Gore at leisure

Tomorrow’s New York Times Sunday Book Review runs Al Gore’s review of a book (Boiling Point) on global warming by reporter Ross Gelbspan: “‘Boiling Point’: Who’s to blame for global warming?” It is striking to me how unhinged Gore seems even in this book review written at leisure for an audience of readers:

Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the American news media’s coverage of global warming for the past two decades. Indeed, when the author investigates why the United States is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that fails to recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he concludes that the news coverage is ”a large reason for that failure.”
At a time when prominent journalists are writing mea culpas for allowing themselves to be too easily misled in their coverage of the case for war in Iraq, Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis of how the media have been duped and intimidated by an aggressive and persistent campaign organized and financed by coal and oil companies. He recounts, for example, a conversation with a top television network editor who was reluctant to run stories about global warming because a previous story had ”triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition” — a fossil fuel industry lobbying group — ”to our top executives at the network.”
He also describes the structural changes in the news media, like increased conglomerate ownership, that have made editors and reporters more vulnerable to this kind of intimidation — and much less aggressive in pursuing inconvenient truths.
Gelbspan’s first book, ”The Heat Is On” (1997), remains the best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists who began to make themselves available for mass media interviews as so-called skeptics on the subject of global warming. In fact, these scientists played a key role in Gelbspan’s personal journey on this issue. When he got letters disputing the facts in his very first article, he was at first chastened — until he realized the letters were merely citing the industry-funded scientists. He accuses this group of ”stealing our reality.”
In this new book, Gelbspan focuses his toughest language by far on the coal and oil industries. After documenting the largely successful efforts of companies like ExxonMobil to paralyze the policy process, confuse the American people and cynically ”reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” as one strategy paper put it, he concludes that ”what began as a normal business response by the fossil fuel lobby — denial and delay — has now attained the status of a crime against humanity.”
I wouldn’t have said it quite that way, but I’m glad he does, and his exposition of the facts certainly seems to support his charge.

Not a hint that any climatological expert such as Robert Balling or Fred Singer has exposed the global warming theory as a shabby dogma. Not a hint that any non-expert might be opposed to the global warming crusade for the dubious cost-benefit ratio of its proposed “solutions” — no acknowledgment of costs whatsoever.
No hint that our way of life depends on the work of companies like the ones condemned by Gore and Gelbspan. On the contrary, the efforts of these productive American companies to defend themselves from zealots like Gore and Gelbspan — well, that is a crime against humanity.
When do you suppose some enterprising journalist will get around to asking John Kerry what his position is on the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol? Or the sanity of Al Gore?