Al Gore and the Climate of Extremes

Featured on YouTube via TED Talks, former US Vice President Al Gore speaks about some alarming new signs of global warming.

In the video Gore talks about the alleged spread of oxygen-depleted "dead zones" in the oceans, and about methane emissions from lakes, including a video where some scientists set these methane emissions on fire. He then finishes up by debuting some campaign ads directed against clean coal technology.

Yet as it turns out, Al Gore is not at all a reliable source of information about global warming -- or as alarmists re-term it when challenged about the lack of a demonstrable warming trend, climate change.

Speaking via ForaTV, UN Inter-government Panel on Climate Change member Patrick Michaels demonstrates how quickly Gore's sensationalist rhetoric can be exposed for what it truly is.

It quickly undermines any faith in nearly anything that comes out of the former Vice President's mouth, and reminds viewers that while individuals like Gore want to insist climate change will be the end of the world, and that we should all be extremely terrified of it, there's more afoot than these alarmists would have us realize.

It's difficult to overlook the extent to which climate change alarmism is being treated as a pretext for various political programs.

In Canada, Liberal MP Ken Boschoff let a wealth-transferring agenda slip when talking about Stephane Dion (and Michael Ignatieff's) carbon tax.

George Monbiot has been amongst the most extreme of the alarmists, writing a book that insists that climate change will reach a "point of no return" if not stopped as immediately as possible. Monbiot, who is not a climatologist, had also previously spoken on CBC's Ideas radio program about the need for a global Parliament -- something that legally-binding climate treaties like the Kyoto protocol could arguably (but not necessarily) lead to.

On the other side of the coin there are those who deny climate change outright. As Gore rightly notes, many of them profit from oil and coal -- just as those who profit from oil and coal will rightly note that Gore has a political agenda that is served by climate change alarmism.

It would be foolish to deny that climate change is a problem. At the very least, it would be foolish to deny that there aren't countless other good reasons to reduce carbon emissions and other industrial emissions -- air quality being paramount among them.

But to allow Al Gore and his extremist cohorts to terrify people ignores both the tendency of these people to promote alarmism at the expense of scientific fact, and the political agendas they seek to promote.

Patrick Michaels is absolutely right. People need to stop feeding the climate of extremes.