An Inconvenient Truth (alternative, house, rock, Atmosphere, Europe)

~~[MERIT]~~ · 02-28-2007, 02:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by USA Today

Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

What a schmuck.

sleepy jack · 02-28-2007, 06:00 PM

I also read somewhere his home also uses the same amount of energy in a month that the average house hold uses in a year.

<3politicians

~~TheUsedToolguy~~ · 02-28-2007, 06:12 PM

A lot of big time environmentalist have their own private jets, which are gas guzzlers if there's ever been such a thing. Other than that, I like bringing attention to the cause, because it's important to preserve good living conditions for future generations, not just abuse the planet as long as you're living here, and then say, 'well, as long as it doesn't affect me, I don't care'

Sparky · 02-28-2007, 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crowquill

I also read somewhere his home also uses the same amount of energy in a month that the average house hold uses in a year.

<3politicians

yeah i saw that on the colbert report

though the people who sayd that are just a couple brothers who have a blog or something, not an official new source

~~[MERIT]~~ · 02-28-2007, 08:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by matious

yeah i saw that on the colbert report

though the people who sayd that are just a couple brothers who have a blog or something, not an official new source

well,it was in a national newspaper and on many legitimate news sites as well.

Sparky · 02-28-2007, 08:31 PM

o really?

hmm..guess its for real then.
I also like how John Edwards is against homelessness, though he recently built a 28000 square foot house

tdoc210 · 02-28-2007, 08:37 PM

lulz

vote TDOC 2008

~~TheUsedToolguy~~ · 02-28-2007, 09:04 PM

Tdoc?

TheBig3 · 03-01-2007, 05:39 PM

him essentially, its a long story. And yeah, Gore is a shmuck but then you'd have to agree that he was right about his arguments on the enviornment.

I figure for every gore theres 10 of us who ride a bike weather permitting so i'm sure it balances itself out somewhere.....right?

IamAlejo · 03-02-2007, 10:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

him essentially, its a long story. And yeah, Gore is a shmuck but then you'd have to agree that he was right about his arguments on the enviornment.

I figure for every gore theres 10 of us who ride a bike weather permitting so i'm sure it balances itself out somewhere.....right?

But is he really right?

Quote:

This For All The Victims Of The Global Warming Scam.

The Nonsense That Is Global Warming

Some years ago a British newspaper arranged a square-off between a meteorologist, an astrologer and a woman with corns, to see who could best predict the weather. The woman with corns won.

In almost every newspaper around the world and at least once a week, some report surfaces suggesting we stay worried in the light of latest figures and analyses. Not only is Global Warming occurring, we are assured, but it is now accelerating at some alarming rate and pretty soon the poles will have all melted, the sealevels will have risen and all low-lying atolls and seaside villages will be covered over with this calamitous rising tide. And apparently this gigantic catastrophe is due to human behaviour.

We are informed that if our wicked CFC and CO2-producing ways continue, we will be doomed as a civilisation. Today we are so buffeted by what is put forth as irrefutable evidential science as to the nature of the so-called problem, that we don't even think to question it on any basic level. What is still essentially viewpoints and nothing more, based on tiny sample data and extrapolated, is now promoted as scientific fact, regardless of the lack of real evidence. The voices of the many diligent scientists calling for real hard evidence are drowned out by those who have the ear of a worldwide media hungry for sensational and emotive headlines.

The Misleading Picture
The result is that the picture many now have is of the Earth heating up and hotter now than it has ever been. But... 1999 was cooler than the year before and since 1998 the world has been cooling. The hottest day in all recorded history was at Al Azizah in Libya back in 1922. There was warming from the 1880s to the 1940s, then a cooling for the next 40 years. Some of the hottest years were in the 1930s, when builders in Britain began putting pipes on the outside of buildings because frosts were only a memory. Then the thermometers turned around and from 1940 right up to 1980, global mean temperatures fell by about 0.3degC. All those houses in Britain started getting burst pipes.

Some over-reacted and called it the start of a new Ice Age, due to global warming. Er..pardon? Yes, a heating up OR cooling down now was, apparently, because of global warming. The 40 year downturn in temperature was in spite of supposed rising CO2 levels due to the new industrialisation after the war, showing then that rising CO2 does NOT fit into the scenario of Greenhouse gases.
Look outside. Do you see any global catastrophe? Point to an ocean that is rising. Point to a methane cloud. Demonstrate in any lab how CO2 could rise past a few hundred feet of what we used to call haze, or significantly increase in the atmosphere and therefore be harmful.

Fact: CO2 occupies 0.035% of the atmosphere. If it doubled it would only be 0.07%. We can all live with that. 99.9% of all the world's CO2 is at ground level or below, 71% being dissolved in the oceans.

Fact: Like CO and N2O, CO2 is heavier than air. By how much? The molecular weight of air is 29, that of CO2 is 44, nearly double. CFCs have a MW of 100. It is therefore utterly impossible for these super-heavy gases to rise to form a 'greenhouse cover.' Wind and diffusion can transport gases but that is to do with mother nature, not man, and the warmers are claiming a rising of gases is taking place due purely to humans and quite apart from wind, thermals, tornadoes and whatever else the processes of nature will do. Our question is, what can possibly make heavier than air gases rise 20 miles to get above 99% of the atmosphere and significantly increase the constant water-vapor-dominated greenhouse cover that enables life to continue to thrive at an average temperature of 13-15degC on the surface of this planet?

CO2 does not rise. If it did, fire extinguishers wouldn't work. A party balloon blown up with the breath would fly straight upwards as if it was filled with helium. Moreover CO2 dissolves in seawater. More CO2 produced just means more is going to dissolve. Scientists are still trying to find out the finer points of how it gets from the sea to the trees. They know of the great cycle in which land goes under other land, heats and spews out as volcanoes. CO2 is thrown out and drifts with rain to ground, gets into trees as CO2 and into rocks as CO3, than finds its way back to the sea, then into chalk, which is compressed plankton, and then to the seafloor which becomes part of the continental drift which produces volcanoes at its extremities. CO2 is kept aloft by upper level turbulence. Otherwise it is always drifting down, not up. CO2 is found in centuries-old ice in Antarctica, way before any industrialisation on Earth. It is a natural part of the atmosphere and as such has a stable cycle of its own.

Fact: The atmosphere on the planet Venus is 100% CO2, produced entirely from volcanoes. Because it is closer to the Sun , its atmosphere is in turmoil all the time. On the other hand Mars, also with a CO2 atmosphere is so frigid its polar caps are solid CO2, which we call dry ice. The coldness comes purely because Mars is further from the Sun . If CO2 alone heated planets up, Mars would be much warmer than it is.

Fact: More CO2 is absorbed by young plants than by grown-up trees. If all we are worried about is CO2 absorption, it would make more sense to cut down the rain forests and plant saplings or even leave it as grass, both of which would absorb far more CO2 than mature trees do. It is hard to imagine environmentalists advocating the cutting down of the rain forests.

Fact: Many scientists argue correctly that natural variations in climate are considerable and not well understood. But the Earth has gone through warming periods before without human influence. According to satellite data, air temperatures in the lower atmosphere have not increased appreciably and the sea ice around Antarctica has actually been growing for the past 20 years. Satellite data from NASA says the Earth has only heated by 0.04 of one degree in the last century, that which would be expected from natural fluctuation causes. This data conflicts with that of land-based thermometers and so is not released widely. But landbased measurements are less accurate because they are taken from cities, which are getting warmer all the time due to their expansion and replacing of trees and grasslands with asphalt.(source: science@NASA, October 20th, 2000)

Satellite data gives more of a global picture. 75% of the earth is covered by oceans. Of the rest, nearly 3% is covered by ice and of the remaining 24% less than 2% is habitable, when you take out swamps, deserts, lakes, ranges etc. In fact we live only on 1.4% of the surface of the Earth, hardly representative of the planet. According to National Geographic, all of Earth's metropolitan areas would only fit into an area less than the size of Spain. It is only a human vanity to imagine that our relatively small inhabited percentage of global surface has the ability to alter the climate of the whole planet. And if we only occupy 1.4%, that means 98.6% of Earth is mostly uninhabited.

Nearer to the truth is that the climate has always had its ups and downs. In 1100 AD the Earth enjoyed a much warmer environment than it does now - closer to a Meditterranean climate in the north of England. Around 549AD it appears a fireball may have swept through much of Europe, melting the facias of some castles. For many years the Vikings wandered around in their shirtsleeves. The Great Fire of London in 1666 came in a year of tremendous drought. This century just gone saw higher temperatures and heavy droughts around particular recurring years. Each drought in the past was described as the worst in living memory. But there is a simple mathematical pattern here.

02-28-2007, 08:37 PM	#7 (permalink)
tdoc210 ashes against the grain Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: new hampsha Posts: 2,617	lulz vote TDOC 2008 __________________ We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that.

03-01-2007, 05:39 PM	#9 (permalink)
TheBig3 killedmyraindog Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Boston, Massachusetts Posts: 11,172	him essentially, its a long story. And yeah, Gore is a shmuck but then you'd have to agree that he was right about his arguments on the enviornment. I figure for every gore theres 10 of us who ride a bike weather permitting so i'm sure it balances itself out somewhere.....right? __________________ I've moved to a new address

02-28-2007, 06:12 PM	#3 (permalink)
~~TheUsedToolguy~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Joplin, MO Posts: 468	A lot of big time environmentalist have their own private jets, which are gas guzzlers if there's ever been such a thing. Other than that, I like bringing attention to the cause, because it's important to preserve good living conditions for future generations, not just abuse the planet as long as you're living here, and then say, 'well, as long as it doesn't affect me, I don't care'

02-28-2007, 08:31 PM	#6 (permalink)
Sparky not really Join Date: Jan 2007 Posts: 5,223	o really? hmm..guess its for real then. I also like how John Edwards is against homelessness, though he recently built a 28000 square foot house

02-28-2007, 09:04 PM	#8 (permalink)
~~TheUsedToolguy~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Joplin, MO Posts: 468	Tdoc?