publicly leaning toward the U.S. position; and then, to the embarrassment of the Kyoto group, Japan, home country of the treaty and of course a signatory to it, joined the United States and Canada in looking favorably on the voluntary approach. Its spokesman offered as an excuse for this apostasy that the intent was just to get the U.S. into the dialogue. That did not mollify the E.U. and other critics, and there is talk of the “unholy trinity” who are on the edge of outer darkness as far as the true believers are concerned.
Meanwhile, the developing countries, led by China and India in collaboration, have been noisily and stridently pushing another agenda. They don’t want mandatory cuts either, but they say they are willing to take measures to cut their enormous and growing CO2 emissions–China now produces the world’s largest amount–only if the developed countries go first. Furthermore, they say these developed countries must give them, at bargain rates or for free, new technology for emissions control and a transfer of intellectual property rights to any new clean technology so they can copy the processes and not have to pay to import them from the West. Their argument is that the rich developed countries caused the problem in the first place and must pay for the correction.
Some disingenuous Chinese have even said that their pollution is our fault because we have such an appetite for the goods of their factories. The devil–that’s us–makes them do it. They also say that no international control regime will be permitted to slow their economic growth away from poverty, certainly not as long as their per capita emissions remain a fraction of the West’s, especially that of the United States. In other words, they’ll go on “polluting” as they please, accepting only such cuts as may be produced by technology given to them that will allow them to grow with fewer emissions.
Read the rest >>>>> The Bali Conference
“Al Gore understands the science of global warming better than anyone else in the world of politics. His interest was sparked when he was a student at Harvard, studying with the legendary geochemist Roger Revelle, who realized that humanity’s pell-mell burning of fossil fuels could make the earth a vastly different—and warmer—place.”
TIME MAGAZINE 
Any chance of getting one of those penguins to give him a shove?
What a bunch of BS. Yeah, Gore was a geochemist…or was it a minister in training…or a pot smoking military journalist…or presidential loser…or side kick and yes man to the Bill-meister…or…or… Excuse me while I THROW UP.
