The BFD | Who Will Call Out Al Gore’s Bullshit?

In the classic Beyond the Fringe sketch. “The End of the World”, a millenarian cult await a predicted apocalypse. When it fails to materialise, one of the cultists shrugs, “Never mind, lads – same time tomorrow. We must get a winner, one day.”

That’s the thing about cultists: they’ll never admit that their prophets are wrong. Climate cultists least of all.

Al Gore is the Grand Poobah of the Climate Cult. His tedious PowerPoint presentation movie is one of its foundational gospels.

Naturally, it’s been proven spectacularly wrong.

Al Gore is coming to visit Australia, 15 years after flying here to promote his film An Inconvenient Truth. Will he now say sorry for all his porkies?

Of course not: being a cult leader means never having to say “I was wrong”. Just attack the heretic for daring to question the Podium of Truth.

I once got the chance at a conference to question Gore about some of his fake claims in a movie shown by activist teachers to terrify a generation of schoolchildren. He went red and started yelling. Now he won’t be interviewed by sceptics, but I hope a real journalist can sneak past his guard when he comes in November to tell an engineering conference “the opportunities and challenges posed by climate change”.

You’ve got about as much hope of that as of getting the Chinese Communist Party to tell the truth about the Wuhan virus.

But, in the extraordinary chance that a nasty heretic can sneak past the Grand Poobah’s Praetorian guard, here’s what a journalist should ask (but won’t):

Al, where’s the warming? The latest satellite data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville shows the world’s temperature last month was about the temperature when your film first screened.

But, wait, wasn’t 2020 “the hottest year on record”? Perhaps by the merest poofteenth, several orders of magnitude smaller than the margin of error. But, otherwise, global temperatures have practically flatlined for nearly three decades – even as carbon dioxide emissions soared (thanks mostly to China).

Al, where are your drowning islands? You claimed the seas had already risen so high that “citizens of these Pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand”. What citizens? The biggest study of those islands show nearly half have not changed in size, and another 43 per cent had actually grown.

Al, where’s the melting Antarctic? You told us to “watch out” for it, but sea ice there is now above the long-term average, and NASA says from “1979 to 2014, total Antarctic sea ice increased by about 1 per cent per decade”.

Al, what’s with all the polar bears? You said they were being drowned as sea ice melted, but even the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which said there were 25,000 bears at most the year before your film, says there are now more – 26,000.

Al, why is the snow still there? You said “within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro”, but there is.

Al, where are all those monster hurricanes? You said we were now getting “a lot of big hurricanes”, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it is still “premature to conclude with high confidence” that our emission have “had a detectable impact” on hurricane activity.

Herald-Sun

None of the scary predictions of the Climate Cult have come true.

A recent review examined the past decades of apocalyptic climate predictions. None had come true. Not one. The peer-reviewed paper examined 79 predictions of climate doom. Nearly 50 have failed to happen – the rest are conveniently still in the future.

In something of a coup for Australia, our very own Great Predicto, Tim Flannery, got no less than three mentions – right up there with Grand Poobah Gore.

Maybe the two of them can do a double-act?

The only problem is that double-acts need a straight man, not two clowns.