Is Al Gore serial?
I typically don’t care about the Oscar awards until I found out that Al Gore won an Oscar for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Before I start, it should be revealed that I have not seen this film. Yet. I do plan on seeing it in the near future to see what the big deal is. I suppose I should have seen it before I go on criticizing it, but it’s not like I have a reputation on the line. For my purposes I think my opinion would be unaltered had I seen the film or not. Throughout this post, you will see me spouting satirical global warming hysteria jabs directed towards Al Gore. Although I praise him for inventing the Internet, I still believe he is a giant douche.
Don’t get me wrong, the Earth probably is warming. Something should probably be done to at least decelerate the effects of warming. It also cools a lot. Obviously it has warmed at least enough to bring us out of the ice age we were in about ten thousand years ago. It’s natural for a planet to go through periods of warming and cooling. What I am not convinced of, though, is that the planet’s warming is a direct result of human activity.
But how do we know that the Earth is even warming? The weathermen can barely predict the weather for the next week accurately. Sure, we can look at graphs and see a warming trend, but who’s to say where it ends? We don’t know how the Earth’s climate changes over long periods of time, because we have only been logging temperature data for a little over 150 years. Don’t forget that there was once a global cooling hysteria that looked equally convincing at the time.
Alright, so that was thirty years ago. Their science was inferior to our science, obviously. But could you not also say the same thing about their methods of obtaining temperature? Maybe they were off by a degree in the negative direction–especially in the 1800s. This illegitimizes the principle of global warming–that we’re seeing a warming trend since temperatures started to be logged.
It just bothers me when people like Al Gore make it seem like humans are intrinsically evil. Other factors of global warming, such as volcanic activity and solar warming are commonly ignored. Mars is warming up too, you know. So, those polar animals are going extinct? It happens. A conservative estimate of the percentage of all species that have gone extinct is 95%. Many animals went extinct both before and after the earth’s last ice age.
I also have yet to see any persuasive effects of global warming. If it’s so super duper serial, why aren’t I ablaze under the February sun? It just snowed six inches Saturday night. The ground has not been free of snow for well over a month. It’s cold. The more intelligent penguins would be well-advised to migrate to Nebraska. Take a look at the graph again. The record anomalies are about +.42° and -.53° C. The record anomaly is .95° lower than the record high. We are talking about temperature changes of less than a degree. Wow, it would sure suck if the early meteorologists were off by .2°.
Al Gore is here to tell you that manbearpig–I mean global warming–most certainly exists. And he’s serial. It doesn’t care who you are, or what you’ve done–global warming is out to get you. And someday, when the world is rid of global warming everyone will say, “Thank you Al Gore! You’re awesome!” Should we take him seriously? Who knows?
Excelsior!
lol. . .you’ve got it down and you haven’t even seen it. i advise you to watch this documentary with a bunch of other people, it’s a good one to poke fun at and point out all his inerrant flaws and inconsistencies. . . . . . . and how global warming was responsible for all of the bad things in al gore’s life.
he’s super serial with this one.
Anyone who uses the word “serial” in place of serious (a la South Park) should not be listened to.
Al Gore made a mistake between cereal and serial in an interview on Oprah. It was a simple mistake (seeing how the words sound the same), but the South Park folk seem to think this is a major reason to make Al Gore look like a fool and use THAT as more ammo for their stubborn insistence that global warming is a myth.
Al Gore has done many good things and I might point out to the ignorant that he DID finance the people who were trying to give us the internet because he saw it as a potentially powerful tool for the future. He NEVER claimed to have invented the internet, but he certainly did help bring the internet into being with financial support and belief in a vision.
Clearly, your viewpoints are not influenced by any facts, knowledge or even by watching the film (as you admitted). You are clearly biased by cheap sound bites and a cartoon.
Wake up, get some facts, and then write when you actually know something.
Are you that dense?
I thought I made it clear from the title of the article and the jokes throughout that this was more of a humor article. Hell, I even have it tagged under satire. Do you honestly think I would use South Park to enhance my argument if I wanted to be taken seriously?
I have seen the film since this was written, and also took a class based on his views on climate change. I was thoroughly unimpressed.
Yeah, maybe my article is biased, but Al Gore was still wrong about global warming.
The Earth has cooled during the past year and most of our temperature data is wrong.
Al Gore knows exactly what he’s doing – there’s big bucks to be made fighting a global warming whose impact and severity is highly exaggerated. Read some of the deniers Al treats with such contempt (and who he refuses to debate). I’m super serial on this.
I hope by now you (and everyone who agreed with you) have changed your mind on global warming. If not, you should probably emerge from that cave of denial and read a little.
Did you read my post?
It was mostly satire, and some opinion. I am not pretending to know it all. You, however, are.
Is there some new, earth-shattering evidence that it is purely human activity that is causing the warming? Has the sun suddenly been discovered to have no measurable affect on the earth’s temperature?
How many of you actually made A+ in science (geology etc) to give an opinion… Science itself proves and disproves global warming as an effect of human activities…There is an equal probability.. Investment of huge money into some project does not make it true.. Da vinci as the best selling book and Bible being the most purchased book doesn’t make both of them as the ultimate truth.
Just something to keep in mind:
it is entirely insignificant whether or not human activity is heating up the planet or not.
Every single thing believed by some to cause global warming has a negative effect on some aspect of the environment. Our massive CO2 emission, blowing other shit into the air and burning countless tons of fossil fuels, wasting energy etc. – pumping toxic substances into fresh and salt water, burning down the rain forests…
Saying it’s not proven any of that “has an effect” is like taking a mansion, getting a nice fire going inside until nothing but the naked stone structure is left and saying “Hey, you’ve still got a roof over your head, so obviously it’s still a house and everything’s peachy.”
Yeah, not the best allegory, but really, that kind of “Prove to me we’re doing something wrong or I’ll keep going” attitude has led to the USA’s emissions destroying the ozone layer over New Zealand and what seems like half of urban Asia being so covered in smog you can barely see to the other side of the street. If you reduce the habitat of species and poison everything to the degree it kills off wildlife, it’s kind of a no-brainer that it is indeed human activity that’s gotta be blamed.
Also, for another random comparison, just because Life8 and Bono Vox are pretentious and somewhat sickening to watch doesn’t mean there’s no poverty and injustice in the world.
Science contradicts itself all the time but some common sense sometimes goes a long way. And what’s up there in paragraph one is impossible to have no effects.
To come full circle: just because we may not be changing the climate doesn’t mean we should just keep going as we’ve done so far, because that there is SOME kind of negative effect of our actions is so painfully obvious, you’d have to live in manbearpig’s cave not to notice.
I do agree with you, Matt. I don’t think that just because we are (or at least I am) uncertain that the warming is direct result of human activity should be a good reason for us to not look to alternative, cleaner sources of fuel. Keep in mind that this was posted over three years ago, and i have drastically altered my opinions on this subject since then.