With his lucrative climate-change agenda and predictions under water, former vice president Al Gore (shown) is pulling out all the stops to salvage his reputation and earning potential. The latest example is a spun claim that one of his (many) incorrect predictions has actually come to pass.
In his global-warming propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore spoke of how ice melt-off could lead to the flooding of low-lying areas, including Manhattan. In fact, nine years ago he warned of a high probability that the “entire North Polar ice cap” may well be gone in five years. Instead, reports are that Arctic ice is the thickest it has been in 75 years. And Manhattan? Well, it’s still dry and as all wet with liberalism as ever.
Nonetheless, Gore insists in his latest environmental monetizing effort, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (video below), that Manhattan did in fact end up under water, as per his warning. His reasoning?
Super-storm Sandy caused Big Apple flooding.
Never mind that Manhattan is an island and that parts of its lower section are built on landfill. Never mind that, as Alan Lyons of law office Arent Fox LL informed in 2010, “New York City has 578 miles of waterfront and ranked third [in the country] in the number of paid flood insurance claims from Jan. 1, 1978 to July 31, 1983.” In his new film, Gore still showed “‘Superstorm Sandy’ footage of water flooding lower Manhattan, including the memorial site and a quote from Gov. Andrew Cuomo blaming climate change, to prove true Gore’s claim from 11 years ago,” writes Newsbusters.
The site continues, “But his original prediction was not about extenuating circumstances of a storm like Sandy slamming into New York or any ‘storm surge’ at all. It was about the sea level rise that would be generated as (he predicted) ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica escalated dramatically.”
Speaking of storms, alarmists had also claimed that anthropogenic climate change would cause more severe weather. Yet Live Science reported in May 2015 that we were experiencing the “longest ‘hurricane drought’ in recorded history, or since 1851,” with no hurricane rated Category 3 or higher having “struck U.S. soil during the past nine years.”
In fairness to Gore, he clearly learned well from master word-parser Bill Clinton (a.k.a. The Wizard of Is) and — contrary to most conservative reportage — has qualified his climate soothsaying with words and phrases such as “may” and “a 75 percent chance” (video below). Yet he still felt compelled to lie about his prediction’s accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLmTX_e6Vf8
Of course, it could just be habitual. Note that in 2007, a British High Court ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contained no fewer than nine very convenient “key scientific errors” and thus could only be shown in U.K. schools with “guidance notes” to prevent political indoctrination.
And Gore himself should come with guidance notes. Consider: Speaking at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, Gore slammed GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole as a shill for Big Tobacco. Rendering a tear-jerking story about his sister’s tragic 1984 death of lung cancer, the then-vice president emotionally vowed that he would fight the tobacco companies till his dying breath (video below; relevant portion begins at 21:18).
Yet the facts tell a different story. While campaigning for the presidency in North Carolina in 1988 — four years after his sister’s death — Gore tried to woo the state’s tobacco producers with the following impassioned appeal: “Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.” Was there a lag between his sister’s tragic demise and the emergence of his feelings surrounding it?
Consider what the Weekly Standard reported at the time: “At a luncheon the day after his speech, Gore was challenged by Morton M. Kondracke of Roll Call to explain this jarring inconsistency. Here is his answer: ‘The truth is, Mort, I myself was still an example of the phenomena that I’ve described a moment ago. In spite of having suffered the loss, I still felt a numbness that prevented me from integrating into all aspects of my life the implications of what that tragedy really meant.’”
You can read the rest of Gore’s convoluted response via the link above. Yet it’s much with how he was pro-life when a congressman from Tennessee, but became pro-abortion when that was necessary to further his national political ambitions. As the Standard noted about his tobacco transformation, “It appears, then, that our vice president was in denial, but came out of it — just at the time when tobacco began to show up really poorly in the polls. Interesting.”
Now there’s an inconvenient truth.
Photo: AP Images
