After a brief hiatus, Al Gore is back on his global warming warpath. After giving a laudatory keynote address at the 2013 Tahoe Summit, the victory lap continued with a lovey-dovey interview the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.
The former vice president told Klein climate change deniers are like “an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned” and believes his climate ‘science’ has taken a little while to catch on because it is on par with movements such as abolition, civil rights and gay rights, which all gained acceptance over time.
“This is very important. We have to apologize in no uncertain terms to Mister – and do I even dare call him Mister? It’s so beneath him. Sir, even though he's not been knighted, I think he should be,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “Sir Albert Gore. Boy, was he right. He is now taking credit for how right he is."
“And you know what,” Pat asked. “We may have been among those mocking him when he said it and yet, I'm ashamed.”
“We are ashamed. We should be ashamed,” Glenn agreed. “Anyway, I don't know exactly how that works, but it's really bad, and he has made some predictions. And should we go with the predictions or should we go with him taking the victory lap?”
You can watch Gore’s full remarks from the Tahoe Summit below:
For those of you who don’t have 34 minutes to spend watching Gore recycle his old global warming speeches, one of the themes he attempted to convey was that the models presented in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth have come true years ahead of schedule.
GORE: Back when that movie came out, the single most common criticism of those who disagreed with what I was trying to say was they pointed to the part in that movie where I did an animation saying that with rising sea levels and flood and the storm surges, the World Trade Center Memorial site could be invaded by ocean water. They say, that's ridiculous, that can't ever happen. How demagogic can you possibly be predicting such a thing? Well, it happened last October 29th, way ahead of schedule. And Dan Cuomo, who was a colleague of these two great governors, said he went down there that night and watched the ocean water flood right in to the World Trade Center Memorial site.
Not so fast…
Ignoring the fact that Superstorm Sandy – the catastrophic event to which Gore refers – is considered a 100-year storm, his good friends over at United Nations appear to have a different opinion of global warming.
While Gore may be confident that he has science on his side, TheBlaze is reporting “a recently leaked draft of a U.N. report shows that although climate experts are confident man-made activity is causing global warming, they are having a hard time explaining why the warming rate seems to have slowed in recent years.”
According to Reuters, who reviewed the leaked document, scientists are now explaining the slowed warming rate in a new way:
An IPCC draft says there is “medium confidence” that the slowing of the rise is “due in roughly equal measure” to natural variations in the weather and to other factors affecting energy reaching the Earth’s surface.
Scientists believe causes could include: greater-than-expected quantities of ash from volcanoes, which dims sunlight; a decline in heat from the sun during a current 11-year solar cycle; more heat being absorbed by the deep oceans; or the possibility that the climate may be less sensitive than expected to a build-up of carbon dioxide.
“It might be down to minor contributions that all add up,” said Gabriele Hegerl, a professor at Edinburgh University. Or maybe, scientists say, the latest decade is just a blip.
Yes, volcanoes are now being blamed for the slowing of global warming. Glenn, Pat, and Stu have some fun with the volcano claim in the clip below:
