A KEY COROLLARY OF THE ALL HUMOR IS CONSERVATIVE RULE:

The gods are laughing (Tom Harris, June 07, 2006, National Post)

Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to realize that this film amounts to little more than science fiction.

Gore's credibility is damaged early in the film when he tells the audience that, by simply looking at Antarctic ice cores with the naked eye, one can see when the American Clean Air Act was passed. Dr. Ian Clark, professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa (U of O) responds, "This is pure fantasy unless the reporter is able to detect parts per billion changes to chemicals in ice." Air over the United States doesn't even circulate to the Antarctic before mixing with most of the northern, then the southern, hemisphere air, and this process takes decades. Clark explains that even far more significant events, such as the settling of dust arising from the scouring of continental shelves at the end of ice ages, are undetectable in ice cores by an untrained eye.

Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide as "global warming pollution" when, in reality, it is no more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball. The hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming is just that -- an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is increasingly mounting.

In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales.

There's nothing funnier than a liberal speaking in earnest.

MORE:
Chocolate, Elvis and foil hats as politicians woo the bloggers (Tom Baldwin, 6/12/06, Times of London)

THERE were people walking around in hats fashioned out of tin foil in Las Vegas over the weekend, the fruits of a workshop on the media at an inaugural annual convention of liberal internet bloggers.

“It’s to stop THEM from frying our brains,” said Lisa Schiff, who writes a regular blog — or web log — under the name of “Crkrjx”. She explained that the tin foil helmets were an “elaborate joke on the much-despised mainstream media”. She said: “Everyone thinks that because we are on the Left we must be conspiracy theorists, even though we have some pretty good ideas.

“I mean,” she added with a sly smile, “look at my hat. I’ve given it a receptor aerial so that it can pick up the truth.”

The Yearly Kos convention is the most formal manifestation yet of what organisers hope will be a burgeoning political movement similarly seeking to harness technology for a higher purpose.

Except for when they try to be funny and come across as earnest....

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 12, 2006 11:19 AM