"#NARRATIVEFAIL: Five Years Ago Today: Al Gore Predicted the North Pole Will Be Ice Free in 5 Years."

"Today Cairo had its first snowfall in 100 years."

Poor Al Gore. He almost — or must feel that he almost — got us panicked enough to quickly adopt new rules, and if we had, he could point to those reforms and express gratefulness that we'd heeded his warning and expect adulation for all the good that he'd done. But the very elements of his story that were needed for panic and quick action are exactly what exposes him as so terribly wrong.

He can retrench and say things like: The snow in Egypt is evidence of the truer, overarching narrative which was not so much global warming, but climate chaos. Or: The prediction was about the odds of something cataclysmic happening, the odds were high enough to justify immediate action, and we are lucky that we beat the odds, but we won't be lucky forever.

"When the government is so clearly failing to act on climate change... it's not surprising that the level of doubt about climate change has risen."

A cogent insight — by Green Party leader Natalie Bennett — into a UK poll that shows disbelief in climate change has spiked 400% in the last 8 years.

Obviously, Bennett means to shame the government for failing to act on climate change, but the failure to act is evidence that the people rationally take into account. Failure to act like it's an emergency is circumstantial evidence that there is no emergency, and it can be more persuasive than assertions that there is an emergency.

If someone says that house is on fire but doesn't leave the house, we tend to doubt that the house is on fire and wonder why that person is trying to get us to leave the house. For years, people have looked at the disconnect between Al Gore's lectures about our profligate burning of fossil fuel and seen his extravagant indulgence in power consumption. What going on?

And yet, while Al Gore could institute a rigorous green policy for himself, governments can't do drastic things without strong support from people. There's a terrible bind. The less government does, the more people think that nothing needs to be done. After a while, it's not only the failure to act as evidence of that the alarmist doesn't believe his own alarm. It's also the unfolding of reality without having taken precautions.

Speaking of hurricanes...

... now, some scientists have a theory that global warming mitigates hurricanes.

ADDED: Meanwhile...  "Al Gore’s Incredible Shrinking Climate Change Footprint."

"Al Gore made $200 million. Good for him!"

Said Meade. Acknowledging that I got the reference, I said, "But he didn't do it alone..."

Meade has his computer screen open to Drudge, the right 2/3 of which looks like this right now:



It's all about smiles, as the dolphin in the lower right corner makes clear. Meade says, "Wow, George P. Bush looks like Nixon," and I say, "And Obama too... strangely." The Gore smile is waxen. For all I know the pic is of a wax depiction of the GoreBot, the ManBearPig we've come to dread.

Meanwhile, there's Leo, our new Gatsby, apparently "vibrantly alive." The word "vibrant" appears only once in "The Great Gatsby":

He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

I think you know what to do with that sentence. And if not, my belief in the harmony of the universe — or the mystical shades and echoes of pink dolphins or the reliability of the Althouse commentariat — tells me that betamax3000 will show you the way.

"Most of the woodland wildflowers are as late as they have ever been, and some are later than they have been in the last decade..."

"Bloodroot, red maple, toothwort, we haven’t recorded any blooms yet for any of them yet this year."

Last week’s bloom count lacked forsythia, long past its historical average of April 10 in [Aldo] Leopold’s study and March 9 in the [University of Wisconsin] Arboretum’s recent work and a latest date of April 20 for Leopold and April 15 at the Arboretum. The pale purple of hepatica held out past its April 17 record. Dutchman’s breeches, bloodroot, toothwort, white violets and Pennsylvania sedge were all reaching the record late dates for production of pollen of flowers....

“The same thing is happening up at the Leopold shack” near Baraboo, said Stan Temple, who has kept up his research on phenology as an emeritus professor of conservation. “It has been one of the latest dates for most of the things that we keep track of.”

March and April ran close to five degrees colder than average, but, as Temple notes, a late spring is no strange thing in Wisconsin....

“It seems even later because our recent comparisons have been so, so early,” Carpenter said. It was just last year we set so many of the earliest dates we’ve seen.”

Very late spring. Somewhere, Al Gore is fuming.

Al Gore performs a breathing exercise...

... when he realizes that Jon Stewart's use of the phrase "voracious over-eater" isn't going to turn into a reference to Gore's obesity:



(My edit, my interpretation of what's going on here.)

Instapundit reviews Al Gore's new book.

The book is "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change." Yeesh. What a title. Drivers. But he couldn't just call it "The Future." That would be dumb. And people love lists. Lists make it seem possible to read a whole book.

So Six Drivers. Sounds almost sexy. Six ≈ sex, and driver seems like a way to refer to one's chakra in old songs like "Me and My Chauffeur Blues."

That's all I have to say because I haven't read the book. It just came out today yesterday. Instapundit got to drive into the future, and having read "The Future," can give a substantive account. So go read his review. It's mixed.

"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."

"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants."

Joanna Johnston, movie costume designer.

***

"But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."

Bob Dylan.

***

"How many Bob Dylan songs have the word 'naked' and how many of them can you name?" I challenge Meade with a Bob Dylan test, as I tend to do when I've done a search at bobdylan.com (as I did for the "It's Alright Ma" quote, above).

Meade immediately says "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," then none of the others — not even "You see somebody naked and you say who is that man?" — and makes 2 wrong guesses:

MEADE: "'Mr. Tambourine Man'... just to dance beneath the naked sky..."

ME: "That's 'diamond sky.'"

MEADE: "The one where the farmer is chasing him out of his house."

ME: "'Motorpsycho Nightmare?' No."

In "Motorpsycho Nightmare," Bob Dylan is just trying to get some sleep — no sign that he's sleeping naked — when Rita — "Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins" (i.e., the murderer in "Psycho") importunes him to take a shower. He's freaked out: "Oh, no! no! I’ve been through this [movie] before." Afraid of getting knifed to death, but unwilling to run off unless her father (the farmer) throws him out (because he promised the farmer he'd milk the cows in the morning), his sees his only option as saying "something to strike him very weird." What he says is: "I like Fidel Castro and his beard."



Beards. Fidel Castro made a beard as off limits to an American president — in spite of Lincoln — as Hitler made the mustache. And here I want to go back to that "Becoming Adolf" article by Rich Cohen that were were talking about a couple days ago:

[Y]ou could not wear any kind of mustache after [WWII], because, running from Hitler, you might run into Stalin. Hitler plus Stalin ended the career of the mustache in Western political life. Before the war, all kinds of American presidents wore a mustache and/or beard. You had John Quincy Adams, with his muttonchops...



You had Abe Lincoln, whose facial hair...



... like his politics, was the opposite of Hitler's: beard full, lip bare. You had James Garfield, who had the sort of vast rabbinical beard into which whole pages of legislation could vanish.



You had Rutherford B. Hayes...



Grover Cleveland...



... and Teddy Roosevelt, whose asthma and elephant gun were just a frame for his mustache.



You had William Howard Taft — the man wore a Walrus!



After the war, the few American politicians who still wore a mustache were those who had made their name before Hitler and so had been grandfathered in. Like Thomas Dewey.



Dewey was Eliot Spitzer. He was a prosecutor in New York in the 1930s (and later governor), the only guy with the guts to take on the Mob. For Dewey, the rise of Hitler was a fashion disaster. Because Dewey wore a neat little mustache. Dewey ran for president twice — losing to F.D.R., losing to Truman. In my opinion, without the mustache, the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune (Dewey Defeats Truman) turns true. One of the few prominent American politicians to wear facial hair in recent memory is Al Gore, who grew a Grizzly Adams beard after he lost to George Bush, in 2000. The appearance of this beard was taken to mean either (1) Gore would never again run for office, or (2) Gore had gone completely mental.



The decision to grow a mustache or a beard is all by itself reason to keep a man away from the nuclear trigger.

Are we going to decide who deserves out trust based on they look? Come on, Abe. Lose the beard. Okay.

Pick one:

"How does raking in $100 million petrodollars fit with [Al Gore's] life’s mission?"

"Though the deal’s been widely criticized on the right..."

... most of my progressive friends have a more tolerant attitude towards the transaction: "After what happened to him," in the recount of 2000, one friend remarked, "I’d forgive him almost anything." A politically active environmentalist, too, was taking the news in stride: "I don’t think the community is too upset," he said. "My personal sense is he got a good deal."

Al Jazeera hands Al Gore the second-chakra-releasing sum of $100 million.

Wow! Here's this failed, low-rated cable TV project of Al's. What is Al Jazeera buying? It's going to close down Current TV and only seems to want access to the American TVs that receive Current TV, if the people watching those TVs wanted to watch Current TV, which they obviously don't. There are many, many more spots on the cable TV dial, so why buy Gore's channel? Al Jazeera paid $500 million total (Gore's share is 20%). That seems like a crazy amount of money just to get onto cable TV. The idea is — as the NYT puts it — "to convince Americans that it is a legitimate news organization, not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more sinister."

How hard is it to take over an existing slot in cable TV?

News channels financed by Britain, China and Russia are especially hungry for American cable deals. To date, the BBC has had the most success; its BBC World News channel is now available in about 25 million homes thanks to a deal struck last month with Time Warner Cable.

But the takeover of Current brings Al Jazeera to the front of the line. 

But did BBC or those other channels ever try to purchase an existing channel's access? Would $500 million be the going rate? Did Al Jazeera negotiate only with Gore's channel or did they try to get a better deal from some other channel with pathetically low ratings?

In recent weeks, Mr. Gore personally lobbied the distributors that carry Current on the importance of Al Jazeera, according to people briefed on the talks who were not authorized to speak publicly.

So... Al Jazeera was buying the former Vice President's advocacy.

Distributors can sometimes wiggle out of their carriage deals when channels change hands. 

How long is that carriage deal? $500 million worth of long? And it's not even guaranteed? It could turn into nothing?!

Most [distributors] consented to the sale, but Time Warner Cable did not...

Time Warner Cable had previously warned that it might drop Current because of its low ratings. It took advantage of a change-in-ownership clause and said in a terse statement Wednesday night, “We are removing the service as quickly as possible.”

So Time Warner — which serves 12 million of those 40 million homes — is already out. Did Al Jazeera get hoodwinked by the Oscar-and-Nobel-Prize-winning former Veep? He did what he could for them, "personally lobb[ying] the distributors that carry Current on the importance of Al Jazeera." How much more can you buy in this world? You got Al!

Hey, I just thought up a slogan Al Jazeera can use as it promotes itself to the American people: You Can Call Us Al.