The power to tax is the power to destroy.

"Free Market", yeah, right. They are just echoing the corporate line.

Check out Richard Harris's and Bob Mondello's review yesterday (24May06) of "An Inconvenient Truth" It left me with that mild aftertaste of disgust that has become quite familar to me in listening to NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5428154

My revulsion is due to my growing recognition that NPR, like the "MainStream Media," vitiates itself with meaningless "balance" and contorts itself to find "controversy" in order to appear unbiased, and in the process sacrifices the truth.

Near the beginning of the piece, Harris quickly states that Gore gets it right on all the big questions, and then quibbles that the problem with Global Warming is that the facts get "sticky" when getting into "particulars." He gives Kilimanjaro as an example, stating that there is some debate as to whether or not the receding snowcap is due to decreasing precipitation or increasing temperatures.

This is incredibly patronizing for a variety of reasons. Firstly, surely Harris must realize the threat of Global Warming is not that every single spot on earth will experience the same slight increase in mean temperature? Global warming means climate change, and this change will be uneven, and could easily be in the form of decreased precipitation on the top of Kilimanjaro.

Secondly, Harris mentions 1900 as when Kilimanjaro's snowcap started declining, but fails to mention that industrial release of CO2 started to become significant at about that time.

Thirdly and most importantly, no one, not even Gore, is saying that you can definitively blame specific incidents, like Kilimanjaro, on Global Warming. This is not a "problem" with Climate Change Theory. Climate Change due to Global Warming has and always will be a statistical argument about general trends. Global warming can not and has never been used to predict or definitively explain specific localized events.

Harris is just taking apart a scientific strawman so that he can prove he is unbiased to his listners. Someone should tell Mr. Harris that if this NPR thing doesn't work out, he can probably get a job with cigarette manufacturers. They pay well for this kind of reasoning.

Harris also states that Gore's "lift system" implies that global temperature will follow exactly along with the CO2 curve. Fine, except that Harris does NOT mention that Gore never states the scaling, nor makes a prediction of a 10 degree C rise by 2100, which is what a tight correlation would predict.

Gore's "lift system" is a dramatic and cinematic way to illustrate a larger point, that as CO2 rises, so does temperature. Harris never mentions that there is NO REAL SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSY on this larger point. You can't explain the current rise in temperature without accounting for the current rise in CO2. I can only suppose that mentioning this larger point, perhaps the most important point of the whole movie, would violate the seeming rule of avoiding saying anything of significance and certainly violate the rule of making as few concessions to Gore as possible. But maybe it's just that truth is optional but finding some sort of fake controversy to prattle on about is absolutely mandatory.

The time that Harris wastes on these "particulars" is way out of proportion to their significance. At the beginning, Harris states that Gore gets the "big picture" questions correct, but never again mentions it. Moreover he does this so quickly (16 seconds out of a 500 second piece) that he must have been glad to get "Gore is right" part over with in order to get to the juicy "controvery" stuff.

The coup de grace comes at the end, when Harris asks "where was this Al Gore when he had 8 years in the White House?" Perhaps Mr. Harris was on another planet at the time, or had not mastered reading English until 2001. It's more likely, however, that he has the peculiar selective amnesia that afflicts the chattering elites who live about our capitol. That would explain why he cannot remember Ken Starr, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Travelgate, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and all the other issues that filled our media during the Clinton presidency. It would also explain why Harris can't remember how the press howled with boredom every time the "wooden" and "wonkish" Gore brought up any issue that he, Gore, cared about. It would exlain why Harris can't seem to remember anything about certain well beloved topics like Love Story, canoe trips, and flannel shirts that the press couldn't seem to get enough of during Gore's campaign. It would explain why Harris can't remember Gore promoting a carbon tax in 1993, or supporting higher CAFE limits for trucks. For if Harris had remembered any of these, he surely could have answered his own question.

Mr. Harris should have asked why didn't we see this more likeable Al Gore at the time? Why, point the finger everywhere but at yourself and the press, Mr. Harris. I'm sure you can find someone to blame, like the Democratic party, or Gore's advisors, or just Gore himself. Perhaps he was just too busy "inventing" the internet at the time to talk about the environment.

I will end by stating that it's normally not good practice to blame the messenger for the message. But it becomes a different matter if the messenger puposefully drops the ball and gives you a bunch of garbage instead.

RedCharlie,
What the heck are you talking about?

Wulf,
Is this first in a series? Is privatizing the FDA next? ;-)

Just make sure you don't scare someone and tell them that UL, who verifies electronics' safety, isn't a government agency. The moonbats are all going to have to move into concrete homes so they don't burn down...

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