Little "White" Lies May Be Bad, But Little "Green" Ones are Just Fine

In the movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore predicts that the ocean levels will rise by a catastrophic 20 feet "in the near future." The IPCC itself, the "Bible" of the AGW alarmist movement predicts that the ocean levels will rise by 3 feet over the next century. Gore and the IPCC report shared a Nobel Prize in 2007 and Gore was runner-up for Time's Person of the Year for 2007.

The question is why the gigantic discrepancy? After all, it is a huge discrepancy, not a little one. And, it should be noted, the IPCC prediction itself is catastrophic in its effect. If ocean levels rose 3 feet it would be a catastrophe for most of the world's coastal areas and therefore most of the world's population. But, on the other hand, if they rose that much over a 100 year period, many people would think (quite reasonably) that such a rise could be coped with by the use of technology like the Dutch have used to reclaim so much land from the sea.

If people believed that mankind could cope with global warming, they might very well be indisposed to spend trillions of Western taxpayer's dollars on schemes to enrich environmental entrepreneurs, environmental organizations and corrupt third world governments.

Also, the push toward world government by way of a global banking transactions tax overseen by the United Nations and other such drastic and Utopian plans cherished by the governing elites would be less attractive. Basically, people have to be panicked into socialist revolutions. This is why progressive, big government movements thrive on crises and manufacture them when they do not occur in sufficient level of urgency naturally. When Rahm Emmanuel made his famous comment "Never let a crisis go to waste" he was simply mouthing the conventional wisdom of the Left.

In light of this analysis, I found some comments made by Al Gore in an interview with Grist just before the movie An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006 to be very enlightening.

There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Over time that mix will change. As the country comes to more accept the reality of the crisis, there's going to be much more receptivity to a full-blown discussion of the solutions.

It is very interesting to note that, acccording to a study by the University of Colorado:

The actual sea level rise over the last eighteen years is 1.85 inches, which works out to 10.4 inches per century. This is similar to the 20^th century's rise of 8 inches, but much less than the average rise of 4 feet per century for the last 10,000 years as glaciers left by the last ice age continue to melt.

Gore has basically admitted that he has lied by exaggerating the truth about the effects of global warming. Even the IPCC report, which he exaggerated by over 666% is itself projecting that the next 82 years or so will see the oceans rise by more than 3.6 times as much as they have been rising on average for the past 18 years. So the exaggeration is stupendously large, not just a slight overstatement.

But what is really disturbing is the apparent self-righteousness about lying to deceive the public into panicking as long as it is in a good cause. The problem is not simply that a politician is lying. That is bad enough. But Gore is not presenting himself as a politician but as a popularizer of "Science." So we are supposed to believe that "Science" is telling us what we ought to do about Global Warming. What we have here is the corruption of science for the purpose of creating a sense of crisis so that a left-wing agenda can be imposed from above without opposition.

This is just another way in which the Left is anti-science.