Reason Is Not So Fooled: Al Gore's New Book

I am back, and I am mad as fire ants on skin. Actually, I am merely back.

Let me ask you a few questions. If I write a book entitled Freedom From Hate: Rejecting intolerance, bigotry and prejudice, and the psycho-social constructs that protect them, wouldn't you expect me to be free of hate, intolerance, bigotry, and the psycho-social constructs that protect them? If I write a book called Loosed At Last: Self-delivery from addiction, would it be imprudent of you to ask whether I was the one photographed last week puking with Christopher Hitchens outside Circa Tabac?º What if I pen the best-selling Regular As Sunrise: 10 sure steps to overcoming diarrhea? Would it be proper of you to presume that I did not write that fine book while sitting at a desk in my bathroom?

Just asking.
_______________

If the writer of Ecclesiastes is correct, that there is a season for everything under the sun, then there is a time for scoffing, for sarcasm. A friend of mine once said that she could not embrace Christianity because there was not a single reference in the whole Bible to God laughing. One wonders what she meant: the Bible has several references to God laughing at idols, scoffing at vanities, mocking false and phony gods. In other words, there is a time for scoffing, and the time is now.

You may have already garnered from my many essays about Al Gore that I am incurably Algore-aphobic. I am very discomforted by the over-crowding inside Al Gore's head. But that is the least of my phobias. I am much more phobic that Al Gore is presenting himself to the world as deity.

Surely you have heard that Mr. Gore is about to release a new book called (I am not making this up), The Assault on Reason. No, this is not autobiography, nor is it a confession or tell-all foisted upon the world to generate sympathy for his reckless rhetoric, his own sins of the mind. Those of us paying attention find just a hint of delight, an almost arthritic mirth, in the irony of it all: Al Gore is going to pontificate on the world's flight from reason. We giggle, but with some pain: our joints rattle and grind, joints battered by years if not decades of twists and sprains and hyper-extensions earned while fighting the fallaciousness of mass hysteria, even mass opinion.

Let us recall for the moment that Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, is from credits-to-Oscar one long fallacy: the film unrelentingly confuses or, if not confuses, conflates correlation and causality in an almost insouciant non causa pro causa polemic. Of course, this is not to suggest that the conclusion is right or wrong; Mr. Gore may be infallibly correct in his conclusion that humans† are killing the planet and that the need for green living is of moral imperative. But his method is utterly irrational. His method is an assault on reason. Even his appeals to "most scientists" or "scientific consensus" are fallacious, as is his appeal to experts; both are fallacies, the former, the fallacy argumentum ad populum (or consensus gentium, the appeal to majorities), the latter, the appeal to authority.

In 1987, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Al Gore at a house party held on the edges of a tiny New Hampshire town. He was just beginning his bid for the White House; the twenty or so folks gathered in the kitchen and living room were remarkably interested in his words. But they were not sufficiently interested to give him the Democratic nomination in 1988, nor were they overly awed by him. My impression then (vague as it is now), was that the only person sufficiently awed by Mr. Gore was Mr. Gore himself.

Alas, I find he has not changed at all over the last 20 years. I also find that his current fans are giving him a pass. But since I am not a fan (nor am I at all current), he does not pass my way without receiving a jeer and a tomato (both the jeer and the tomato, by the way, are certified organic and totally carbon neutral; the jeer is also free-range). My incredulity slips into sarcasm at the idea: Mr. Gore has come to the rescue; he is going to enlighten us all to the true value and blissfulness of reason. He shall demonstrate logical perfection; he will rise above the profanum vulgus and model proper thinking. But one look at his unintentionally hilarious essay on economics from 2006 will give you a sense of Mr. Gore's vast skills in clear thinking. Perhaps my reference to that essay is unfair; perhaps lucidity is not one of reason's predicates. Perhaps muddied and abstruse prose is the crown jewel of reason. Perhaps.

The Gore Advantage

The advantage to writing a book called The Assault on Reason (TAR) is that the author instantly presents himself as the Most Reasonable Human. For surely the man who writes such a book could not be the most assaultive force on reason, could he? No, he could not. He can only be reason's protector, exemplar, purifier. He must be reason's very template.

And this is proven (I use the word the way Mr. Gore uses it) by TAR's description at Amazon. I would be remiss not to demand that you read it. Please! Go check out this most-reasonable description of this important bulwark against anti-rationalism. It is eye-opening: you will be aghast at your own benighted reasoning skills. A light will shine in your darkness, I am sure.

I just pray that the light shining in your darkness is not a bullet coursing through your incredulous head. I hope that, instead of inflicting any injury upon your lovely self, you will turn toward the light through derisive laughter. It is surely where and how I must turn. Laughter, for me, is the only reasonable alternative to suicide.* A high school friend of mine published next to his yearbook picture a veiled dig at the interminable laughter of a girl he thought he loved. He wrote, "Laughter is the air release of all one fears." But my friend was wrong. Laughter is not the release of all one fears. It is the release of all one hates. I either laugh at Al Gore or I kill myself; I either open my mouth and release my hatred or I open my cranium some other way in order to let out what I loathe. And I do loathe "Al Gore"; I hate him.ª But I do not hate Al Gore the man, the gentleman I met in 1987 or the man that holds his wife's heart. I do not hate the Al Gore loved by God. No, I hate Al Gore the commodity, the product. The merchandised. And the only passage to sanity I can find is one that demands -- for a season -- derision, mockery, scoffing, laughter. I laugh at Mr. Gore, at his absurd over-reaching.

(OK. Let me grant that there's nothing more irrational than for me to critique a book I have not yet read. I admit it is hard to read a book that is not yet even in print. But I am not sure it is unreasonable of me to make a wild prediction: In his new book, Mr. Gore is not going to be elucidating his many intellectual mistakes. Nor do I expect his book to consist of one long string of apologies. And I also do not expect Mr. Gore to admit that he is, of all people, quite eminently dis-qualified to write this book. This is a book that is, above all else, committed to promoting Al Gore.)

Al Gore's book is, like so many deeds and screeds of too many today, mere psychological projection. Mr. Gore is going to point out the sins of others not knowing (apparently) that such sins are his own. (I am reminded of what I wrote to Open Ide, a cowardly visitor to this site a few weeks ago.) And the only sins any one of us is truly expert in is the sins that are indeed our own. The Assault on Reason is a child's game of distraction: Look! What's that behind you?! Mr. Gore hopes you will ignore what is in front of your face, just so he can slink away, unchallenged, but nonetheless beloved for his commitment to "dialogue," to "reasoned conversation."

But Al Gore writing to us about reason is a bit like my lecturing Fabio on hair care. Al Gore promoting reason is not unlike Madonna promoting chastity. It's like Bill Maher telling the pope to cool down his opinions. It's a bit like Rosie O'Donnell advising Steven Wright on paradox, or Paula Abdul coaching Melinda Doolittle on how to be more vocally dynamic. It's a bit like George W. Bush giving tips to William Safire on how to pronounce nuclear (which, as we know, is just a variant spelling of unclear), or Eddie Van Halen telling André Segovia to be more subtle, or Anna Nicole Smith appearing at Fatima and urging women to remember her temperance.

In other words, Al Gore's book should be a failure before it even hits the editor's desk. Instead, it will be wildly successful.

Laugh your way to light. It's the season.

Peace and true mirth.

ºI mean this as a joke, of course. I do not know if that was Mr. Hitchens partying with me in Soho. But I do recall smashing rounds with a British atheist.

†Christianity has unflaggingly agreed with Mr. Gore since time immemorial, but with a twist. Humans are not going to destroy the planet. Humans already have destroyed the planet.

*I mean this facetiously, really.

ªMy hate is purely a rhetorical device.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Breaking Great Wind In The Storm's Eye: Al Gore And The Democratic Party

Former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, needs the world to melt away.

As you know, and as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, Al Gore, with the help of his friends at Apple Computer, Inc. (where he sits on the board of directors), has recently released a film, An Inconvenient Truth. Ebert & Roeper have given the film Two Thumbs Up. I will skip the science part of the whole debate for today, and I will admit that I have not seen the film, though I intend to. What I want to point out is that Al Gore has done something utterly precarious: He has pinned his whole political life on a swirling, whirling, convecting and advective maelstrom of gas. In short, he has put his career on the line for a bunch of variables, hoping to win our plaudits by the hoped-for triumph of one constant: The planet is getting warmer.

Trust me when I say this: Al Gore is doomed if the planet begins to get cooler. He is doomed if the polar caps are indeed getting deeper in their cores as they are shrinking on their edges (as some have posited). He is doomed if November 2008 is bitterly cold, especially if September and October are cold, too. His career will be so much vapor looking for one constant particle around which to coalesce; yet if the rarefied air he hopes to coalesce in should become utterly clean of any particles, his raindrop will never form, and he shall be lost in the gases he fears.

I am not suggesting that he is wrong for being concerned about global warming, or that humans impact the environment in often grotesque proportions. I am saying that he is wrong for politicizing this whole "crisis", this "planetary emergency", as he calls it.

But what I am really saying is that the Democratic National Party is doomed for the exact same reasons. You see, they have embraced Gore's "science" completely: They have endorsed his view and made it a plank in the Democratic Party's weather observation deck. Gore is The Man right now, and he has got to be relishing the attention. Egads, he was even The Man at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yesterday I received this email titled "Gore-bashing" from Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean. Let me remind you that Democrats repeatedly refer to the Republican leadership as "fearmongers". Here's the email:

Dear Fellow Democrat,

Hurricane season has arrived -- and two fresh studies point to a link between global warming and an increase in the number and power of storms like Hurricane Katrina.

What are Republicans doing about it? They're smearing former Vice President Al Gore.

One right-wing pundit compared Gore to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist. Another right-winger, who's been on the payroll of corporate special interests, likened Gore's pursuit of solutions to global warming to Adolf Hitler's pursuit of genocide.

I'm sending Al a note this week telling him to keep fighting, to keep standing up for the truth no matter how vicious the attacks. I thought he might like to hear from you, too. …

Facts are facts. Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence. But it also presents a historical opportunity to rise above politics and act boldly. Despite right-wing efforts to silence him, Al Gore has articulated one of the great moral challenges of our time and tried to move people to act.

This should not be a political issue. We need a conversation about climate change and its consequences. But special interests in Washington have a tight grip on the Republican leadership, and an entire network of corporate-funded front groups has emerged to deny reality and attack the messenger.

They hope that scorched-earth political tactics will cover up the reality that the scientific debate is one they've already lost.

Vice President Al Gore deserves our thanks for his courage and leadership. …

Did you know the National Academy of Sciences joined academies in the other G8 countries last year by concluding that global warming requires "prompt action"? Or that insurance companies are fleeing coastlines and charging huge premiums to avoid taking more losses from massive hurricanes? How about the fact that climate researchers have a new worry: that we could cross a tipping point that sends sea levels rising by 20 feet by the end of the century?

If you didn't know, that's by design. Corporate special interests are deeply invested in keeping us hooked to the status quo -- high gas prices, inefficiency, and dependence on foreign oil.

That's why last year, in the middle of a record-breaking hurricane season, Republicans in Congress and the White House gave oil companies $6 billion -- even as those companies ran away with the largest corporate profits in American history. And that's why we still have yet to see the Bush administration stand up and do anything to stop global warming.

Enough is enough, and people know it. Al Gore is demonstrating exactly the kind of courage and moral clarity that Democrats will bring when we take back Congress and win elections up and down the ballot this year.

The inconvenient truth is that global warming exists -- and thanks to Al Gore, it's now more likely that America will come together and do something about it.

Sincerely,
Governor Howard Dean, M.D.

And, according Dr. Dean, here are the two offensive quotes regarding Mr. Gore:

Citations

"You don't go see Joseph Goebbels' films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don't go see Al Gore's films to see the truth about global warming."
--Sterling Burnett, DaySide, Fox News, May 23, 2006.

"Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."
--Bill Gray, as quoted in The Washington Post Magazine, May 28, 2006.

Now, I have no idea who Sterling Burnett (?) or Bill Gray are, but to Dr. Dean, this amounts to an all-out right-wing attack on Al Gore. And if you don't think that Dr. Dean's letter suggests that the Democrats have politicized this issue, then recall with me what happened May 31 when a group of concerned citizens protested outside the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Hurricane Center. What was their beef (excuse the references to methane)? That NOAA has been "covering up the growing scientific link between severe hurricanes and global warming." And NOAA is doing this in a gross conspiracy along with the Bush Administration and EXXON! Don't believe me? Then read this statement from the protest's organizers. It is clear that the protesters are not members of the Republican Party.

(Let me point out that real scientists would not say that there is a "growing scientific link" between anything. There is an alleged "climatological, meterological" link or "growing atmospheric-chemical" link. But a "growing scientific link"? That's middle school stuff.)

And lastly, look at this from the Democratic National Committee. It pretty much proves what the Democrats have in mind.

***

Why has Al Gore hitched his wagon to a melting polar ice cap? Simple. It is a perfectly hot topic right now, and it is perfectly ambiguous. It is the sort of scientific "fact" that can be used for glorious political gain, because it is one that has the appearance of certitude and yet is, by all honest accounts, a field of broad uncertainty. Moreover, Al Gore has hitched his wagon to so much gas because he wants to distance himself from "Big Oil", you know, the REAL source of global warming and the impending calamity. And the Democrats have hitched themselves to the very same vapors.

THAT is why they desperately need the planet to get hotter, at least for a couple of more years. They need the calamity in order to save not only all of us, but all of them. They need the planet to melt so badly they can see water already rising in New York. They are so knee deep in it that they might just propose putting life jackets in voting booths.

It is a bit of a joke when we hear Democrats insist that this "crisis" should not be a partisan issue. Of course it should: The Democrats have made it one. They are the real scientists after all, a fact well-established now that they've shown the Republicans to be all about Intelligent Design (which is about the philosophy of science, the very foundations of it, and not about science per se; which is a fact lost on critics of Intelligent Design). And it is the Democrats, long critics of Big Oil, who have laid the blame for most of the global warming on that giant industry.

Of course, there is great irony watching all those liberals, so concerned about global warming, flying over to Cannes to watch Al Gore's film. Gore also scarred the sky in a trans-Atlantic crossing. And now he flies around the globe, telling us all that the atmosphere is fragile and is becoming our enemy.

An Inconvenient Truth is exactly that.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
Al Gore photograph courtesy of CBS News (via Google photos)

Technorati tags: Al Gore, Global Warming, Climate Change, An Inconvenient Truth, Environment, Democratic Party, Democrats, Howard Dean, DNC, Big Oil

A Really Inconvenient Fact

I may not have a B.S. in any scientific discipline, but that has never stopped me from recognizing BS, especially when I step in it. I know, I know: it is dubious at best to come to Contratimes for a science lesson, but once in a while it is OK for us to think like scientists, you know, critically.

My starting point is the rather recent installment of PBS's NOVA called "Dimming the Sun", which I watched a couple of weeks ago (and where I stepped into some serious BS). The point of that rather stimulating science program was that particulate matter released into the atmosphere as a result of human industrial activity, along with myriad contrails produced by airliners, combine to reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the lower levels of the atmosphere. Studies in the Maldives, for instance, have shown that air pollution may indeed reduce sunlight by as much as 10%. The result, obviously, is that air temperatures in "smoggy" zones are cooler. And cooler air has drastic effects on weather patterns, perhaps even distorting weather and (ocean ?) currents to such a degree that droughts and other sundry calamities occur.

But this is only half of NOVA's story. The other half has to do with reducing air pollutants, especially the particulate matter associated with solar dimming. The idea is that with cleaner air more sunlight reaches the lower atmosphere and ground, thus increasing air temperatures. In other words, the theory is that visible pollutants are masking the invisible catastrophe awaiting us: MASSIVE global warming due to invisible and dangerous levels of greenhouse gases which will "trap" heat should more light penetrate the atmosphere. For a full explanation and a virtual synopsis of the NOVA program, read the Wikipedia article "Global dimming." I urge you to read it not merely because it is interesting, but because of what it never mentions. And you know what? NOVA never mentions "it" either.

But before I tell you what "it" is, I must make one observation about the NOVA program. I might be wrong about this, but I don't think I am: NOVA did not interview a single person with a countervailing opinion regarding dimming, cooling or warming. Not one! Add to that the fact that NOVA only aired the opinions of at best five experts, and one MUST conclude that NOVA might best be taken with something like a grain of salt.

Permit me to back into what is missing in both NOVA's "scientific inquiry" and Wikipedia's article. This passage from Wikipedia is a great starting point. I mean, this is science at its (political?) best:

It is now thought that the effect (global dimming) is probably due to the increased presence of aerosols [sic] particles in the atmosphere. Aerosol particles absorb solar energy and reflect sunlight back to space. The pollutants can also become nuclei for cloud droplets. It is thought that the water droplets in clouds coalesce around the particles, and more aerosol particles result in the clouds consisting of a greater number of smaller droplets, which in turn makes them more reflective: bouncing more sunlight back into space.

Now there is nothing wrong with this virtual rehashing of NOVA's major premise. It is, for our purposes, completely true. But there is something massive, literally, missing from all of this, and one wonders how it could not be mentioned even in passing. I wonder if you have guessed what "it" is. Need a clue? Well, try this one, or this.

Yes, that's right: Volcanoes. What is missing in the global dimming report is the earth itself: that the earth is its own heat engine; and is its own cooler.

Remember in 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo absolutely ripped a hole into our earth's atmosphere, belching material in unimaginable quantities into the earth's very stratosphere? Remember what you were told, that the eruption would affect the entire globe for years? Remember hearing the same when Mt. Saint Helens blew apart in 1980? Remember hearing that such eruptions would cool the earth's atmosphere, even though they hurled millions of tons of gas and heat skyward? Well, if you need a refresher on Pinatubo alone, read this, this and this.

Now let's for a moment return to the Wikipedia quote above, where it is mentioned that global dimming is a result of the presence of aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Alas, there is no mention of volcanic activity. Yet in all three Pinatubo links above we read something like this:

Pinatubo injected about 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it reacted with water to form a hazy layer of AEROSOL particles composed primarily of sulfuric acid droplets. Over the course of the next two years strong stratospheric winds spread these aerosol particles around the globe.

Unlike the lower atmosphere (or troposphere, which extends from the surface to roughly 10 km), the stratosphere does not have rain clouds as a mechanism to quickly wash out pollutants. Therefore, a heavy influx of aerosol pollutants, like the plume from Mount Pinatubo, will remain in the stratosphere for years until the processes of chemical reactions and atmospheric circulation can filter them out. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, the result was a measurable cooling of the Earth's surface for a period of almost two years.

Because they scatter and absorb incoming sunlight, aerosol particles exert a cooling effect on the Earth's surface. The Pinatubo eruption increased aerosol optical depth in the stratosphere by a factor of 10 to 100 times normal levels measured prior to the eruption.

Oopsy! Just a small detail left out of Wikipedia and NOVA's uh, science. Call it a mere blippish oversight. And to think someone went to the Maldives in the 1990's to run tests to determine whether smog blocks sunlight!

Moreover, what is also not mentioned in either source is the effect the earth's core temperature has on climate; that the earth is not a frozen ice ball (though surface materials are indeed "frozen" in the scientific sense), but a sphere with an incredibly volatile heat source not far below its skin. That source of heat is not only important in maintaining life on this planet, it is important in this discussion of global warming and cooling. But more importantly, that NOVA and Wikipedia never mention either volcanic activity or the earth's radiant heat suggests that real scientific inquiry is not what either is interested in. Finally, neither the TV program nor the online encyclopedia mentions increases or decreases in solar activity, which also wreak havoc on terrestrial atmospherics.

Al Gore has released a new movie called "An Inconvenient Truth," in which he apparently divides for us the facts from fiction regarding global warming. I will venture a guess that the complexities of vulcanism and any one volcano's impact on climate make naught but a small appearance in Gore's film. But that's fine: he is a politician, after all, and he needs science to work for his agenda, which is, in part, to distance himself from "Big Oil," you know, that industry allegedly most responsible for global warming (and the one allegedly associated with Republicans). But that NOVA, an apparently neutral science program, should have neglected not only any countervailing opinions but the facts of Pinatubo––that such an eruption lowered global temperatures as much as .6 degrees C in 15 months––should give us all pause.

There is more that NOVA failed to tell us in "Dimming the Sun," but I will leave that for another time. But let us not in all this permit such "fact-based" programs and resources to have a dimming effect on our much needed minds. We need to think clearly about the complexities before us. I mean, let us beware (unlike Al Gore) of committing non causa pro causa fallacies, you know, mistaking correlation with causality. Gore and NOVA might be right, but we won't ever know if we accept only part of the data.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

For a complete transcript of NOVA's program, go here.

Pinatubo photo courtesy of http://www.geo.mtu.edu/volcanoes/pinatubo/volcano/

Technorati tags: Al Gore, Global Warming, Global dimming, NOVA, Mt. Pinatubo, vulcanism, An Inconvenient Truth, Climate Change