Albert A. Gore, Jr., a former Vice President of the United States, recently made the news by claiming that some of his predictions on climate change “have already been locked in place.” He went on to say, “sea level increases are going to continue no matter what we do now,” and that “the heat wave was in Europe…now it’s in the Arctic, and we are seeing a huge melting of ice there.”
Mr. Gore made these statements on the ABC Sunday morning news show during a patty-cake interview by the host, Jonathan Karl.
There are many questions to ask Al Gore, especially about his climate predictions made over the last three decades, for which he should be embarrassed to the point of hiding under a rock. Except Gore remains very much out in the open since he is on a mission – a political mission.
See special report on Gore’s failed predictions at CFACT’s Climate Depot.
Among Gore’s predictions were that Mount Kilimanjaro would lose all its snow from the warmer planet; there would be “stronger storms” and more frequent hurricanes; the planet’s warming would continue unabated; the Arctic Sea would be free of sea ice and cause a “death spiral” of polar bears, and so forth. By 2016, when it was all supposed to happen, it was clear none of it did, as discussed here and here.
As the recent interview reveals, Gore is sticking to his claims of polar ice melt and sea levels rising. Last year, he sounded the alarm that sea level rise “poses a grave threat to humanity.” Turns out, the sea level was increasing about one half a millimeter per year (0.02 inches) to about 7.6 millimeters over a 15-year period, not exactly cause for concern.
Gore often obsesses about ice melting when it’s summer. Summer ice melt shouldn’t surprise anyone. Ice always melts during respective summertime months, even along the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, in some years more than others, and it builds again in fall and winter. In fact, ice and snow melt off my yard for good, usually by mid-March every year in the northeast United States, only to return around November. I’m confident by then my local hardware store will restock ice melt.
The string of bogus predictions by Al Gore, from his 1992 book Earth in the Balance to his 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth, did not keep him from making a second film in 2017, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, an even worse sequel than Jaws 2.
But there is more going on than wrong-headed climate predictions that were knowingly false and turned out accordingly. Al Gore, like so many life-long politicians, has perfected shamelessness, but he is not self-unaware.
Gore’s predictions and his climate activism ultimately come down to this: politics.
During the ABC interview, he gave the game away by following up his climate claims with political assurances. “Here’s the good news,” Gore said. “In the Democratic contest for the presidential nomination this year, virtually all of the candidates are agreed that [climate change] is either the top issue or one of the top two issues.”
In other words, it’s about electing fellow Democrats, and being in power.
In this sense, Gore, the elder statesman, echoes a more obscure individual named Saikat Chakrabarti, who until recently was the chief of staff to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lead author of the Green New Deal. Mr. Chakrabarti spoke volumes when he admitted about the GND, “it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all…we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy-thing.” In other words, climate alarmism is a means to gaining political power and economic control.
To be clear, Democrats and Republicans are all about power, and each side says and does things to advance their political interests and expand their influence. Nothing unusual there, but it should be understood when it’s occurring on either side.
Al Gore is a lifelong Democratic politician and the offspring of another senator, his father, Albert Gore, Sr., who served in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. After stints in the House, Senate and as President Clinton’s V.P., Gore just missed the biggest political prize of all – the presidency, having lost in 2000 by a whisker in the electoral college to another political scion, George W. Bush.
Gore found his second act by taking his global warming crusade to a new level, which made him a wealthy man and an international celebrity. Still, it all comes back to political power.
Politicians make fibs, promises and predictions that often don’t get checked later on in the next election cycle. In that sense, Gore’s climate activism of the last 20 years is parallel to his life in elective office; that is, he rarely got held to the claims and predictions as a politician, and he’s largely escaped scrutiny for the same in his climate career.
So the beat goes on for Al Gore. There’s a presidential election around the corner, and he’s about electing a fellow Democrat for the prize that narrowly escaped him.