LET US PREY THE CHURCH OF GORE SCIENCE HAS NO TOLERANCE FOR HERETICS. BY TIM FINDLEY l Gore is one scary dude. Even if you co-creator Larry David, lovingly incorporates believe only a part of his nightmare Gore’s younger days with photos and news Avision of melting ice caps and starva- film that fawns on the former vice president’s tion droughts, it’s enough to cause you worry. rise to his great revelation. The cinematic Skeptics suggest, however, that what the for- composition of “An Inconvenient Truth” mer vice president is really doing is meant to mirrors David’s passionate digital environ- galvanize a movement into an ecopolitical mentalism and has the help of huge party more frightening to freedom than any screens portraying graphics of ominously mere meltdown. overwhelming charts. There’s even a Any way it goes, critics say, Gore and his heartbreaking digitally created polar religiously faithful green congregation bear facing certain lonely doom. The intend to shape their “moral imperative” bear, reminiscent of the spotted owl into demagogic power still beyond the that helped Gore and Clinton shut imaginations of most well-meaning down Pacific Northwest logging, might Americans. make the kiddies cry (although it is a What is perhaps more disturbing is pure fabrication), but the massive graphs the truth about who occupies the most of rising CO2 leave everybody feeling a important “Pews” in the church. The for- little queasy. mer vice president has some disciples he The church of Gore science has no seldom introduces. Among them are a selec- tolerance for heretics—“deniers,” as He tion of the richest and most powerful busi- calls them. There is very little patience ness executives on the endangered planet, even for sympathetic agnostics who beginning with Goldman Sachs, the corpo- agree with the condition of climate rate investment giant whose chief executive change but won’t accept the premise officer last year put aside his position as that industrialized society is either chairman of the board of The Nature solely to blame or ultimately capa- Conservancy to become U.S. secretary of ble of solving the problem. the Treasury. Others include the Sun Oil- Anthropogenic (human- created Pew Trust, Du Pont, Texaco, based) activity, particularly in the British Petroleum, Toyota, and, most overconsuming United States, is recently, General Motors. the sinful cause, Gore preaches as Baptized by Gore in his self-pro- he rides a cherry-picker pulpit claimed mission to make “saving the high above the crowd to illustrate earth’s environment…the central organiz- the projected extent of the rising ing element of the post-Cold War world,” red horns of carbon dioxide in the the corporate disciples have already set atmosphere, which he expects by up their altars in what General Electric 2050 to doom the planet, unless we CEO Jeffrey Immelt describes as “a act now. time period where environmental No serious scientist disagrees with improvement is going to lead to prof- LOOK, UP IN THE SKY! that, he sermonizes, “zero. Not one.” itability.” And that’s another of the biblical pro- “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film IT’S, WELL, JUST THE SUN, nouncements that bothers many, by Laurie David, does deal with the AND THE HEAT’S ON including at least some of the 17,000 horrors of global warming, but it is scientists whose signatures appeared on also a paean to Gore himself. It seam- FOR AL GORE AND a petition questioning that conclusion lessly wanders away from its theme to or its implications as early as 1997. muse on Gore’s own life and his dis- GLOBAL WARMING. As recently as June 2007, noted appointment at losing the 2000 elec- environmental scientist Eric Steig, who tion. “We just have to get by it,” he is heard to been banished by the Supreme Court and studies arctic ice cores cited by Gore, joined sigh as the film shows him gazing soulfully despite winning the popular vote. other scientists in objecting to claims of “sci- out the window of a helicopter after having Filmmaker David, the wife of “Seinfeld” entific consensus” requiring government ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BARDWELL. 10 • RANGE MAGAZINE • FALL 2007 action on global warming. “In general,” Steig School where, in less than two years, he Armand Hammer or bragging about being said, “the certainty with which this chapter flunked out. He tried law school after that the model for Eric Segal’s “Love Story,”Gore presents our understanding of abrupt climate with largely the same result; too distracted, he has a pattern of manipulating facts to inflate change is overstated. There is confusion said, by his other obligations. his own importance and virtue. Word spread betwen hypothesis and evidence through that No, his mother knew best. The future that he claimed he had “invented” the Inter- chapter, a a great deal of confusion on the dif- ecomessiah was not destined for higher edu- net. Actually, what he said in a TV interview ferences between an abrupt ‘climate change’ cation or media fame; he belonged in politics, was that he “created” the Internet link and possible, hypothetical causes of such cli- just like his dad, a former Tennessee school- between scientists in the government with mate changes.” teacher prodded into running for office also passage of his “High Performance Computer And Josph Bast, president of Heartland by Gore’s mother. and Communications” Act in 1991, some- Institute, wrote: “It is now abundantly clear In the film, Al Jr. lovingly remembers thing many agree opened what Gore himself why Al Gore will not accept our debate chal- those days growing up, splitting his time called “the information superhighway” to all lenge. The supposed scientific consensus on between the family-owned Fairfax Hotel in of us. global warming is pure fiction.” Al doesn’t really lie; he just has a way of In the film, and especially later at the “IT IS NOW ABUNDANTLY CLEAR WHY ignoring the truth. When he took all that Oscars, Gore looks a bit like a frumpily aging AL GORE WILL NOT ACCEPT OUR money from a Buddhist temple during the Superman who is letting his belly get a little DEBATE CHALLENGE. THE SUPPOSED 1996 campaign, he honestly said there was out of control. You’d have to know that “Sein- SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL “no prevailing authority” telling him not to. feld” included an image of Superman in every WARMING IS PURE FICTION.” And salting away the clean-burning coal episode to make that much of it, but film- JOSEPH BAST, PRESIDENT, HEARTLAND INSTITUTE reserves of Utah’s Grand Staircase Escalante as maker David doesn’t miss the opportunity to a monument had nothing he knew of to do imply superhero status to the one-time Washington, D.C., where he was really raised, with Chinese contributions making their way reporter secretly on a mission to save the and the family’s Tennessee farm, where he to the White House. planet. says he spent four months every year, In the film, Gore concedes that he felt Gore says that while he was at Harvard in although critics say it was less. guilty about his father raising tobacco, espe- 1967, he was first awakened to global warm- “My dad was cattle breeder of the year,”he cially when his sister died of lung cancer. He ing by his “mentor,” Dr. Roger Revelle. “[Rev- says in the film, as it shows one of the Black doesn’t mention that he later railed at a U.N. elle] was startled by what he found in his Angus on his Tennessee pasture. He doesn’t meeting that smoking was a major factor in study ofCO2 and I soaked it up like a mention that Al Gore Sr. got those prize bulls creating global warming. He doesn’t claim sponge,”Gore says. as a gift from his political buddy Armand that Gore Black Angus never have flatulence, Revelle has since died, but not before Hammer, founder of Occidental Oil Compa- but the guru of global warming also believes working with former NASA climate scientist ny, and identified before his death in 1990 as methane from cattle is a major contributor. Frederick Singer, who has for years been an agent of the Soviet Union for the past 40 But it’s oil and the wasteful use of fossil Gore’s nemesis, a man whom Gore accuses of years or more. Al Gore Sr.’s main role with the fuel that he blames for most of it. That may being in the employ of the big oil companies cattle, critics have reported, was to extort explain why—in the largest disposal of U.S. (something Singer adamantly denies). political contacts to pay extreme prices for resources in history, and in what would have Before he died in 1991, Revelle produced a Black Angus they didn’t really need. been a major scandal only 20 years earlier— paper with Singer suggesting that people But no matter, aside from what he says in Gore (in 1998) engineered the sale of the Elk should not be made to become alarmed over the film was his great delight as a youngster Hills Naval Oil Reserve to Occidental Petrole- the “greenhouse effect” and global warming. working in his father’s tobacco sheds, young um, the company owned by his dad’s old “Drastic, precipitous and, especially, uni- Al was never a farmer. Nor was he the segre- buddy Armand Hammer, who had awarded lateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse gationist his father was said to be. Fresh out of the elder Gore with a lucrative shareholding impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and Harvard, young Al was a liberal who knew the position on the “Occi” board after he left the increase the human costs of global poverty, world was doomed.