SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Kyle Smith on “Al Gore’s Long and of Persistent Record of Miserable Failure.”
In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
It’s been a “few decades.” How is Mr. Gore’s prophecy working out? Did he even get the direction right?
Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.
Yet there is a greater chance that all of them will be eaten by gators by next Friday than there is of Mr. Gore issuing an “Oops.” Hey, he was merely saying, “According to some predictions,” right? Maybe he was quoting a soothsayer he met in Reno. Maybe he did some research at the local facility for the criminally insane.
Maybe he was quoting that legendary soothsayer, Dan Rather, in 1982:
Rather was pivoting from another legendary soothsayer, Walter Cronkite, during the previous decade:
And now Gore is pivoting back! Al Gore invokes disaster film, warns of ice age within 25 years.
Former Vice President Al Gore warned a Hollywood audience Thursday that a Gulf Stream collapse could occur within 25 years, remarks that came 20 years after his climate documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” drew criticism for predictions that did not bear out.
Mr. Gore, 78, appeared at the inaugural Sustainability in Entertainment Honors, co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance at Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. He participated in a keynote conversation with actor Bradley Whitford of “The West Wing,” timed to the 20th anniversary of “An Inconvenient Truth.”
According to a Breitbart account of the event, Mr. Gore invoked the scenario depicted in the 2004 disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow” — though he repeatedly referred to it as “The Day After,” the title of a separate 1983 television film about nuclear war — saying a shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, commonly called the Gulf Stream, is “a very real threat within the next 25 years.”
“That movie that I mentioned, ’The Day After’ about the Gulf Stream shutting down, well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of the scientists who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.
Mr. Whitford raised a more compressed timeline, suggesting that a Gulf Stream collapse could put the world “in an ice age in, like, 10 years.” Mr. Gore pushed back, saying such a scenario would unfold more slowly, while acknowledging the consequences would be severe.
“It would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond our, anything we can compare it to today,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.
Exit quote from Smith: “But as the tone on climate change adjusts to reality, he risks joining Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich to go down in intellectual history as one of the Three Stooges of man-caused global disaster.”
But that sweet, sweet Qatari money doesn’t spend itself, you know.
(Classical reference in headline.)