Al Gore is at it again. On Friday, the failed presidential candidate and amateur climatologist made several baseless claims regarding Hurricane Florence. Not surprisingly, at least one of Gore’s assertions was factually inaccurate.
Gore was speaking at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when he blurted, “This is the first time in history that two major storms are making landfall from the Atlantic and Pacific simultaneously.” Gore cited the two simultaneous storms as clear evidence of so-called climate-change causing unusually extreme weather.
The carbon-credit salesman was referencing Hurricane Florence, which struck the Carolinas on Friday, and Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit the Philippines on Saturday. While simultaneous cyclonic activity in both oceans is a bit unusual, it is hardly unprecedented.
In a tweet, meteorologist Ryan Maue of the Cato Institute took Gore to task: “Al Gore just (fraudulently) claimed without any evidence that we’ve never had hurricanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific making landfall at the same time.”
Maue believed that Gore was citing an NBC News article, which Maue claimed was “botched.” The article claimed that what weather-watchers were seeing in the Atlantic and Pacific was “consistent with climate-change.”
But as Maue pointed out on Twitter, the NBC article “completely missed the mark on ongoing hurricanes and their rarity — without any evidence. (It’s not rare at all.)
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., a meteorologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, also chided the former vice president. “Such statements show that he is not familiar with the history of tropical cyclone landfalls,” Pielke wrote.
Even the NBC article stated that the relationship between climate change and dual ocean cyclonic activity was only circumstantial at this point. “We do know these changes are happening,” said Kristy Dahl, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dahl went on to confirm that the connection between warming oceans and hurricane intensity was only hypothetical and added that it was not clear “how much is being caused by humans and how much is just natural variability.”
But that didn’t stop Gore from making the claim to the like-minded nodding heads in attendance. The Global Climate Action Summit was hosted by California Governor Jerry Brown and included appearances by Hollywood environmentalists Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin.
It’s not the first time Gore has used “alternative facts” in his zeal for promoting the climate-alarmist agenda. In his 2006 “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth, Gore was guilty of making several false claims regarding climate science. In 2007, a British court ruled that the film was political propaganda, not science. The court further ruled that the film contained at least nine factual errors.
Seemingly in conjunction with the mainstream media’s efforts to use the hurricanes to beat the climate-change drum, Gore used the occasion of Florence’s landfall to engage in hyperbole about global warming and its supposed effects on the planet. “Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation and we’ve got to connect the dots between the cause and the effect,” Gore said.
Gore also used the hurricanes to attack climate realists in general and President Trump in particular. “Some people evidently can still deny the reality,” Gore said. “It’s a little bit harder to deny the 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria. C’mon. How far down that rabbit hole are people going to follow? This is utter insanity.”
On Friday, Gore went on to blame several recent weather (and non-weather) events on climate change, linking wildfires, drought, mudslides, and even dead trees to global warming. “Even without the cyclonic storms, we’re putting so much heat into the oceans. We’re using the sky as an open sewer,” Gore ridiculously claimed. “This is insane.”
It’s insane alright, but not in the way that Al Gore thinks. Even as the two cyclones were releasing their destructive force on the Carolinas and the Philippines, chasing people from their homes and devastating large swaths of land, climate huckster Gore decided to use the disaster as a political tool. That’s actually beyond insane; it’s evil.
Photo: AP Images
