Global Warming Boy Can't Take The Heat

Oh, what a debate it would have been: Al "The world as we know it is ending" Gore vs. Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg.

Gore is in Denmark promoting his particular brand of hysteria and our friends at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten invited Al (did you know Global Warming and Bush share initials?) and Bjorn to get together for a co-interview. Not a debate under the hot lights in front of an audience, but a simple co-interview in front of one reporter.

Now this should have been a piece of cake (baked in a carbon neutral oven) for Al, since Lomborg also believes the globe is warming; he just doesn't believe the hysteria and human causality notion, and feels the money Al wants to spend on quixotic schemes to keep us cool would be better spent on helping the sick and needy.

In a WSJ opinion piece co-authored with Fleming Rose (subscribers only), Lomborg picks up the story:

The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore's agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled.

Meltin' Al's mighty mission to save the planet would cost $553 trillion in this century alone, according to UN estimates. (Anti-war estimates put the cost of the war in Iraq at $359 billion.) $553 trillion, if I remember my numbers right, is just over half a gazillion -- and that's a lot of money even for a Democrat.

You would expect the main proponent of spending this money would be willing and able to defend his position. But Al Gore is not willing to do so. He's afraid of one skeptic, and that says a lot about the foundation of his arguments: He does not trust them himself, but his mission has gotten far ahead of his morality so rather than answer, he'll go to a college with his famous charts and illustrations, dominate the presentation, and spread half-truths to a room full of half-wits.

Related Tags: Global warming, Al Gore, Bjorn Lomborg