Al Gore says climate battle lost by 'failure' of government

Ex–Vice President Al Gore, who has invested heavily in schemes that would give him profits from climate-related energy credits and carbon-emissions trading, is lamenting bitterly the "failure" of the government to pass comprehensive legislation taxing energy use and emissions.

And he's blaming "right-wing" media, whose reports documented "Climategate," the revelations that global-warming scientists were manipulating results and shutting out critics.

In a recording obtained by Steve Milloy, who writes among other places on the Green Hell Blog, Gore states, "There is a sad but undeniable truth that those who wanted to try sowing confusion used an echo chamber from blogs and talk-show hosts and biased right-wing media to promulgate the distortions of the paid skeptics and paid professional deniers who tried to undermine the evidence."

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Gore continued, "There have been, of course, multiple formal inquiries, all of which have dispelled the falsehoods that go under the title of 'Climategate.' The three separate inquires conducted not only cleared the scientists and organizations involved but strongly reaffirmed the basic assertions that they have been making."

The conference call was organized by Repower America, which later posted a notice that audio clips of the event would be posted.

The dispute focuses on the hacking attack that uncovered a long string of e-mails involving scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., one of the premier global-warming advocates in the world. The communiqués, released late in 2009, "revealed well-known climate researchers speaking in baseless terms about their critics, discussing clever ways to sidestep colleagues skeptical of manmade climate change, devising plans to freeze opponents out of peer-reviewed journals and systematically manipulating the earth's temperature record," according to author Brian Sussman, whose book "Climategate" details the controversy.

In a column on WND, Sussman reported that one of the investigations, by Muir Russell, an educational bureaucrat in the U.K., "requires 158 pages to accomplish two items. First, the report excuses the intemperate language found throughout the e-mails (such as one 'cheering the death' of global-warming skeptic John Daly; or another threatening to 'kick the crap' out of another denier) as being 'characteristic of the [Internet] medium.' Second, the panel gently finds fault with the scientists in question for being 'unhelpful' in dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests for data and for failing to share their data with other researchers holding different points of view."

Be the first to see the full documentation of how your life could be changed by climate-related laws, taxes and regulations, in "Climategate"

But Sussman notes the report does not even address the primary question from critics: Is the weather warmer now?

Gore said in the tapes, which according to Milloy were from a conference call with supporters this week, that one example of the "bias" was in the Wall Street Journal, which, he said, "wrote upwards of 30 editorials and news stories during the time the story about the University of East Anglia broke and not a single one of them presented the side of the science."

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He called on supporters to demand that journalists report what his supporters believe.

"It is our responsibility to demand that reporters, editors and all journalists report the truth. It is only through consistent and constant pressure from us demanding equal time and coverage in local and national media that we will get the truth out," he said.

"Only when the media hear from enough of us will they change their habits and print the truth about these scientific facts," he said.

Milloy reported that in the warm-up discussion before Gore addressed the call, the National Wildlife Federation chief Larry Schweiger referred to the skeptics as "enemies" and said that he hoped the alarmists would "outlive the bastards."

In another part of the address, Gore complained about the failure of his agenda.

"In all candor, the United States government in its entirety, largely because of the opposition in the United States Senate to taking action on clean energy and solution to the climate crisis, has failed us," Gore said.

"In the last few months and weeks, the U.S. Senate has failed to meet the challenge of the climate crisis. … Comprehensive legislation is now likely not to be debated when the Senate returns from the August recess," he said.

"They have failed. They have failed badly. And the possibility for a robust debate later this year is greatly diminished.

"I have to tell you in all candor and honesty that this battle has not been successful and it's pretty much over for this year. I hope I'm wrong about that. But I want to be realistic. We need to redouble our efforts for the battle that lies ahead," he said.

But Sussman's commentary highlighted the problems with the "Climategate" defense.

"In one of the most damning unit e-mail exchanges, scientists spoke of a 'trick' to 'hide the decline' in an iconic graph used to illustrate an increase in global temperatures since industrial times. The graph, known as the 'hockey stick,' was unfurled in 1999 and is famously used by both the U.N. and Al Gore to make it appear as if the temperature in recent decades has dramatically spiked," he wrote.

He said his own review of the "faulty unscientific procedures" used to create the "phony graph" revealed it as a "broken fraud."

"And, contrary to what the scientists at Climatic Research Unit say, we are not living in the hottest conditions ever. In fact, as recently as 1990 the United Nations promoted a totally different graph, illustrating that the warmest weather in the past 1,000 years occurred during the medieval period between 1150 and 1350. That graph illustrated that the 'Medieval Optimum' was a solid two degrees warmer than today! Certainly, SUVs and coal-fired electrical generating plants could not be blamed for that increase in temperature," he wrote.

"The hockey-stick hoax has now become the basis for every current proposal on the planet to combat global warming, including President Obama's proposed cap-and-trade legislation currently being considered by the U.S. Senate," Sussman wrote.

"Climategate" traces the origins of a "climate-scare" agenda to the "diabolical minds of Marx and Engels in the 1800s – down the ages to the global governance of the United Nations today."

On the issue of carbon dioxide, the book points out that nature needs carbon dioxide and generates it through multiple natural processes to ensure its availability.

"Decomposing vegetation, the carcasses of dead animals, forest fires, smoldering peat bogs, volcanoes, plowed soil, weathering rocks, human utilization of fossil fuels and even termites and crustacean shells – all exude carbon dioxide beneficial to the plant kingdom," he writes. "And the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more content the plants become – just ask anyone who has worked in a greenhouse.

"In fact, that is a portion of the carbon-dioxide debate no one bothers to address – the plant kingdom would abound if carbon-dioxide levels were to increase in the global atmosphere," he writes.

He also raised the specter of an unrelated reason – dollars – that could be driving the agenda.

"It's widely reported that Al Gore is worth at least $100 million, although my well-connected [source] believes it may be closer to $500 million. Quite a success story for a guy, who, according to financial-disclosure records released just prior to his bid for the presidency, had a net worth near $2 million," he writes.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., has suggested the Justice Department investigate scientists for potentially falsifying data as part of "Climategate." And the Orange County Register has posted a chart for consumers to try to keep up with all the scandals developing in the "global warming" community.

Among the scandals listed are:

• ClimateGate: The scandal over the Climatic Research Unit e-mails from East Anglia.
• FOIGate: In which British officials are investigating whether East Anglia scientists refused to follow that nation's freedom-of-information law about their work.
• ChinaGate: In which dozens of weather monitoring stations in rural China apparently have simply disappeared. This would lead to higher temperature averages since city levels frequently are warmer.
• HimalayaGate: In which an Indian climate official admitted in January that he falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 to prod governments into action.
• And PachauriGates I and II, SternGates I and II, AmazonGate (in which a claim that global warming would wipe out rain forests was exposed as a fraud), PeerReviewGate, RussianGate I and II and nearly a dozen others.

WND also reported when the St. Louis–based Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, petitioned the EPA to re-examine its decisions in light of the controversy over the scientists' e-mails. And legal challenges are being raised by Virginia and Texas, among others.

The scientific community actually is anything but unanimous on climate change.

The disunity is documented by the Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered. The effort by Art Robinson, a research professor of chemistry and cofounder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in 1973, now lists tens of thousands of qualified scientists who endorse the following statement:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Among the original e-mails hacked from East Anglia and posted online was, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."