Climate change alarmist and former United States Vice President Al Gore has blasted the fossil fuel industry, accusing oil and gas companies of “using the atmosphere as an open sewer.”
Mr. Gore, whose climate rants have grown progressively more unhinged, said this week that fossil fuel companies are “digging and drilling and pumping up the fossilized remains of dead animals and plants and burning them in ways that use the atmosphere as an open sewer, threatening the future of humanity.”
Like many prophets of climate Armageddon, Gore has sought to pin the blame for opposition to alarmism on the selfish interests of fuel companies, rather than recognize a growing scientific challenge to claims of a climate emergency.
Fossil fuel industries, he said, “have portrayed themselves as the source of trusted advice that we need to solve this crisis,” but in reality they are responding to “powerful incentives” to keep the need for fossil fuels alive.
It is now clear that the fossil fuel companies were not “sincere in saying that they wanted to be a meaningful part of bringing solutions to this crisis,” Gore said. “Fossil fuel industry speaks with forked tongue.”
According to the former vice president, the fossil fuel industry has been engaging in “massive fraud” for decades and is now trying to infiltrate the political process at every level, including the U.N.’s annual climate summit.
It is helpful to recall that in 2006, Gore declared that unless drastic measures were implemented, the planet would hit an irreversible “point of no return” by 2016. That year has come and gone with no catastrophic results, despite the employment of no “drastic measures.”
Then in 2008, a video of the opening of a German museum showed Gore saying that “the entire North polar ice cap may well be completely gone in five years,” a prediction that proved spectacularly false.
This past January, Mr. Gore made the remarkable assertion that greenhouse gas pollution was “boiling the oceans,” causing “rain bombs,” and setting the stage for “a billion” climate refugees, during an address at a World Economic Forum (WEF) event in Davos, Switzerland.
We’re still putting 162 million tons of greenhouse gas “pollution” into the atmosphere every single day, Gore said.
“That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees, predicted to reach one billion in this century,” he thundered.
Meanwhile, saner voices have begun to prevail in the scientific world, notably with August’s World Climate Declaration, which flatly denied the existence of a so-called “climate emergency.”
The Declaration, whose 1,600 signatories include two Nobel Prize winners, notes that climate models have proven inadequate for predicting global warming, that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant, and that climate change has not increased natural disasters.
“The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases,” the Declaration states. “The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.”
Moreover, the world has warmed “significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing,” the text reads, and the gap between the real world and the modeled world “tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.”