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By Andrea Peyser
December 7, 2015
Al Gore has done more harm than good battling climate change
I’m worried about Al Gore.
The Bozo of Ozone went off his rocker (or off his meds?) while delivering a 2011 speech in Aspen, Colo.
The Gulfstream-jet-hopping, mansion-dwelling, greenhouse-gas-guzzling hypocrite and self-appointed savior of not-really-endangered polar bears cursed and sputtered at the thought of unnamed corporate villains who dare deny the gospel of global warming.
“They pay pseudoscientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message, ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat,’ ” Gore began. “ ‘It may be volcanoes.’ Bulls- -t!”
Groggy audience members started waking up.
“‘It may be sunspots.’ Bulls- -t!”
“‘It’s not getting warmer.’ ” All together now — “Bulls- -t.”
One might think Gore was out of his flipping gourd.
I thought he was magnificent. Cracked — but more entertaining than a zombie apocalypse.
But it was a terrifyingly wimpy Gore, now 67, who joined scene-making leftist celebrities (Sean Penn) and world leaders at the UN climate summit outside Paris, now entering its second week.
In an interview last month with The Associated Press, the former doomsayer used terms such as, “I’m optimistic,” and, “We’re going to win this” — at least 16 times in 35 minutes. What gives, Albert?
Then I read the cutting words of Dana Fisher, director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland. She said Gore’s role in solving planetary cooking “is limited at this point. There was a moment in time when he was pushing a wave of attention.”
She added, “I never thought of him as a central person in the climate movement.” Ouch.
It gets worse.
Gore’s fame whoredom has hurt the anti-global-warming movement, one expert told the AP. “Climate-change science is demonized because of Al Gore,” said Erik Conway, a NASA historian who co-wrote the book “Merchants of Doubt.”
“If John McCain had become the titular leader of the climate-change movement instead of Al Gore, we might have a different world.”
It all makes sense to me now.
Gore wasn’t cracking up four years ago. He was issuing an epic cry for help. Once a world-class weather wizard, Gore has been melting, melting, Wicked Witch-like, for years to the point at which he couldn’t get arrested if he marched in the streets stark naked.
How did this happen?
After losing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, Gore reinvented himself as a climate messiah. He narrated the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” a bit of scary science fiction featuring rapidly rising seas, rampant tropical diseases and drowning polar bears. He shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with warmists of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the panelists’ vision of bikinis in Bismarck is far less imminent than Gore’s hysterical shtick.
As it turns out, polar bears are doing just fine. They’re frolicking on an unbroken North Pole ice cap that, despite Gore’s 2008 prediction that the ice would disappear in five years, has rebounded since 2012 to a size not seen since the late 1970s.
Even more threatening for Gore is that he’s been replaced as the world’s leading warming pooh-bah — by Pope Francis. A recent poll shows “The Francis Effect” has resulted in the conversion of an increasing number of Americans into climate-change foes.
One can believe, as I do, that the pope’s demand that wealthy nations reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would hurt the poor, whose lives have been greatly improved by industrial innovations. But no one can rightly accuse the pope of being an attention hound.
For Al Gore, it’s always been about “Me! Me! Me!”
I haven’t read much about Gore in Paris since the 24-hour Webcast he was hosting at the Eiffel Tower on Nov. 13 was halted after less than five hours due to the terror attacks. Duran Duran had already played. Elton John, Bon Jovi and Pharrell Williams hadn’t yet made their scheduled appearances.
He popped up Saturday to pose for pictures with delegates, nearly 200 of whom agreed to a draft plan for curbing carbon emissions.
I don’t know if human-caused climate change exists. Neither does Al Gore, President Obama, UN warmists or Duran Duran.
Gore has lost his mojo and his reason for being. I worry about a man so self-involved that he sees Earth as a sick planet revolving around the guy he calls “Me!”