Posted 2/28/2010 03:19:00 PM by Douglas

Global warming has taken a hit recently, in the scientific community, but under several feet of snow in the northeast. So where is Al Gore in all this? You guessed it, The New York Times, and this one's a doosey. This man's ego must have its own ZIP code.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion.

Right. And I don't want my Oscar, Nobel Prize or anything else that has permanently linked my cult of personality to the illusionary crisis that may or may not be global warming.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes.

So don't let all those mistakes fool you. While the scientific community may make mistakes, Al Gore certainly doesn't.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

So global warming causes it to get really hot, really cold, really wet and really dry?Who is still listening to this?

Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Dogs and cats, living together, Coke turns to Pepsi and the Cubs win the World Series. Is there anything global warming can't do?

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

Damn old representative democracy, always getting in the way of crazy windbag on the street corner crying "the sky is falling!"

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Geez. To equate the profit motives of tobacco companies to the fact that carbon based fuels run the motor of the world is disingenuous at best, especially coming as it does from a former tobacco farmer.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic.

I'd never confuse Al Gore as a showman nor a political thinker, but is he freakin' serious? At 7 A.M., I wouldn't believe Al Gore if he said the darkness was about to end.