Author’s note: By the time you finish this column, it will
be 2.6 degrees warmer somewhere else.
Al Gore has a movie coming out next month.
I’ll wait until the excitement dies down to continue.
Okay… The film, entitled An Inconvenient Truth (view
clip here) is about, you guess it — global warming.
The bad news: Al Gore says we could be doomed. The good news: Al
Gore is the one saying we could be doomed.
The subject of “global warming” holds a particular fascination
for many of us, since it involves something with which we’re quite
familiar: the weather. We’re also familiar with the “art” of
weather forecasting. This is why Al Gore can go full-blown
Chicken-Little on us, and yet our highways are still filled with
SUV’s, people continue to use hairspray, and our cows still shrug,
look the other way, and break wind with reckless abandon.
Gore-style meteorology, specifically climatology as it concerns
global warming, seems to be one of those rare sciences for which
the percentage of accuracy of predictions rises as the distance
from the date in question increases.
To buy into this scientific convenience takes the same blind
confidence required to believe an archer who tells you he can put
an arrow through a soda can at 500 yards — the same person who
you’ve noticed can’t hit a bale of hay from 10 feet away.
Ask the night sweat-suffering Gore what the world will look like
in 100 years if the United States doesn’t sign on to the Kyoto
Protocol, and you’ll be drawn a gloomy, and very specific, picture
of our final days. Then ask him what the overnight low will be in
Chattanooga two weeks from Thursday, and you’ll get an unresponsive
stare. At some point during the conversation, Gore will excuse
himself and go burn thousands of gallons of jet fuel to fly to an
emergency summit meeting on ozone depletion.
At least the global warming doomsdayers showed some
common sense in the release date of An Inconvenient Truth.
Usually a liberal, skillfully utilizing a business acumen that can
only be acquired by earning a Master’s Degree in tarantula
dentistry, would put out a movie on global warming in the middle of
the winter, but Al is learning. Gore went for a near-summer release
date, when all of us sweaty movie-goers will be sitting in a
theater that will probably have its air-conditioning turned off as
we roast in the pleather seats, thinking, “dang, Al’s on to
something!”
If there’s one marketing flaw in Gore’s attempt to find an
audience for his film, it’s this: If we really have so
little time left to either (A) live, or (B) fix the “problem,” do
we really want to spend that precious 90 minutes at an Al Gore
movie?
Another Gore hurdle is credibility. Sure, Al has his core
followers, many of whom are proud owners of Colorado swampland, the
Brooklyn Bridge, and other stuff from the back of Mr. Haney’s
pickup truck, but the rest of us see somebody else in Al Gore.
Remaining skeptics perhaps are uncomfortable hitching the
direction of the future of the human race to somebody who once
spent eight years kick saving morality slapshots for his boss,
while his wife, Tipper, stuck parental warning stickers everywhere
except where they really belonged — on Bill Clinton’s pants.
The Al Gore we know once showed up at a debate wearing so much
makeup it looked as if he’d rear-ended a Maybelline truck on the
way to the auditorium. The Al Gore we know endorsed Howard Dean and
created the Internet. The Al Gore we know thinks that the biggest
threat to the world isn’t Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, or al Qaeda, but rather their
leaf-blowers.
Did you know that, even if the planet gets cooler, this
is also evidence of global warming? Gore’s former boss, Bill
Clinton, proved that in a speech not long ago in Montreal. Clinton
pointed to “evidence” of global warming; including that glaciers in
the Himalayas, and Arctic sea ice, are melting and the warm
Atlantic currents are slowing down.
One result of a slowing Gulf Stream would be, for several
reasons, more severe winters and cooler summers
in Europe. As Bill might say, “It depends on what your definition
of ‘warming’ is.”
You have to give them credit for covering almost every angle.
The only area of the argument left uncovered is the part where the
hand sticks out to grab money from the United States.
Global warming? Sorry, Al, but I demand a recount, and from
someone with weather, rather than political, experience. What’s
Willard Scott been up to?
