Why Al Gore Has Disappeared

You must read this piece over to Red State. It is perhaps the best description of what is happening to the global warming scam I have read. Caleb Howe describes his transformation from a brainwashed youth

When I was 13 years old, science scared me. Not science itself, mind you, but the terrors of the future it foretold. News of the coming dark ages were delivered to our young ears through that most trusted of conduits, a high school science teacher. We’re killing the planet? I was shocked. What a bunch of jerks we all are! I remember so very clearly coming home from school, brow furrowed, and earnestly rebuking my parents for contributing to the destruction of the earth. RECYCLE! LIKE RIGHT NOW!! OR WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIEEEE!!!!!

to a sceptical adult to a nonbeliever.

So now I’m thirty-five years old, and although I eventually broke free, environmental hysteria has surrounded me ever since that day. And there is no hysteria more rabid than that over man-made global warming (anthropogenic global warming, properly, or AGW). Assuming you haven’t been in an alternate dimension for the last decade or so, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The world is going to be destroyed, Al Gore tells us with the earnestness and oratorical flourish of any panicked 13-year old, if we don’t do something RIGHT NOW!! To which the “global community” replied with a resounding FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!!!!!

Al "Chicken Little" Gore and his band of fanatics are in denial mode and are too busy screaming LALALALALA with their fingers in their ears to respond to Senator Inhoye's requests for Congressional hearings into the scam of the century. And while the Brit papers are all over this, little has been heard in the USA regarding the outright lies and falsification of data used to buttress the claims for AGW.And still, that is not all.

In an admission that rocked the British and Australian press and was mostly ignored here in the States, Professor Phil Jones himself has now conceded that the period of medieval global warming, the mere mention of which would have you swiftly decorated by a scarlett letter mere weeks ago, might, in fact, have actually been warmer than the predicted peak of the current warming.

[...]Jones also revealed that a warming period between 1860 and 1880 occurred at a greater rate of increase than what the warmers themselves purport to be the increase of the past 30 years. These are extremely crucial points, as the extent of warming and the possible consequences are what drive any potential legislation such as what was proposed at Copenhagen in 2009.

It will take you a few minutes to read this article but it is well worth the effort. It encapsulates what I have felt for years.

The Ice Man Cometh

In a statement issued from his new estate in southern France, Chateau d'Gorcicle, climate genius Al Gore has issued new directives in his battle to combat mankind's greatest enemy - Global Warming.

These directives propose a revolutionary change to the way that the world will manufacture leisure products by taking advantage of global warming trends; that will not increase mankind's carbon footprint...

HOT TUBS AND JACUZZIS

" Whew! Honey! More iced tea please! I'm roasting in here!"

That's what you'll be saying to your spouse as she lovingly hands you another cold, frosty glass of your favorite beverage as you loll in your new Gore Technologies™ carbon neutral jacuzzi! Global rising temperatures will bake your cares away without wasting a single kilowatt!

Nothing beats the heat as you unwind from a hard day at work!

And who knows? Maybe the little lady will join you for a relaxing dip once the kids are in bed! Oh you naughty guys! But don't worry, we won't be able to see a thing and you won't want to escape from your jacuzzi after just a few minutes!

LAWN FURNITURE

Imagine this: you are out on your patio, basking in the sun on your brand new lawn furniture. Your neighbor will be "green" with envy as you enjoy a refreshing beverage on your eco-friendly chaise lounge fashioned by Mother Gaia herself! You'll love your Gore Technologies™ lawn furniture so much, you'll find it almost impossible to pry yourself loose!

BILLARD AND POOL TABLES

Hard bank shot got you worried? Game on the line? No Sweat! You'll be cool as a c-c-c-cucumber showing off your stuff on this Global Warming inspired creation from Gore Technologies™! The carbon neutral pool table! Rack 'em up!

Gore's 401k Is Starting To Unravel

Since everyone else's retirement plans are in the crapper, it is only fitting that the climate scam fueling Al Gore's 401k is hopefully coming apart at the seams. Over at the Rott one of my favorite pervs, BC - The Imperial Babysitter Torturer, has put together a post that flagellates Gores from an unusual source - The Huffington Post.

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:
1. First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. [...]

2. Mr. Gore has gone so far to discourage debate on climate as to refer to those who question his simplistic view of the atmosphere as “flat-Earthers.” This, too, is right on target, except for one tiny detail. It is exactly the opposite of the truth. [...]

3. What the alarmists now state is that past episodes of warming were not caused by C02 but amplified by it, which is debatable, for many reasons, but, more important, is a far cry from the version of events sold to the public by Mr. Gore.

4. This mechanism has never been shown to exist. Indeed, increased temperature leads to increased evaporation of the oceans, which leads to increased cloud cover (one cooling effect) and increased precipitation (a bigger cooling effect). [...]

If not carbon dioxide, what does “drive” climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the “super cycle” of which cooling La Niñas and warming El Niños are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Niños predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Niñas predominate.[...]

P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the "terrible," "unprecedented" melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007, they say. Well, the ice in the Arctic basin has always melted and refrozen, and always will. Any researcher who wants to find a single molecule of ice that has been there longer than 30 years is going to have a hard job, because the ice has always been melted from above (by the midnight Sun of summer) and below (by relatively warm ocean currents, possibly amplified by volcanic venting) -- and on the sides, again by warm currents. Scientists in the alarmist camp have taken to referring to "old ice," but, again, this is a misrepresentation of what takes place in the Arctic.

More to the point, 2007 happened also to be the time of maximum historic sea ice in Antarctica. (There are many credible sources of this information, such as the following website maintained by the University of Illinois-Urbana: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg). Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.

The commentary was written by Harold Ambler. Go to HuffPo and read this, there is a lot to it.

If you are of a scientific persuasion, also go to this site, Watts Up With That. This site was just nominated as a final for the 2008 Weblogs Award for Best Science Blog. The owner of this blog has some meteorological chops and is also not amused by Gore's insane rantings.

Al Gore Wants To Be King

Jerome J. Schmitt at the American Thinker has a great blurb on the global warming scam and how other scientists are finally getting the guts to call it for what the scam really is: a blatant, hostile incursion in the sciences by militant liberals who want to control this country. If Al Gore can't be President, then he'll be King. One way or the other we'll be forced to pay the price for his greed and foolishness.

Outsiders familiar with the proper workings of science have long known that modern Climate Science is dysfunctional. Now a prominent insider, MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen, confirms how Al Gore and his minions used Stalinist tactics to subvert, suborn and corrupt a whole branch of science, citing chapter and verse in his report entitled "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" His answer: A resounding "NO!"

Detailing the corruption, he names a series of names. Until reading this I did not know that "For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore." Page 5

This 35 page report titled: "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" is written by Richard S. Lindzen who is the is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at M.I.T.

Doing through the report, Schmitt highlights that scientists are coerced:

"to ignore or amend measurements that undermine the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Scientists are literally forced to include sentences in their papers that indicate their support of AGW, even if these sentences are non-sequiturs, or even if they conflict with the overall thrust of the paper. In this way, Al Gore's uneducated political commissars are able to deliver the "consensus" he so craves."

As many scientists in this country are from other countries, they are easily intimidated into following the leader on global warming. Schmitt goes on to say that:

Many scientists are naturalized citizens from Asia and Eastern Europe, unfamiliar and intimidated by American politics and government, to which they are dependent upon for visas and grant support. Although all stereotypes are unfair to individuals, there is some truth to the one of the shy, retiring, absent-minded professor. His or her absent-mindedness is most likely due to intense cogitation on a difficult scientific problem. Their dealings with one another are only possible by maintaining extreme standards of honesty, integrity and open-mindedness to scholarly debate in search of the truth. The very qualities that make them good scientists and scholars thus leave them ill-equipped to deal with the raucous, underhanded, disrespectful, politically-motivated radicals unleashed upon them by Al Gore and his fifth column for a "hostile takeover" of their scientific institutions.

The report itself is very mindful of this. In his report, Dr. Lindzen states that:

[...]even universities are hierarchical structures where positions and policies are determined by small executive councils or even single individuals. This greatly facilitates any conscious effort to politicize science via influence in such bodies where a handful of individuals (often not even scientists) speak on behalf of organizations that include thousands of scientists, and even enforce specific scientific positions and agendas. The temptation to politicize science is overwhelming and longstanding. Public trust in science has always been high, and political organizations have long sought to improve their own credibility by associating their goals with ‘science’ – even if this involves misrepresenting the science.

As scientific research grew more and more dependant on the government, the professional agencies representing the various scientific societies started to more closer and closer to the source of the "blood" (research grants) - Washington, D.C.

Professional societies represent a somewhat special case. Originally created to provide a means for communication within professions – organizing meetings and publishing journals – they also provided, in some instances, professional certification, and public outreach. The central offices of such societies were scattered throughout the US, and rarely located in Washington. Increasingly, however, such societies require impressive presences in Washington where they engage in interactions with the federal government. Of course, the nominal interaction involves lobbying for special advantage, but increasingly, the interaction consists in issuing policy and scientific statements on behalf of the society.

Once the central office of the society is established, it is just a matter of time before just a few radicals infiltrate and start to make things difficult for everyone else:

[...]a more common form of infiltration consists in simply getting a couple of seats on the council of an organization (or on the advisory panels of government agencies). This is sufficient to veto any statements or decisions that they are opposed to. Eventually, this enables the production of statements supporting their position – if only as a quid pro quo for permitting other business to get done. Sometimes, as in the production of the 1993 report of the NAS, Policy Implications of Global Warming, the environmental activists, having largely gotten their way in the preparation of the report where they were strongly represented as ‘stake holders,’ decided, nonetheless, to issue a minority statement suggesting that the NAS report had not gone ‘far enough.’ The influence of the environmental movement has effectively made support for global warming, not only a core element of political correctness, but also a requirement for the numerous prizes and awards given to scientists. That said, when it comes to professional societies, there is often no need at all for overt infiltration since issues like global warming have become a part of both political correctness and (in the US) partisan politics, and there will usually be council members who are committed in this manner.

This is how the global warming scam grew to such prominence. Once these "societies" start to pressure the government into funding more and more bogus research (that their associates control), pretty soon all you hear is a slew of Al Gore clones droning on and on incessantly about the dangers of carbon dioxide. And there are other avenues for thee pseudo-scientific quacks to pursue.

It is, of course, possible to corrupt science without specifically corrupting institutions. For example, the environmental movement often cloaks its propaganda in scientific garb without the aid of any existing scientific body. One technique is simply to give a name to an environmental advocacy group that will suggest to the public, that the group is a scientific rather than an environmental group. Two obvious examples are the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Woods Hole Research Center.

Of course the liberal media will not bring these advocacy issues to the forefront so that media consumers can make a rational decision for themselves. We're just not smart enough to make these decisions for ourselves, we might get hurt. But even better, have them co-opt one of the most corrupt governmental entities on the face of the planet, the UN.

Perhaps the most impressive exploitation of climate science for political purposes has been the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by two UN agencies, UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program) and WMO (World Meteorological Organization), and the agreement of all major countries at the 1992 Rio Conference to accept the IPCC as authoritative.

This is what you'll find in only the first nine pages of the report. There's more - alot more.

Gore's Retirement Scam, Redux

Hopefully the morticians are starting to drive nails, such as this article, into the coffin lid of the shameful flim flam know as global warming. From the Toronto Sun:

Over the past 18 months I've written scores of columns on global warming.

I've read nine books on the subject so far (six by authors supporting the theory of man-made global warming and the Kyoto accord, three by skeptics).

I've watched three documentaries, including Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and two by skeptics.

I've read hundreds of articles and now spend at least two to four hours each week researching this issue alone.

The best journalism, pro and con, is coming out of the United Kingdom and Europe, where carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are already adversely affecting millions of people because of skyrocketing energy prices.

Al Gore's retirement plan in action. Hundreds of millions of people being forced to contribute to Gore's 401-stic(k)itinyourass.

I'm not an expert. But I am an engaged lay person who now knows enough that I can tell when someone is bullsh****** us.

Here's what I've figured out so far.

Tighten yer lugnuts, the road to a carbon neutral lifetyle is getting bumpy.

First, Canadians care about this issue, passionately. I've never had as strong a response from readers as I've had to these columns in more than 20 years of column-writing.

Second, most politicians, regardless of party, don't know what they're talking about.

They don't understand the theory of anthropogenic global warming, or what is known with confidence and what isn't.

They don't know the difference between the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

They don't realize the economic dislocation involved in moving from a carbon-based to a carbon-free economy.

Most care about the issue only in so far as it can help them get elected, which, given the implications and what's at stake for ordinary citizens, is recklessly irresponsible.

Most politicians don't know what the Kyoto accord says.

Economic treaty

They think it's an environmental treaty. It's not.

It's an economic treaty.

Its purpose is not to reduce GHG emissions -- under it GHG emissions are guaranteed to rise.

Kyoto is a United Nations treaty designed to transfer wealth from the developed world to the developing world by charging the developed world for the right to emit carbon.

While still VP, Gore must have been approached by some mega investor types who saw his eco-nuttiness as a way to influence the markets. Think of it, Gore's investment firm, Generation Investment Management, is based in London, not in the US where the loons are not quite completely in charge of things - yet. So the stage was set for the redistribution of Europe's wealth, as it is being set here with the demand for reduction in greenhouse gases. And the price? Gore and his buddies are looking at slicing up a $3 trillion pie.

The main drivers of Kyoto were, ironically, the U.K. and Europe, along with the developing world, led by China, now the world's largest GHG emitter.

Last year, China alone, exempt from reducing its own GHG emissions, was responsible for two-thirds of the total global increase in these emissions, although its per capita emissions remain well below that of the United States, the second-largest emitter.

In any event, the developing world, the U.K. and Europe each saw in Kyoto (although it's now backfiring on the U.K. and Europe) not a way to save the planet, but to hobble the U.S. economy to their advantage.

For the developing world, Kyoto, if ratified by the U.S., would place severe restrictions on American industrial activity from which developing nations are exempt.

Europe and the U.K. crafted Kyoto to give them an undeserved economic advantage over the U.S.

There is more to this article, particularly how European countries took credit for an overall reduction of carbon emissions that resulted from the economic collapse of the USSR in 1990.

By using 1990, a year before the Soviet Union disintegrated and its carbon emissions dramatically dropped because its economy collapsed, Europe was able to claim much of this emissions drop for itself, as major parts of the former
Soviet empire were absorbed by it.

It was an accounting trick. Nothing more.

The selection of 1990 also gave an undeserved bonus to the U.K., which was moving, for reasons unrelated to Kyoto, from coal to natural gas as an energy source, which emits less GHG than coal.

The Americans, wisely, refused to ratify Kyoto, even when Gore was their VP and lobbying for it.

Unfortunately, we did, either because the previous Liberal government didn't understand that the economic penalties Kyoto aimed at the U.S. would also apply
to us, or because Jean Chretien, in his rush to craft himself an environmental legacy, didn't care.

Al Gore's New Retirement Plan

Al Gore wasn't making enough on the carbon offset scam; seems like the affluent investors finally wised up that the alfafa farms in Nigeria weren't doing so well. So Al dumbed down his client base and went after the real big bucks, the bucks controlled by the US government.

Enter the corn-to-ethanol scam. Al's got his retirement accounts tied up in grain futures.

And the poorest of the poor are now the ones paying through the nose for Al's 401k.

What does Al have to say about this? According to the NY Sun, nuthin.

Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article.

Measurements

There is an air pollution control monitor at the intersection of Almond and East Adams Sts. in downtown Syracuse. This is one of the busiest intersections in the entire County and the sensor reflects that assessment as it measures CO (carbon monoxide) emissions produced by automobile engines. Of course all the State sponsored construction on Rt. 81 and hospital construction, parking garage construction over the years has affected traffic patterns and caused periods of long waits at this intersections traffic lights, thus affecting CO monitoring. But the State uses that data to determine measures needed to reduce atmospheric pollutants.

My point is this, there are other factors that can affect monitoring activities that may or not be taken into account by the agencies who report on the activities of these measuring devices.

Is there a bias in sampling the worst area in the County? No, I don't think so. You want to know how bad the pollution is in any given area so you'd expect that a sensor at the point of high concentration of CO makes sense. But what about other measurements?

As a young man, I used to ride my motorcycle pretty much non-stop from April through mid November (until the snow got bad). One of the environmental variables you are very sensitive to while riding a motorcycle is temperature. At night I would ride my 1968 BMW R60 from visiting friends out in the country to my apartment in the city. As soon as I got near the city line I could feel the air warm up significantly. Why was this?

The answer is simple. In any city there are many more structures and materials that act as heat banks, storing up the sun's energy during the day and releasing it at night. Concrete and asphalt are very good at this and the more roads and large buildings the city has, the more heat energy is stored and then released once the sun goes down.

Coyoteblog has a post on global warming that linked to this effort to inspect the sites where the feds measure temperatures across the country. Looking at some sites through the critical eyes of coyote blog, we can find problems in their positioning. The monitors are near buildings and air conditioning units that emit heat. Look at the following photos. The white finned canisters are United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) temperature monitoring devices.

This is a USHCN climate station in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. The sensor is situated near several large air conditioner heat exchangers. These heat exchangers were moved from the roof of a nearby building and placed on the ground.

Heat exchangers cool off the refrigerant in an a/c unit by blowing air through cooling ducts that circulate the refrigerant. These units give off a tremendous amount of heat. To get an idea of the heat transfer from the refrigerant to the atmosphere, just put your hand behind a 5,000 BTU window A/C unit. The units in the picture are many times more powerful.

The proximity of the A/C units must affect the nearby temperature sensor. Of course the sensor showed a giant spike once the a/c units started blowing hot air toward it as displayed in the graph. Poof! Instant global warming!

Next, Coyoteblog covers this USHCN monitor located in Tucson, AZ. Notice how the sensor is situated right next to a building and on top of an asphalt parking lot.

In Tucson the temperature can reach over 110F in the summer. This building and the asphalt will radiate heat all night long even as the area's overall temperature cools.

But even better, look what is situated directly across from the sensor on the other side of the parking lot.

These are very large heat exchangers blowing their discharge at the sensor from only about 25-30 feet away.

The USHCN might as well have stuffed the damn thing in a pizza oven.

The National Weather Service has field operations manuals that provide instruction on site preparation and reporting. Here is an excerpt.

Metadata is an essential part of climate information. This ‘data about data’ covers simple things like units of temperature to more complicated descriptions of site characteristics. Objective measures of any conditions that can bias instrument measurements must be consistently and readily made and reported.

Nope, no bias here, just move along now, nohing to see.

But there is more. The NASA/GISS database of national temperature readings has been revised. The claims by Al Gore that this decade produced historic temperature increases is now official kaka. The ten hottest years in the US have been changed to 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939.

Three of the top 10 are in the last decade. Four of the top ten are in the 1930's, before either the IPCC or the GISS really think man had any discernible impact on temperatures. Here is the chart for all the years in the data base:

Pay close attention to the period between 1920 and 1940. Why isn't Gore and the rest of his hysterical acolytes screaming about these years?

There are still almost 1,000 USHCN temperature monitoring sites that need to be inspected by people who do not worship at the altar of global warming. Surfacestations.org has a list of all the USHCN monitoring stations across the country (here). Perhaps some readers who know how to interpret the coordinates can give it a play and document some nearby site characteristics for evidence of bias. I read the chart and couldn't make much sense of it. I learned to use coordinates from GIS pin mapping s/w which uses an eight digit coordinate system. Sorry, no addresses, but Map Quest has a lat/long function that will help you locate where the sensor is. Good luck.

Al Gore's Whine

The Live Earth concerts didn't do much for the environment but they sure produced a lot of noise. From John Berlau's article in the American Thinker:

Now it's official. Global warming alarmism has indeed "jumped the shark", as revealed by the dismal failure of the Live Earth concerts to galvanize the general public. In particular, the puny turnout in Washington, DC, where Gore himself personally showed up, has proved an acute embarrassment.

But although Al Gore's Live Earth concerts have failed in the ratings, he appears to have partially succeeded at doing what does best: shifting blame for his woes to his political opponents and getting the media to go along. Since last weekend, the Net has been abuzz with stories of how Gore overcame Republicans who allegedly did everything they could to stop the concert from being performed on Washington's National Mall.

"Al Gore foils opponents," proclaimed Associated Press, after Gore had just announced a "surprise" Live Earth concert in Washington, D.C., the next day. "Global warming naysayers in the political world have not been able to have their way, because this will - despite their best efforts - be held on the Mall," Gore was quoted in the story as saying.

The next day, Gore again took a shot at the opponents who he said denied him the use of Washington's famous Mall - the area surrounding the Smithsonian Institution museums between the Capitol and the Washington Monument - and the press again largely parroted his claim. In his speech at National Museum of the American Indian last Saturday, which the Paris-based wire service AFP called "a thinly veiled hit on members of President George W. Bush's Republican party," Gore declared, "Some who don't understand what is now at stake tried to stop this event on the Mall."

And "some" media outlets, who don't understand or don't care that Gore is spinning them, allowed him to peddle the biggest set of urban myths to appear on the Internet since Gore "took the initiative in creating" it.

If at first you don't succeed, blame someone else.

To start with, the Washington "show" consisted of country stars Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood added to preexisting events with Indian artists. As Carter Wood observed at the National Association of Manufacturers' blog ShopFloor.org: "The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian had already scheduled a day of events -- including the Indian Summer Showcase 2007, which appeared to be absorbed into ‘Mother Earth - In the Spirit of the Live Earth Concerts.' There were already going to be performances, drum circles and spiritual/environmental speeches by tribal leaders. Al Gore and the Smithsonian's organizers just figured a way to add Gore's overtly political address and the Garth Brooks/Trisha Yearwood performance to an existing event."

But Gore's most blatant falsehood - as phony as a three-dollar carbon credit - is his claim that Republican lawmakers or global warming "deniers" prevented him from holding the concert on the Mall. This spread through the left-wing blogosphere like the proverbial wild fire, with entries on ThinkProgress claiming that Republicans "had tried to block the event from happening in DC" and on Daily Kos declaring that "[d]espite Republican efforts ...to deny this, Friday Al Gore announced LiveEarthDC."

Nothing new here. The nutroots latch on to conspiracy rumors like tics on a passing hound dog. And like tics they burrow deeply into the flesh and feed off it as long as they can.

In truth, the only thing some GOP lawmakers objected to was an unusual last-minute effort to hold the concert on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, after its organizers discovered that Mall had already been booked for other events. Use of the Mall had been denied to Gore and his colleagues for one reason: they failed to apply for the proper permits before other parties had. And one of the groups "blocking" Live Earth's use of the Mall happened to be the Smithsonian Institution itself.

The truth is that Gore's desires for a huge concert on the Mall were actually thwarted not by Republicans, but by a very talented group of Irish Riverdance cloggers, Vietnamese folk artists, and African-American gospel singers. They were performing as scheduled at the acclaimed annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival and at a gospel show sponsored by the predominantly black Christian organization Together One Unity.

It seems the "nefarious right-wingers" who organized these folk and gospel fests had the temerity to schedule their events with the National Park Service, which runs the Mall, weeks and months before Live Earth's organizers ever contacted the agency, and then not call them off when Gore let out a sneeze.

[...] If Gore had really wanted a big event on the Mall, all he would have had to do was pick another weekend. The big bad Bush Administration and the mean old Republican-controlled Congress placed no obstacles in the way of antiwar rallies and Earth Day events held on the Mall in the past few years that bashed the President and the party. The Park Service issues permits in a professional manner without regard to an event's ideological content. But it will not let an event jump in front of the line, even if the organizer is a former vice president and Academy Award winner. As the Washington political newspaper The Hill explained, "Getting access to the Mall comes on a strict first-come, first-serve basis."

But that doesn't make headlines. There is no righteous conflict, no controversy over readily available guidelines to staging events on public property. No controversy? No problem. We'll invent some.

Gore's friends in Congress, namely Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, then tried to bail out Gore's lack of planning with a thoroughly impractical alternative: putting the concert on the Capitol building's West Lawn. With rare exceptions, the only large public gatherings there are the National Symphony Orchestra concerts on the 4th of July and Memorial Day. Much attention was paid to Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-OK, who regularly challenges Gore's views on humans role in global warming and the effects of climate change, calling the concert a "partisan political event" that shouldn't be held on Capitol grounds. Gore shot back, with his oft-repeated claim that climate change is a "moral issue."

But even Democrats reportedly chafed at some of the practical impediments to holding Gore's extravaganza on the West Lawn. An all-day concert drawing huge crowds on the grounds of the Capitol, as opposed to a three-hour symphony performance there at night, could have posed formidable security challenges for those guarding the Capitol building. Plus, in the holiday concerts, the Mall is utilized to pick up the overflow in the crowds from the West Lawn. But, in this case, of course, the Mall would be hosting its own events and would be unable to absorb as much of the overflow.

I have participated in for public safety planning for events that involved thousands of people. It isn't easy to draw together the various public agencies needed to address safety issues for large gatherings. That's why there are time considerations when applying for these kinds of events. Even in private venues these planning considerations come into play.

These concerns may be part of the reason Democrats on the Hill backed off as soon as practical questions about the event were being raised. Unlike Inhofe, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, merely refused to let Reid's bill on Gore's concerts clear the Senate with "unanimous consent." According to The Hill, McConell wasn't necessarily opposed to hosting the concert at the Capitol, but "wanted more time for his side to look at the resolution." Reid soon backed off, and Gore announced that the concert would be in New Jersey. The fact that Reid and Gore didn't push harder suggests that they may never have wanted an actual concert on the Capitol grounds, but merely an issue to beat-up Republicans with.

In the meantime, out of the media spotlight, thousands of people gathered on the Mall for the festivals that had been properly booked. As Ludacris and Madonna crooned (if you can call it that) in the bask of media attention, the Folklife Festival was abuzz with the sounds of Southeast Asian flute music, folk songs and dances from Northern Ireland, and the bluegrass tunes of rural Virginia.

More Al-Foolery

In this installment of the Chicago Sun-Times, Al "Screamin' Mad" Gore and his Save the World GlowBull Warmening Circus are taken to task. Global warming tends cool down a bit under cold analysis of the facts.

In his new book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore pleads, "We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth." Gore repeatedly asks that science and reason displace cynical political posturing as the central focus of public discourse.

Science and Reason according to Al Gore's medical dosing cycle is the proper context of course.

Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

Winding up for the intellectual smacker pie, one has to ask this question, "What didn't he know and when didn't he know it?" The answer is, "Yes, all the time."

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit.

Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes. [Emphasis mine]

This is the deadly "Gore claims ... Yet" formula, known to cause liberal asshats to rend their own flesh in agony before their heads explode. I wish my hemorrhoids were shrinking as fast as Gore claims the glaciers are.

Don't you know we're all going to die in ten years if we don't *insert liberal mantra here* right now this very moment and even then it may be too late??!!??

I kinda derailed my train of thought because for a minute I thought Gore was blaming global warming for causing more tomatoes. I'm okay now. But I really like tomatoes.

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa." [Emphasis, again, is contribution to Gore's debacle.]

Gore claims... and misses again. This passage is a variation of the "Gore claims .... Yet" formula. "However", however, is equally devestating.

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s. [Emphasis, well, you know...]

The "Gore argues .... But" format is the terminal stage. No other contradictory element need be introduced after this. Global Warmening is now in meltdown, but not from the heat. Eventually a lack of oxygen will starve this inconvenient calumniation of science, this distortion of truth, this, this, this... pile of shit.

I dare say the Danes have also incurred the Wrath of Gore for refuting his illogical, inescapable, financially induced, spectacularly inaccurate, cross-my-offsets-and-hope-to-die scientific conclusions. Also know as bold ass lies.

Each of these cases provides an opportunity for Gore to lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science. Will he rise to the occasion? Only time will tell.

And ruin his retirement portfolio? Are you crazy?? This carbon offset BS is the sweetest scam Al Gore has managed to pull since his zinc mine was listed as a major environmental polluter.

THE WRATH OF GORE

Yeah, yeah I know. My PhotoShop (free knock off) kung fu is weak... Can any one fix this?

Beating The Brush

I never bought into the Carbon Offset Scam Scheme Plan To Save The World From Global Warming. There is plenty of information out there regarding how these scams work. It is just like driving deer.

If you ever hunted you know what I am talking about. You find the area that deer frequent and use other hunters to frighten them and drive them towards your concealed position. As the deer pass you nail them. These men are called beaters. In Africa they banged things and whacked the foliage with sticks to drive game from hiding. This is where the expression "beating the brush" comes from because it flushes out game from concealment.

Part of the Global Warming hype is all about flushing scared liberal investors' cash from their normal hiding holes of municipal bonds, mutual funds, etc. so Al Gore and his pals can take a shot at them. This is known as opportunistic feeding. As all those guilty liberal dollars go stampeding by, just grab the weakest and have a feast - then hang the pelt from your corporate website, mount the horns on your annual report.

An article by the Guardian helps explain this.

A Guardian investigation has found evidence of serious irregularities at the heart of the process the world is relying on to control global warming.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere, has been contaminated by gross incompetence, rule-breaking and possible fraud by companies in the developing world, according to UN paperwork, an unpublished expert report and alarming feedback from projects on the ground.

How can you possibly hope to regulate a scam?

One senior figure suggested there may be faults with up to 20% of the carbon credits - known as certified emissions reductions - already sold. Since these are used by European governments and corporations to justify increases in emissions, the effect is that in some cases malpractice at the CDM has added to the net amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

The problems focus on the specialist companies that validate and verify the projects in the developing world which produce the certified emission reductions. Three of those companies have failed spot checks, which revealed a catalogue of weakness.

It's the same weakness that has plagued mankind for millennia .. greed.

Separately, one of the CDM's experts calculates that as many as one third of the projects registered in India are commercial ventures which do not produce any additional cut in greenhouse gases and were wrongly approved.

There are only 17 of these validating and verifying companies. Most of them have a clean track record and will have approved reliable emissions reductions, but three of them have been performing so poorly that the CDM's executive board ordered spot checks - and all three companies failed on multiple grounds. The findings on one company, which is believed to have validated dozens of projects and verified millions of tonnes of carbon reductions, were so bad that the board considered suspending its right to work.

Let me put this in a slightly different light. There three companies were only the ones that got caught.

The chairman of the CDM board, Danish energy consultant Hans Jürgen Stehr, insisted that in the end the problem was not bad enough to require any of the companies to be suspended. However, he said: "This has been serious. We are talking about competence and the ability of the company to do a proper job." He ruled that none of the three companies be named.

Why is it that the controlling authority seeks to protect the companies that bring the rest of the industry into a bad light? Follow the money. First find out who these companies are; then see who owns them. Then find out what else they own and their political affiliations.

Global Warming Is Al Gore's Retirement Scam

I never did like the "feel good" approach to reducing environmental pollutants, but that's the path Al Gore and his liberal band of merry marketeers have chosen. Others have the same opinion and have dug a bit deeper. This is what the FinancialTimes has found.

Industry Caught in Carbon ‘Smokescreen’
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

This does not surprise me. Not one bit. It sounded like a scam from the get go.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.

Uncle Al learned at the hands of a master. This is the Clinton Method For Looking Like You're Doing Something (CMFLLYDS).

The Financial Times investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Say what you will. There's a sucker born every minute.

Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found “serious credibility concerns” in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months.

“The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it,” he said.

These concerns led the bank to ignore the market and fund its own carbon reduction projects directly.

Let the indictments begin!

HALP US AL GORE!

WE HAV GLOWBULL WORMING!

WE R TWO STOOPUD TO NO WHIN ITZ TOO WORM OUTSEYED AND HAF TWO WEER HEEVY KOATS AND MITTUNS!

This is what my street looks like like on this sweltering Sunday morning. Notice how my tulips are blossoming? My wife just loves tulips! They were planted by my daughter two years ago. See them in my front yard? They're the red and yellow flowers under the snow.

We're expecting up to 24" of additional snow tonight so of course I'm worried about my tulips dying in the heat. I'd better water them today so they'll be covered in a nice thick coating of ice to protect them from the awful heat that Al Gore says is destroying the planet.

These are people attending a Central New York track meet yesterday (April 14, 2007) at about 1:30 pm. Notice how they are bundling up to protect themselves from the incredible heat generated by Global Warming. Minutes before I took this picture, some kind people wrapped that poor woman in a pink blanket just before she collapsed from heat exhaustion. She was starting to feel better when I snapped this shot.

The concession stand had almost run out of hot chocolate and coffee when I stopped there. The heat drives us New Yorkers to swill down enormous quantities of these beverages to protect ourselves from the ravages of Global Warming.

If it gets any hotter I'll have to buy extra wood for the fireplace just to cool us down.

The Real Cost Of Al Gore's Retirement Plan

The Sunday Times ran a story regarding the unintended consequences of poorly designed environmental policies.

FOOD-PRICE inflation so severe that central banks are forced to raise interest rates to growth-stifling levels; corn prices so high that poor Mexicans can’t afford their tortillas; massive deforestation to make way for more corn and palm oil; poor farmers pushed off their land to make room for carbon-offsetting plantings paid for by rich jet-setters;

Just to name a few.

These are some of the unintended consequences of hastily conceived environmental policies. In America, President George Bush has decided that we can plant our way out of dependence on foreign oil. He envisages a future in which America’s fuel will come from planting above ground rather than drilling below it. In Europe, Angela Merkel and Tony Blair have hit upon carbon trading as the solution to global warming, and the man whose mirror assures him that he is the greenest of them all, David Cameron, has a wind turbine on his roof to generate enough electricity to power his hairdryer.

All these measures are jerk knee responses to a non-problem. There's a saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Out climate ain't broke, I really doubt if man can break it. But our economies can tank if wrong models propagate wrong business decisions.

Speaking of the Academy Awards, the stars, starlets and wannabes participating in this exercise in self-adulation poured into the hall from their limousines and private jets, but assured us that the entire flood-lit affair was carbon neutral. They had purchased what are known as “carbon offsets”, a system by which they pay others to curtail carbon emissions, or fund renew-able-energy sources. These deals, which are running at an annual rate of about $100m and rising, according to Business Week, “have become one of the most widely promoted products marketed to cheque-book environmentalists”.

The notion of carbon offsets are horrendous. They don't solve anything (there's nothing to fix anyway) and allow a privileged elite to make demands on the rest of mankind that they themselves are unwilling to follow.

Small problem. The offsets were purchased from TerraPass, holder of a portfolio of offset projects, which include a garbage dump in Arkansas managed by Waste Management. TerraPass has purchased thousands of tons of gas reductions resulting from Waste Management’s decision to burn off the methane produced by decomposing trash. But the company’s managers and state regulators told Business Week that the decision to burn off the methane had “nothing to do with TerraPass’s efforts”. Or with the offsets purchased by the Hollywood greens.

Hypocrites. Liars and hypocrites are driving these environmental debates.

There are more such stories, but you get the idea: the reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions claimed by those intent on being green without changing their lifestyles are often bogus — they would have happened without the purchase of offsets.

It's like being on a diet and still bingeing on baked goods and chocolate. You just buy "fat offsets" from starving Sudanese. Then you can state how many calories you've dropped by the number of bony corpses your offsets are producing.

Rich American agribusinesses are also cashing in on the huge subsidies made available by the government’s decision to subsidise ethanol and biodiesel production from corn, sugar and other crops. Ethanol from corn is a particular favourite of all the presidential candidates vying for votes in corn-growing Iowa, with the honourable exception of John McCain, who knows a boondoggle when he sees one. Crop prices are up, and so are land values.

Government subsidies are not free. You pay for them - someone has to pay for all the freebies the government dishes out. It's just that the rich agribusinesses are suddenly paying a lot less. So you, the American taxpayer, have to make up the difference.

The result is a problem for central banks. In the past, spikes in food prices have been seen as temporary, usually weather-related, and requiring no reaction from the inflation-controllers. But this rise might be a plateau rather than a spike: chickens and cattle are more expensive to feed, so farmers are keeping fewer of them, driving up the price of eggs, beef and dairy products. This food inflation is felt most keenly in poorer countries, where food accounts for a larger part of the average budget than in the developed world. But even in the richest countries, central bankers are wondering whether to raise interest rates to cool growth sufficiently to offset the effects of rising food prices.

I keep track of our household finances through a computer program. Our food costs have risen 10% in one year - and we're not suddenly eating steak and lobster. Some of this is due to increased petroleum costs, but we have a daughter living out of the house now We should be spending less, not more.

But think before you legislate. The EU introduced an emissions trading scheme that California intends to copy — and watched greenhouse-gas emissions rise by 30m tons, or about 1.5%, because too many permits were issued. Europe’s four biggest power producers pocketed €8 billion (£5.4 billion) from the sale of their excess permits, and UK generators an estimated £1 billion. That doesn’t mean all such trading schemes are flawed, but it does suggest that haste makes more than a little waste.

What a freaking mess! It's a scam! Nothing was done to reduce emissions. This is a boondoggle invented by corporations and their hand picked politicians to scam more profits for doing nothing. And Al Gore is the leader of the pack.

All the profits realized by those power companies were drawn from other businesses who just ate the cost, right? Wrong! They raised their prices so that you, the consumer, would pay for it. Could this be one of the reasons why energy costs are going up so fast? And yet, with all this fiscal activity, no improvements have been made in the amount of emissions released into the atmosphere.

Rinky Dink A Mine Fulla Zinc

Al Gore's fiscal interests in one of the most polluted mines in the country are coming back to bite him in the ass. Can you say hy-poc-racy? I knew you could. From the WSJ Opinion Journal:

The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist.

Like a drunken sot arising from a week long binge, the NY Times scrapes the dried snot off its upper lip, pulls its urine stained trousers up from below its knees and finally remembers that it is a newspaper that is allegedly reporting, well, news.

Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous."

*Belch* The Times then orders another round or six, pukes on the beer nuts and slides off the stool. And while it is again relieving itself contentedly into its trousers:

The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal."

Looks like the Times and Al Gore both have problems with nasty discharges. I'm looking for a company that sells dead trout offsets.

Uncle Al won an Oscar for his movie, "An Incontinent Inconvenient Truth" where at the very end of the movie, Gore asks the audience,"Are you ready to change the way you live?" Al sure did. He buys offsets, or rather, he has the people at Generation Investment Management buy them for him.

Mr. Gore's office responded by claiming that the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero." But CNSNews.com reports that Mr. Gore doesn't purchase carbon offsets with his own resources, and that they are meaningless in terms of global warming.

Meaningless, pointless, useless - that just about describes carbon offsets. The more you think about it the less sense it makes.

The offset purchases are actually made for him by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that Mr. Gore co-founded, and which provides carbon offsets as a fringe benefit to all 23 of its employees, ensuring that they require no real sacrifice on the part of Mr. Gore or his family. Indeed, their impact is also highly limited. The Carbon Neutral Co.--one of the two vendors that sell offsets to Mr. Gore's company, says that offset purchases "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions . . . in the short term."

But there's no time!! Gore is Agent Jack Bauer of Frothing Moonbat Central. These people and their incontinent truth are literally shitting themselves over the prospect of massive global flooding unseen since the last time Ted Kennedy relieved himself while swimming in the pool at the Y.

No time! It's already too late! But the Carbon Neutral Company, "If You've Got Carbon, Then Clean Out Your Blowhole" even has a carbon calculator designed to relieve you of worry, guilt and assets. Even though we'll all drown, fry or whatever before one offset cancels one snowflake I'll be breaking my ass to shovel next year.

The Times quoted Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, as telling hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America that "I don't want to pick on Al Gore. But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data." Mr. Easterbrook made clear he has never been paid by any energy corporations and isn't a Republican.

That's okay. Al Gore has never let a fact get in his way, or a dollar get out of his way for quite some time.

Then there is the Gore zinc mine. Mr. Gore has personally earned $570,000 in zinc royalties from a mine his father bought in 1973 from Armand Hammer, the business executive famous for his close friendship with the Soviet Union and for pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions during Watergate. On the same day Al Gore Sr. bought the 88-acre parcel from Hammer for $160,000, he sold the land and subsurface mining rights to his then 25-year-old son for $140,000. The mineral rights were then leased back to Hammer's Occidental Petroleum and the royalty payments put in the names of Al Gore Jr. and his wife, Tipper.

Sounds like another retirement plan. And I don't begrudge the man a penny of that. His daddy wanted him and Tipper to have a little something to fall back on and that's just fine and dandy. But don't get all in our faces about pollution when you can go fishing in Al's river and pull out a three headed catfish that has a glow-in-the-dark pecker.

The Gore mines were no small operations. In 2002, the year before they shut down, they ranked 22nd among all metal-mining operations in the U.S., with total toxic releases of 4.1 million pounds.

Four million pounds of toxic releases. That's over 2,000 tons of poison Al has allowed to be dumped into Tennessee rivers. I won't hold my breath until the Times publishes this story. But if a republican was responsible for this? We'd never hear the end of it.

A new mine operator, Strategic Resource Acquisition, is planning to reopen the mines later this year. The Tennessean reports that just last week, Mr. Gore wrote SRA asking it to work with a national environmental group as it makes its plans. He noted that under the previous operator, the mines had, according to the environmental website Scorecard, "pollution releases from the mine in 2002 [that] placed it among the 'dirtiest/worst facilities' in the U.S."

Well Al, I hope you enjoy the Oscar sitting up on your mantle 'cause you sure won't enjoy where I'd like to put it. But it would at least shut one of the holes that you pollute from.

More On Gore

In the previous post I took a look at Al Gore's preposterous claim that he is not profiting from the carbon offsets that he does not buy from his London investment firm, GIM, Generation Investment Management. He does make a profit (most likely a pretty healthy one) for two reasons: the investment cost him nothing because it is an offset donated by GIM, and GIM seems to have some pretty smart people running the show.

• David Blood, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is Managing Partner;
• Mark Ferguson, previously co-Head of Pan-European Research at Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a Global Equities Portfolio Manager, is Chief Investment Officer;
• Peter Harris, previously head of International Operations for Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is Chief Operating Officer;
• Peter S. Knight, formerly Managing Director Met West Financial, lawyer, Chief of Staff for Senator Al Gore (D-TN) from 1977-1989, and Campaign Manager for President Clinton's successful re-election in 1996, is President of Generation U.S.;
• Colin le Duc, previously Director of Research for SAM Sustainable Asset Management in Zurich and strategy consultant for Arthur D. Little in London, is Head of Research; and
• Uncle Al, Chairman, manly inventor of the intertubes and manly ex-Vice President of the United States. Knowing full well that carbohydrate offsets would not be available until he invented them in the year 2011, Gore demonstrated manly love for his wife by inserting his tongue down her esophagus at the 2000 Democratic Convention and removing the sugar laden Moon Pie from her stomach that she had eaten off stage just moments prior.

The biographies of the Board members are here. We already touched on Peter Knight and his narrow avoidance of a federal investigation when Janet Reno was fortuitously distracted by a comely co-ed intern from George Mason.

But what else is going on here? The spokesman for GIM, Richard Campell, gave us a clue. The confusion, Campbell said, arose because GIM pays to offset the energy use of its operations and the personal emissions of its 23 employees, including Gore. And of course the bigger carbon footprint you leave, the bigger the offset and the more money that is donated to your account for investment.

We do not invest in any activity of carbon offset. That's nonsense. We are a fund management business that does sustainability research," he added.

But the offset is an investment in an eco-frienfly business? Who is receiving the dough if the investment pays off? Campell is silent on this. But their website isn't so silent. It gives a clearer picture of what they're about than their spokeman.

Long Term Focus: A majority of a company's value is determined by its long-run performance. Investment results for long-only equity strategies are maximized by taking a long-term investment horizon.

That doesn't sound like research to me, sounds more like a 401k.

We Buy High Quality Businesses:Dominant market positions, strong entry barriers, predictable future, pricing power, and secular growth trends.

Hmmmmmmm. No research here.

At the Right Price: Key to our success is our price discipline and the ability to buy companies at sufficiently attractive prices to deliver performance.

Nope, no research here either. Then there's this:

LONDON, February 26
-- Northern Trust has been appointed by Generation Investment Management ("Generation") to provide full investment operations outsourcing for its assets under management. Northern Trust now provides custody, trade services,fund accounting, transfer agency, performance measurement and clientreporting across Generation's fund range domiciled in Dublin and Delaware,and investment administration support services for Generation in connectionwith its global separate account business.

I'm not a financial wizkid and I sure don't know what this means. I thought GIM had all this experience?

As a new firm, we had the opportunity to partner with Northern Trust early on to position our business operations strategically for future growth," said Peter Harris, Chief Operating Officer of Generation. "One of the key advantages for us in partnering with Northern Trust is the benefits we receive from a well run, established global business with large resources and deep expertise. We want to focus on managing our clients' assets and delivering superior investment performance: outsourcing to Northern Trust enables us to do this whilst providing the outstanding operational support we require as we grow our business."

This still sounds like 401k stuff to me. Anyone out there lend a hand? Partnering to receive benefits from a "well run, established global business" and one with "deep pockets espertise"?

Northern Trust Corporation (Nasdaq: NTRS) is a leading provider of investment management, asset and fund administration, fiduciary and banking solutions for corporations, institutions and affluent individuals worldwide.

I hate to be redundant, but this does not sound like a research company. And notice the use of "affluent individuals worldwide." Sounds to me like rich people with guilty consiences seeking offsets.

Northern Trust, a multibank holding company based in Chicago, has a growing network of 84 offices in 18 U.S. states and has international offices in 13 locations in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. As of December 31, 2006, Northern Trust had assets under custody of US$3.5trillion, and assets under investment management of US$697 billion. NorthernTrust, founded in 1889, has earned distinction as an industry leader in combining high-touch service and expertise with innovative products and technology.

Global Warming is Gore's Retirement Plan

From an article in Investor's Business Daily:

Environmentalism: Gore's carbon footprint may be the size of Godzilla's, but he eases his conscience with 'carbon offsets.' He buys them from himself. And every time someone else buys them, Big Al gets richer.

This carbon offset scam is just that - a scam. It produces nothing, it does not reduce carbon emissions and it only serves to line the pockets of those hooked into the econoscam.

Say you want to fly your Gulfstream private jet across the country regularly to Hollywood premieres instead of taking a Greyhound bus. You buy a carbon offset, giving money to people who will do something like invest it in windmills and solar panels to 'reduce' carbon emissions by an equivalent amount. Your are then declared 'carbon neutral' as you continue to pollute.

So while the hippie is happily polluting, the not-for-profit is stealing it. Or you can own the carbon offset business itself and pay yourself to use that private jet. Plus a nice salary as executive director or any other title that pops into your thieving brain.

Speaking of carbon offsets and shell games, guess where Gore buys his carbon offsets? Well, he buys them from a firm called Generation Investment Management LLP, a tax-exempt U.S. 501(c)3 corporation. The chairman and co-founder is Al Gore. In other words, he buys his carbon offsets from himself. Others who buy these offset are really buying stock in Gore's growing business. You, too, can green up his portfolio, if not Earth itself.

And there's the rub. The shell game is already set up, the screaming loons are in motion to stifle debate, the scientists have been bought through grants and the UN smelled the bribes a thousand miles away and- through the IPCC - are partners in the scam.

The number of companies jumping into this market has multiplied. In 2006, at least 60 sold offsets worth about $110 million to consumers in Europe and North America in 2006, up from a dozen firms selling offsets worth $6 million in 2004. That's a lot of green.

That's a lot of stupidity, and a lot of hippies with guilty consciences. And they want to force you to join them.

Skeptics of this scheme — perhaps we should call it a scam — include, interestingly enough, Steve Rayner, a senior professor at Oxford and a member of a group working on the reduction of greenhouse gases for the U.N.'s International Panel of Climate Change. 'What these companies are allowing people to do,' said Rayner, 'is to carry on with their current behavior with a clear conscience.'

This is not about conscience or the climate, it's about cash.

Gorebucks that is.

3/13/07 UPDATE:

One of the commenters (thanks Fred) was kind enough to leave this link to the Cyber News Service, where the company spokesman denies that Gore is profiting from carbon offsets.

Al Gore is not profiting from his crusade against global warming, a spokesman for an investment firm co-founded by the former vice president said Tuesday.

Gore's London-based employee-owned company, Generation Investment Management (GIM), purchases -- but isn't a provider of -- carbon dioxide (CO2) "offsets," said spokesman Richard Campbell.

GIM is strictly an investment firm that considers how eco-friendly corporations are in assessing long-term sustainability, Campbell told Cybercast News Service by phone from London.

Fair enough. We'll listen.

The confusion, Campbell said, arose because GIM pays to offset the energy use of its operations and the personal emissions of its 23 employees, including Gore.

So, the firm will cover the cost to offset the energy use at Gore's home, or his global jet travel, as it would the offset cost of any other employee, Campbell said.

So the confusion is that Gore doesn't profit from his crusade but that GIM pays for the carbon offsets so that Gore doesn't have to? Gore still derives a benefit from GIM, namely, Gore can say that he lives a "carbon neutral" lifestyle but doesn't have a pay a cent for it because the company he founded pays for it. Ahhhhhh, I think I smell a profit here. The profit being that cheapskate Gore skates on the carbon offset and pockets the difference.

The fact that Gore's Nashville home runs up electricity bills averaging $1,200 per month was publicized last week by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

I don't spend that much for electricity in a year and a half. But I don't claim to be carbon neutral either. And who runs GIM that enables Al "I Hate Carbon" Gore to make this claim at no cost?

The president of GIM's U.S. operation is Peter S. Knight, who served as Gore's chief of staff in the U.S. Senate and later as campaign manager for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996.Knight is a controversial figure.

In 1999, Republicans on the House Commerce Committee asked then U.S. Attorney Janet Reno to investigate whether a $1 million payment to Knight from a Tennessee developer was an illegal contingency fee for helping get the Federal Communications Commission to move to the development.

Knight and the developer, Franklin Haney, said the payment was for legal fees for Knight's work on several projects. Reno declined to investigate.

I can't speak for the reader, but this certainly does not inspire confidence in me. And since Gore refuses to disclose his income, there is no way to see what other "benefits" Gore is reaping form his association with GIM. But there are other considerations. GIM is an investment firm that takes money that Al Gore doesn't give them and "invests" it for him in eco-friendly businesses.

> We buy high quality businesses and management teams whose securities are attractively priced to deliver excess returns over the long-term.
> Generation's strategy is to invest in long-only, global, public equities with a concentrated portfolio of 30-50 companies.
> We Buy High Quality Businesses: Dominant market positions, strong entry barriers, predictable future, pricing power, and secular growth trends
> With High Quality Management Teams: Culture of Integrity, respect for shareholders, well managed for the long term
> At the Right Price: Key to our success is our price discipline and the ability to buy companies at sufficiently attractive prices to deliver performance

My take on this is simple. Remember Hillary Clinton's spectacular success in the futures market?

On October 11, 1978, the future First Lady, a neophyte investor with an annual income of $25,000, opened a commodity-futures account with a deposit of $1,000.

Her first trade was the short sale of ten live-cattle contracts at a price of 57.55 cents a pound: a commitment to deliver in December of that year 400,000 pounds of cattle with a market value of $230,200. One day later, she bought the contracts back at a price of 56.10 cents, just 0.15 cent above the low of the day, pocketing $5,300 for a return of 530 per cent.

Mrs. Clinton continued to be a net winner at the game. By the time she closed her trading account ten months later, she had racked up $99,541 in profits, a spectacular 10,000 per cent return on her initial investment of $1,000. Either Mrs. Clinton was a better trader than the legendary George Soros, whose best-ever annual return in thirty years of trading was 122 per cent, or she was led by an invisible hand.

Looks like Al Gore did learn something from the Clinton's after all.

He learned how to cover his scheming ass.