Al Gore, the biggest and noisiest pusher, mover, and shaker of global warming politics repeatedly claims that 98 percent of scientists agree with him. He also urges media to ignore the climate skeptics. Cynical politics may be redundant, but it’s hard to imagine a more cynical political issue than global warming. The underlying agenda of the Kyoto Protocol was not intended to save the world but to reduce energy consumption, thereby impeding the economic activities especially of the United States. Can George W. Bush, therefore, be blamed for not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol?
The challenge for Gore is the inconvenient truth that the planners and policy makers in a democracy have to convince the masses first and foremost. Even if propaganda is always a few steps ahead of the great multitudes, and aimed to keep the public alarmed with the threat of an endless series of scarecrows, people will not act unless they are fully convinced. And they will only be convinced if the majority of the experts can vouch for whatever is proposed. The great multitudes are not convinced on the apocalyptic global warming which is Gore’s favorite scarecrow.
Gore need not waste all of his time lobbying in the august halls of congress, or enlisting the support of media to evangelize for him. What he should be doing is convince the scientific community to support his claims.
In the early 1990s when Gore began his campaign of global warming, a poll of scientists showed that only 18 percent thought that there was any evidence to support Gore’s theory. Even a survey conducted by Greenpeace concluded that only 13 percent of climate experts were willing to testify about the likelihood of global warming. Recently, 31,000 scientists who previously approved the dogma of global warming turned around and signed a statement urging the US government not to take hasty and expensive actions to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
It seems that Al Gore is losing credibility, in spite of the Nobel Peace Prize.
