Al Gore’s New Mansion

I don’t have much new to add on the hypocrisy of Al Gore, and quite honestly I think even most ardent AGW proponents are already past the poijt of being embarrassed by him, and have probably moved on to dismissing him as an annoyance. But somehow the guy still makes a gazillion dollars doing what he’s doing, and there’s still a market for his speech-giving, book-selling, and award-getting (not to mention his business interests in seeing the world go “green.”)

So, as long as people insist on making him a rich man then it’s worth making fun of him. (In and of itself, I have no problem with people becoming rich, by the way. I do have a problem with people becoming rich by doing your best to terrify the world into unnecessary activity that costs taxpayers billions and lines the doomsayer’s pockets at the same time).

Well, Al has built a second mansion. And while I can state the obvious things about hypocrisy and how I can’t believe anyone ever listens to the guy, that’s really about as much as I’ve thought the issue over. But I ran across This piece by Victor Davis Hanson that does a great job of thinking through what this action by big Al means. Sure, it’s opinion, but I think it’s spot-on. Warning: it is not limited to climate change, but gets into politics. If you don’t like making fun of liberals or “progressives” then stop reading now.

Click on the link to read the entire article, but here are a couple of noteworthy excerpts:

Why would Gore purchase a second energy-guzzling estate, replete with several fireplaces, fountains and bathrooms, when he was stung so badly about his hypocritically profligate energy use in his Tennessee compound, his houseboat, and his private-jet junketeering? Does he understand that his newest mansion is a sort of volcanic ash-cloud that has now overwhelmed Earth in the Balance, Inc?

The answer is sort of important, because it is emblematic of the decline of liberalism over the last thirty years. Collate the anti-capital rants of a zillionaire currency speculator George Soros, the green sermons from a late Ted Kennedy who stopped a wind farm from marring his vacation home’s views, a John Edwards of “two nations” fame constructing a Neronian Golden House, a Tom Friedman warning of the consumer habits that lead to a hot, flat earth from a 10,000 square foot English-style estate of the sort that 18th-century English barons built after successful careers in the Raj, the comic case of Jeremiah Wright moving to a mostly white golf course to dream up more sermons about “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” or a $5 million a year earning Obama — with all his expenses picked up by the government — lamenting out loud why rich people seem to want ever more money they don’t need. Some spread the wealth around.

We can call this malady Gorism — living not merely at odds with your zealotry, but living entirely against your zealotry…

He then lists those particular things that lead to this attitude.

The whole article is, at the very least, written in an entertaining way. Check it out.

The Global Warming Boys’ Club

This fish is a boy. Can't you tell?

I’ll start with the quote from This chicken-little story:

“We found that in fish that do have temperature-dependent sex determination [TSD], a rise in water temperature of just 1.5 degrees Celsius can change the male-to-female ratio from 1:1 to 3:1,” says Piferrer, the study’s co-author. In especially sensitive fish, a greater increase can throw the balance even more out of whack. Ospina-Alvarez and Piferrer have found that in the South American pejerrey, for example, an increase of 4 degrees Celsius can result in a population that is 98% male.

What makes these findings especially troubling, of course, is that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that ocean-water temperatures are likely to rise by 1.5 degrees over the course of this century — and they may even go up a few degrees more. “If climate change really does result in a rise of 4 degrees, which is the maximum the IPCC predicts, and if species can’t adapt in time or migrate, then in the most sensitive cases of TSD, we’re looking at extinction,” says Piferrer.

Let’s pay attention, here. This is news. Why? because they have found a dramatic rise in the ratio of male to female fish populations, right? Well, not really. There is a reference to a study that alludes to a rise in one specific population of fish in one specific area of the globe. Of course, we would never jump to conclusions based on anecdotal regional evidence and extrapolate it to global trends, would we? Of course not. More importantly, and you can almost sense the anguish in which they need to toss other potential factors into the equation, there are other potential explanations for the ratio shift. We don’t want to talk about those, though, because it detracts from the horrific nature of global warming.

The paragraphs I quoted are nearly 100% conjecture. It’s all an “if” based on IPCC models that are already failures.

Something stinks here, and it isn’t the fish.