Quote:I have some good friends who worked on super computers to build cloud and climate models. They are very complex, but still reality is even more complex.One moment you're accusing me of attacking the sources, the next, you're dismissing the entirety of climate science as an elaborate plot engineered by a cabal of fake "environmentalists" with a decades-long scheme to drum up fear about global warming, then profit from it by setting up carbon trading schemes? This all seems rather Dr. Evil; all they're missing is sharks with frickin' laser beams on their foreheads.
It might be also that no one wants to hear alternative theories, since they wouldn't support their personal or political agenda.
Do you understand who helped found the private firm named "Chicago Climate Exchange"? Do you know who are the largest investors in CCX? Have you ever heard of Generation Investment Management? Some names you might know in and around the Obama administration, like David W. Blood (see Goldman Sachs), L. John Doerr and his wife Ann(see Environmental Defense Fund).
There is a group of people here who maybe don't give a rats patooti about the environment, but who hope to cash in on the fear mongering in promoting an uncertain future. It's only slightly better than a military industrial complex that cash's in on keeping the world in a state of perpetual war. Could I interest you in an environmentally safe bunker?
Wouldn't it be a whole lot more reasonable to just postulate the obvious: that people concerned about the environment invest in environmentally progressive businesses? That people who want to see carbon trading adopted would be among the first to establish a carbon trading exchange? This really isn't very surprising, or ominous.
Rep. Blackburn once confronted Gore about his involvement with Generation Investment Management. He pointed out that not only does he reinvest everything he makes from the enterprise into educational non-profits, but that it's simply absurd to claim that he has spend thirty years of his life investigating and campaigning for environmental causes as some obscure plot to make himself money. Gore may be right about the environment, or he may be wrong, but it's simply ridiculous to state, on nothing but connect-the-dots evidence, to suggest that this is some kind of decades-long plot. Scientists all over the world have been warning for decades that this is urgent business; are they all in it together with these (supposedly) carbon-corrupt politicos? This would be one hell of a conspiracy.
The very first thing on the Realclimate page is a basic rundown of the draft of the "suppressed" EPA report. It contains nothing new, almost zero peer-reviewed science, and is little more than a grab-bag of well-known, mutually contradictory, denialist tropes.
-Jester
Edit: memory failing, Michele Bachmann, while completely looney tunes on the issue of climate change, was not the on to confront Gore on that particular occasion.