In an op-ed in Saturday’s NY  Times, former Vice President and leading “climate change” hoaxer and profiteer, Algore, can nearly be seen with his school-marmish tone, finger-wagging at the American public for not sufficiently joining his cult.

The op-ed is full of Gore’s usual lies, myths, and misrepresentations, a few of which I’ll go over here.

Gore starts with his usual apocalyptic tone: “It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

One can’t help but wonder if Gore realizes that the more he spouts this extreme nonsense, the more he pushes the general public away from the fear he hopes to instill.  To be clear, there is NOTHING in the science…even the junk science…that suggests we’re likely to face an “unimaginable calamity".  It’s always funny to think that even if temperatures changed noticeably, humans would somehow be unable to adapt even though humans now live everywhere from northern Canada and Alaska’s frozen tundras to deserts of Africa and China.

Gore talks about dwindling oil reserves in the Middle East, but that is simply a lie. Proven reserves in the Middle East are at or extremely near their all-time high, and reserves have been on a steady up-trend for decades, as shown in US Department of Energy data.  Furthermore, despite all the oil used by the world last year, 2009 ended with the highest world proven reserves in history, an increase of 10 billion barrels over 2008.  The idea that we’re running out of oil is one of the alarmists’ biggest and most easily disproven lies.

Gore says that new energy sources will be the biggest source of new jobs in the 21st century. That may or may not be true, but as I’ve mentioned before, a major study from Spain – a country which has spent a lot of time and money on government encouraging and subsidizing of green energy – shows that every “green energy” job created costs more than two other private sector jobs.

You can see where Gore intends to focus when he talks about “global warming pollution", implicitly supporting the EPA’s wrong-headed Endangerment Finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant when what it really is is plant food.  What part of “CO2 concentrations increase AFTER temperature increases” does Gore not understand?  Furthermore, to the extent that you believe that the minuscule human contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere (as a percentage of the total greenhouse effect) matters at all, what part of “logarithmic effect” does Gore not understand?  Every addition of CO2 causes less warming than the prior addition (of the same amount of CO2).  And again, the large majority of the so-called greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor, a substance which humans have essentially no impact on in terms of atmospheric concentration.  Furthermore, only a small single digit percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is created by humans.  The idea that humans are having substantial impact on climate is similar to the claim that all the vacationers peeing in the ocean are going to have an unimaginably calamatous impact on sea levels.  Perhaps the fact that CO2 as a pollutant is a lie is the reason that Texas is suing the EPA over their claim that it is.

Gore talks about science never being free of errors. That is certainly true, but he misses a much more fundamental point:  First, the basic data sets upon which the “scientific” analysis has been based is very likely corrupt, both due to intentional selection of data likely to point toward warmer temperatures and due to the urban heat island effect and wear-and-tear on existing sensors causing them to register temperature changes that have nothing to do with “climate".  Second, we don’t even know what the real scientific analysis is because Gore’s allies at the British CRU and elsewhere successfully threatened many important publications out of publishing research that does not support the alarmist conclusions.  Furthermore, the whole issue has become so politicized that many scientists would be hesitant to publish papers (even if the magazines weren’t stonewalling them out of fear of Algore and friends) that contradicted the big money and big egos who support climate alarmism for their own non-scientific reasons.

Gore makes the amusing claim that global warming is to blame for the latest massive snowstorms, and then goes on to say that seas are rising (they are not rising any faster than they had before human input of CO2 into the atmosphere and they are not rising at all around the low-lying islands which have been the poster children of global warming victims). He says that hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more numerous – a claim which has been made every year for many years now even though the trend has shown that not to be true, Hurricane Katrina not withstanding.

Gore also fails to note that something on the order of half of the CO2 emission reduction which he’s campaigned for has happened due to our current recession…a fact that essentially proves that the only way to cut CO2 emissions in the short term is by crippling the economy.  Not that any rational person really wants to curtail our production of plant food.

Gore talks about the US cap-and-trade bill not passing as if that’s a problem – even though the measure’s supporters agree that it would at most lower temperatures by a fraction of a degree in a century, less than the average annual random variation in temperatures.

Gore acts as if China might have done something to curb their CO2 emissions if we had kneecapped our own economy even though anybody with half a brain knows that they were pushing the US to be more aggressive on cap-and-trade because they know that cap-and-trade could just as easily be called – as Steve Moore recently put it – the Full Employment for China and India Act because its impact will be to force all energy-intensive American manufacturing overseas.

Gore’s hyperbole about what might happen if we don’t cripple our economy and send taxpayer money to the “green” projects in which he is a major invested are laughable for their sheer inanity: “the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases."  Riiiiiiight.  Cats and dogs living together!

Gore then lapses into the usual left-wing misunderstanding of the financial crisis in the US, blaming it on “market fundamentalism” and deregulation when it was caused by the precise opposite: Government interference in markets and over-regulation of the banking sector, forcing banks to make bad loans to unqualified buyers. Combine that with the Fed’s outrageous ultra-low-for-ultra-long interest rate policy, and you have the mother of all (modern) bubbles – all thanks to the government, NOT the free market.

Gore then says that industries are fighting against even the most modest regulation.  That is a lie as well.  Most industry executives will generally go along with modest regulation if they know the alternative is massive taxation and regulation.  What was happening is that many businesses were working hand-in-glove with alarmists in and out of government to help structure massive regulations, taxes and subsidies, to make sure they were on the right side as government started picking winners and losers.  Now that the science that Gore says is clear is indeed becoming clearer, just not in the way Gore wants, even those traitors to capitalism are bailing out of the sinking climate change ship.

Strangely, Gore then claims that people leaving magazines and newspapers for TV “conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms."  Does Gore not realize that Fox News is the only major non-leftist news outlet and that viewership of the old-line major broadcast networks still massively dominates Fox and the rest of cable news?  What part of ABC, CBS, and NBC does Gore think have been acting as pawns for evil capitalists?

Furthermore, while it’s true that print newspaper readership has dropped in recent years and that TV viewership has increased, the TV gain has been relatively small.  The really big gainer from the drop in newspaper circulation has been the Internet. (See this Pew study for more data.)

And now we get to the real crux of the cult of Algore, namely to prove that it is a religion/cult, as Gore makes clear: “From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption."  There are so many problems with this statement that it’s hard to know where to start.  Here are just two really big ones:

• Who said that law is supposed to be used for “human redemption"?  Indeed, doesn’t the First Amendment specifically obviate that approach, at least from the Federal government
• Which “rule of law” does Gore mean?  If he means subverting American sovereignty to the whims of some international bureaucracy, is that actually the rule of law or its destruction?

Gore got his last sentence correct, albeit unintentionally: “Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them."  It’s true: Public officials must rise to the challenge of the dangerous cult of Algore by doing what is required:  Forcing a reexamination of all so-called “climate change” science, blocking the EPA from declaring plant food a dangerous pollutant, and defending the American economy from the crippling blow that the cult wants to deal it.