Drudge Report links to Al Gore's NY Times op-ed, proclaims: "Al Gore Found!"

What about this?

Aw, c'mon, Drudge. LIKE YOU WERE EVEN LOOKING!

Former Vice President Gore was doing something that Drudge doesn't understand: he was working.

Directly below this headline is another: "A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC" by Christopher Booker. I will deal with it below.

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

Apparently the Institute of Physics in Britain has submitted something to the Parliamentary investigation into the 'Climategate' scandal. This is what Mr. Booker is referring to. I'm not sure how international it is, but it sounds juicy, so why bother with fact. As for daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations, I don't see evidence to support this, and put it down to simple hyperbole on the author's part.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.

The defense that there are a few marginal mistakes is quite likely correct. Anything longer than ten pages long will have an error. I have a background in publishing, and have seen this firsthand. The consensus to which Mr. Booker refers remains intact, regardless of errors in the IPCC's 2007 report. Why? Because it is a consensus among climatologists, and they have actually studied the science behind AGW and agree that it is indeed happening. Are there dissenters? Of course. Don't jump to any conclusions just because those dissenters are paid by big oil, though, all right?

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

Put the errors together? And what? Create a very easily destroyed straw man, thereby 'disproving' AGW? No thanks. I've seen that rhetorical trap far too often to fall for it here. The loss of the Amazon rainforest, from whatever cause, should be very much at the forefront of our concerns, because it is a vast network of filtering CO2 back into oxygen. As for extreme weather, climate change predicts both ends of the spectrum, meaning more severe winters as well as more droughts and heatwaves. Have polar bear numbers begun to climb again? Yes, but that has far more to do with hunting bans that climate.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

And each has been a scare story, eh? You claim many things, Mr. Booker, but, unlike the IPCC report, you cite absolutely no evidence. Do you have a mysterious all-seeing crystal ball? Can you foretell lottery results with this much accuracy? If so, do not quit your day job.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

You use the story about the Himalayan glaciers to assert that all the 'scare stories' are untrue, and, once again, provide no evidence of your claim. I'm beginning to think you have little to no scientific background, sir.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

Ah, I see. Piling lie upon lie, you not only bring up the 'hockey stick' from 2001 to slander the entire 2007 report, but you shamelessly shill for your own book. How very... commercial of you.

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

And here we have the charge of propaganda. This is just another example of projection, though on a scale that would make FOX Propaganda very very proud. Keep it up, my boy. I hear Rupert Murdoch is hiring. You assert that it will cost tens of trillions of dollars. No mention is made of the cost of the status quo, and no evidence provided to back up what looks like simply more hyperbole. Will you never state a fact, cite a source, sir? Is it ALL to be simply your opinion?

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by "Climategate", the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

At last, we come to 'Climategate'. I notice, Mr. Booker, that you insist still that the email and code was 'leaked'. That's a very polite way of putting it. Stolen is much nearer the mark, however. I guess Deniers such as yourself subscribe to the Faux Con belief that, so long as you are on the right side of an argument, intent is far more important that the law. "We were trying to do good!" you'll whine, as though that will excuse any behavior. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, when we transgress, you and your kind seem to absolutely revel in mandatory minimum sentences, irrespective of mitigating circumstances. The CRU is only one group of scientists out of the whole community of scientists studying this problem, and never are more than one or two emails ever cited, and always out of context. You are failing to convince me at an ever accelerating pace.

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

Since you have brought up Climategate, it comes as no surprise you would bring up Dr. Jones' BBC interview. That you missed the point of it is even less surprising. While you are busy putting words in his mouth, once again you fail to quote him, or provide a link to the text of the entire interview. I guess you believe in faith-based science, and simply expect me to take your word. Call me a skeptic, but I'm beginning to suspect you have a dog in this fight.

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

The reputation of the IPCC is hardly in shreds, but you are entitled to your opinion. To state that opinion as fact is, however, at the very least, sadly misguided. Or, do you fancy that your opinion carries so much weight that simply saying it will make it so?

It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world's politicians will be very different.

So, you are willing to speak of people who have a stake in global climate science, if they think AGW exists, but you will not look into the funding and motives of those who deny it. Very interesting. You are clearly no scientist, and now have proven yourself no journalist as well.

Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.

You claim quite a bit of money has been spent to scare us, but you provide no proof that the underlying science is wrong, and you do not have any sources proving the figures you assert. Come sir, if the conspiracy is as broad as you claim, there must be some evidence. No? No. If there were, doubtless you would've provided it, right? Or, are you just this intellectually lazy?

With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager "renewables" developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white "global warming" continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein's monster. It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.

And you end with two fairy tales. How quaint. You fail to comprehend the difference between weather and climate, else you would not have made that snarky comment about the fluffy white 'global warming'. Or, perhaps you simply don't believe your readers are bright enough to see through your obfuscations and lies. Well, I am for one, and I intend to go on laughing at paid shills such as yourself so long as you insist on painting targets on your chest and pretending to be a superhero. It has not occurred to you that, even if AGW is not happening, it is worthwhile to live in a clean world rather than one deliberately polluted? That perhaps some stability may be brought to the planet if we can all learn to make for ourselves the energy we need to move our societies forward? That this may reduce wars over scarce resources, and allow us to live together more peaceably as co-inhabitants of the planet? No? Why am I not surprised.

From Gore's excellent and thoughtful (thoughtful--as opposed to Drudge) op-ed:

Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

Wow, I didn't even know Al Gore was missing!

What, was he hiding under all that snow . . . that fell during wintertime?

So whatever happens in the US defines global climate?

Got it.

So, here's your map of the world, Drudge.

Where's MagCynic, Seahawks123 and Cheney2012?

I don't get Drudge's claim that Gore was "missing." Drudge implies that Gore writes New York Times op-eds on a regular basis.