Call him a corporate crony yearning after greater wealth and power or recognize him as a smart, decisive capitalist positioning his investments wisely, but the fact remains that former Vice President Al Gore seems a poster child for all who aspire to be a successful left-wing politician.
Most importantly, Gore can thank his brand of climate change for his financial and societal successes.
Gore’s green crusade recalls memorable Photoshopped images of polar bears fighting for their lives on the last remnant of a contracting glacier. It also brought us such riveting cinematic masterpieces, such as “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” depicting the end of the world because of renegade chlorofluorocarbons.
Whether a “going green” fan or not, certainly one must admire the magnitude of Gore’s green marketing campaign, supported by a majority of western scientists partial to its message.
So it came as a shock to the world when breaking news surfaced allegedly linking Gore’s associates to fraud and manipulation of climate statistics in a documented string of thousands of e-mails.
The Wall Street Journal’s aptly named “Climate Gate” brought to light the fraudulent “consensus” among scientists working within the British Climate Research Unit. A Russian climatologist from the University of East Anglia made the discovery and leaked the confidential information to Washington Post associate editor Eugene Robinson.
It looks bad for Gore as more information surfaces. Apparently, it was all about the money.
Al Gore is a member of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that invests heavily in green technology — more than 40 companies — and generates Gore well more than $100 million.
General Electric Co. and World Bank publicly pledged their support through financing targeted green initiatives. Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, told Reuters, “The World Bank wants to breathe life back into a mooted $10 billion-plus fund to combat climate change.”
Suspicious about a conspiracy at the highest levels prior to the recent e-mail discovery, the U.S. Congress initiated a hearing on April 4th. The meeting highlighted a Bloomberg report focusing on Gore’s record jump in net worth from $2 million in 2004 to more than $100 Million in less than four years.
In response, Gore said he invested the $100 million into non-profits. Although it proved true, non-profits are tax-shelter organizations for what the left label the “super rich.”
Gore is the chairman of Team Generation Investment, Alliance for Climate Protection and founder of the “We” initiative, all incubators for a variety of the green initiatives. An estimated 77 percent of the money funnels right back to him and his endeavors, tax-free with additional tax credits for his philanthropy.
Worse, Gore and his venture partners stand to benefit exponentially from the Cap and Trade Climate bill Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., proposed. If the bill passes in the Senate, the New York Times and climatedepot.com estimate that Gore, his associates and a host of unnamed investors can receive a financial windfall of more than $4 billion per year.
Prior to these leaked “Climate Gate” e-mails, Gore and a handful of scientists had a majority of America and western society fooled. The question still remains whether there will be justice in the media against proven fraud on the left.
Or, will the magnitude of this fraud be brushed under the rug at the behest of partisan politics and high stakes investors?
Jordan Sligar is an entrepreneurship senior.
14 comments
I did not contest anything you said because it was computer data, so the premise of your ACORN hypothetical is invalid. I'm contesting your comments because they're not sourced properly. I can find no evidence that Eugene Robinson has had contact with a Russian climatology student who worked at CRU. I can find no evidence that there even is a face to the hacker(s) who stole this data. To say this information was released by a whistleblower is just speculation---nothing more---even if it's repeated over and over on denialist blogs. From what I've gathered, these emails were hacked and placed on file sharing sites, not leaked to press. It's irresponsible journalism (editorialism?) to parrot speculation and the unfounded claims of fraud and data manipulation.
And when I said "entire body of scientific research", I was referring to climate change research, not the field of climatology. Even if you dislike Gore, these emails provided no support for the argument that Anthropogenic Global Warming is an illusion. As I said before, ranting about the money Gore has made is one thing, but asserting an entire body of scientific research is fraudulent is just unfounded and ridiculous.
I don’t know if you read the article but it was about Al Gore profiteering from illusion of man made global warming. It didn’t call in to question climatology as a whole. The article didn't specify how the information was found but it was hacked. Then allegedly given or leaked to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. When a scientist, or scientific student in this case, blows a whistle on a fraudulent operation, shouldn’t we, as journalists with an opinion, do our best to get the information out there? To me, it seems delusional to just accept at face value anything a scientist closely linked to the topic says at this point. Before trying to brush this under the rug wouldn't it do us all justice to question the information's validity. The mere fact that the reputation and scientific prestige of both the United Nations, along with an assortment scientists' life's work is on the line should be reason enough at least look into it. To be fair, I suppose there needs to be a bipartisan multinational investigation. Especially before the Copenhagen affair. The handful of highlighted scientists in these malicious emails are simply doing damage control. Furthermore, the article only briefly highlighted the “Climate gate” information which you can find from a variety of different sources all essentially saying the same thing. As far as the information in sequence, It’s all crosschecked and factual. But I suppose if I were to write about our state's investigation into Acorn and their plans to take over our legislature (by installing liberal politicians in key areas through voter fraud, strong arming and manipulation) you would contest the validity of the hard copy and computer data found in their abandoned office as well.
Did you not read the explanation? The tree ring data divergence problem has been discussed in the literature since 1998. There's nothing suspicious here, preposterously so or otherwise. The "source code" issue is also a red herring, if you'd take the time to look into it. But in the end, you have to remember that these emails were leaked from one institution, while the research is the consensus of hundreds. The science of global warming/climate is simply not undermined by this, and to believe so is the real delusion.
Even *if* the emails didn't undermine the scientists research (which I would still argue, they do), then the source code created by these so-called scientists does. There are many independent sites currently combing through the thousands of lines of spaghetti code and uncovering all kinds of statistically inappropriate activities. At the very least, the CRU's misplacement of the original source tree-ring data (leaving only their "adjusted' values for others to see) is preposterously suspicious.
Very good article. All Al Gore has done is show a power point to the country of how the world is going to to end because of us, and that instantly made him famous and even won him a noble prize which is just stupid. He never presented any good, solid, and reliable evidence; all he did was appeal to people's feeling by showing them images of of sad polar bears. Global warming is blown out of proportion by people like Gore, but if you think about it if theEarth wasn't warming we would be in an ice age right now? And if Al Gore truly believes that the world is going to end because we are polluting it, why doesn't he cut his carbon emissions first and set an example for everybody since between his jet and his house (that consumes the same amount of electricity as a town) he's producing 20 times more carbon than an average human is. And that carbon credit thing he has created is just a bunch of BS since one of his companies owns it, so he's paying for his carbon emissions to himself, how convenient is that? And come on, our planet has endured a lot of disasters throughout couple of billion years it has been around how can we think that we are going to destroy it with plastic bags?
Very good article. All Al Gore has done is show a power point to the country of how the world is going to to end because of us, and that instantly made him famous and even won him a noble prize which is just stupid. He never presented any good, solid, and reliable evidence; all he did was appeal to people's feeling by showing them images of of sad polar bears. Global warming is blown out of proportion by people like Gore, but if you think about it if theEarth wasn't warming we would be in an ice age right now? And if Al Gore truly believes that the world is going to end because we are polluting it, why doesn't he cut his carbon emissions first and set an example for everybody since between his jet and his house (that consumes the same amount of electricity as a town) he's producing 20 times more carbon than an average human is. And that carbon credit thing he has created is just a bunch of BS since one of his companies owns it, so he's paying for his carbon emissions to himself, how convenient is that? And come on, our planet has endured a lot of disasters throughout couple of billion years it has been around how can we think that we are going to destroy it with plastic bags?
[...]No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.[...]What's truly laughable is that such utterly unqualified people think they can offer critiques about the science. That's the real delusion going on here.
I'm not sure where you're getting this information, but these email were hacked, not leaked by some whistle blower. Eugene Robinson hasn't published anything about this Russian climatologist, and he continues to be a supporter of the science. Some quick googling discovered that much. Moreover, while the emails do show that the scientists weren't always professional, the emails haven't undermined their research or the consensus built on the research from scientists all over the world. Ranting about the money Gore has made is one thing, but asserting an entire body of scientific research is fraudulent is just unfounded and ridiculous.