Al Gore, the man conservatives love to hate, is back and he’s spelling out some truly inconvenient truths about the propaganda campaign to pretend global warming doesn’t exist.
Writing in Rolling Stone, Gore notes that an overwhelming number of the global scientific community says hands down that climate change is a major problem demanding attention now. This consensus “has been endorsed by every National Academy of Science of every major country on the planet, every major professional scientific society related to the study of global warming and 98 percent of climate scientists throughout the world,” he writes.
Yet opposition to admitting the problems of carbon emissions has been extraordinarily active for more than two decades. Attempts to shout down the problems of global warming seem tohave gained momentum ever since Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his book “An
Inconvenient Truth.”
“Polluters” and “Ideologues”, he writes, are trampling all over the “rules” of democratic discourse. “They are financing pseudoscientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is true and what is false; buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the politicians themselves have made ‘legal’ and can nowbe made in secret; spending hundreds of millions each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.”
The last time reactionaries got so worked up over scientific evidence was in the 1960s when tobacco companies marshalled billions of dollars and for-hire scientists to try to rebutt overwhelming evidence that cigarette smoke is deadly. Today, that idea no longer is under attack. Some 400,000 Americans still die each year from cigarette smoke yet many more would had the tobacco-funded scientists prevailed.
Gore points out that 2010 tied with 2005 as the hottest year since records were kept in 1880. Pakistani megafloods have displaced 20 million. Historic drought and fires in Russia have killed 56,000 people. Ice caps are shrinking. Andon the list goes.
For more current evidence of violent weather shifts note this spring’s outbreak of severe tornados. One wonders what hurricane season will be like.
The forces of reaction are acting on cue to shout down climate change concerns. They include Fox News, the so-called Thomas Jefferson Institute on Public Policy,any number of Koch Brothers-funded “think tanks” that seem to be quoted all the time on this blog and by some of the contributors to this blog. For the looney-tunes aspect, check into Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli’s politically-inspired witch hunt at U.Va. And any time one brings up climate change, he or she is shown the headlines from the “East Anglia scandal” but when asked what the “scandal” really was, there seem to be no clear explanations.
Gore, who arguably was cheated out of the presidency by the Supreme Court in 2001, hits Brack Obama hard. Obama started out in a strong fashion but has been badly beaten up by the right-wing by goofy accusations that he’s not an American, that is is a Muslim, and that he is a “socialist” all of which are absurd. Somewhere, Gore, believes, Obama has lost his nerve to move for carbon emissions cuts and the consequences will be huge.
Peter Galuszka