Up in Smoke

It's been a bad week for Al Gore. The self-designated savior of the planet and inventor of the Internet now must face the fact that his son, Al the Third, has the judgment of Paris Hilton. No doubt global warming played a part in number three's lapse in common sense. The stress of inheriting a planet on the brink of destruction would drive any millionaire's kid to smoke weed, pop anti-depressants and prescription pain medication, and drive his Prius at 100 miles-per-hour down an Orange County California freeway in the wee hours of the morning. On the eve of his Live Earth concert, a druggie son is it's own inconvenient truth.

One item that the media has not picked up on is the growing number of scientists who have discovered an increasing number of errors in Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, which is looking more and more like a good work of fiction akin to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. On June 30th, the Chicago Sun Times published the following facts that should give even the most ardent global warming disciple pause:

Al Gore’s Fantasy	The Convenient Truth
Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame.	The September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."
Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame.	According to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."
Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes.	The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.
Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes.	Hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.
Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts.	The Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."
Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet.	According to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.
Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming.	The Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

There was a time when the best and brightest of society professed that the world was flat. There was a time when the cultural elite championed the notion that the sun orbited the earth. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 50) was respected for his time and proposed that poisonous mushrooms were the result of snake's breath. The good news is that as more and more evidence brings to light the farce that is the global warming panic, hope remains that mankind will turn its attention to saving its soul versus the arrogant belief that it can control that which has been fashioned and governed by the Divine since the beginning.

Like the smoke from Al Gore III's torpedo, his father's misguided mission will up and drift away.