This year's Tribeca Film Festival is featuring some very
interesting films, and I was looking forward to attending some of
the theatrical previews until I learned that Al Gore would be
opening the festival on April 25. I'm sorry, but the more I hear
the former vice president sound the alarm of global warming, the
more I ponder whether he is a shyster or simply certifiable. What
I find truly frightening are the masses of people who've
swallowed his carbon footprint scam without questioning what it
has to do with lessening global warming. I can't be the only
person who's figured out how ludicrous this concept is, and yet
every day I read about more and more intelligent individuals
succumbing to the scheme. Apparently, the organizers of the
Tribeca Film festival are among those under Mr. Gore's spell.
This was made obvious in a press release announcing details of
the opening night festivities.
"The global climate crisis is the paramount challenge facing
humanity, and the goal of the SOS campaign and Live Earth
concerts is to trigger a groundswell of people worldwide who will
make solving the climate crisis a priority and make meaningful
changes in their lives," the founder of the SOS campaign and
producer of Live Earth, Kevin Wall, said. "… and here I
was worrying about terrorists.
SOS's Live Earth global concert series is set for July 7 this
year and rock celebrities, like Madonna and the Red Hot Chili
Peppers, will be flying in from all from corners of the globe,
emitting massive greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to perform
in London. According to the recent press release, the mission of
the SOS Short Film program is to create educational and
compelling films that highlight the problems of the global
climate crisis. Ay there's the rub, folks. Is it indeed a crisis
or just a way to scare us all to death while some enterprising
hucksters make money off the hysteria?
I discovered that global warming advocates can be far more
vicious than the usual pro-choice or gay rights critics of my
columns. When I wrote about Bob Murray - the CEO of Murray Energy
as a CEO with a Spine for daring to question the issue of climate
control proposals in Congress - the hate mail was filled with
vile personal invectives rather than substantive debate. There is
no possible way to repeat what I was actually called by these
eco-maniacs (colon blow being the mildest) but the gist of their
complaints was that I was an idiot to deny global warming.
Considering that I never denied that the planet is getting warmer
just indicates that deep thinking is obviously not my
correspondents' forte. After these unseasonably cold past weeks,
warming would have felt rather pleasant, but calling it a crisis
that threatens our very existence is to reduce science to an
Irwin Allen disaster movie.
Why is it so easy to convince people that shrinking glaciers will
drown the coastal cities? What's even more amazing is making them
believe that the danger is imminent. The truth is that while
parts of the glaciers are receding, other parts are growing.
"An Inconvenient Truth" showed glaciers in Antarctica
melting and falling into the sea. That's the normal process of
creating other glaciers. The film didn't mention that the Hubbard
Glacier in Alaska's Tongass National Forest is advancing so
rapidly, it threatens to close off a major inlet. That would be
too inconvenient. Instead let the affluent pay a company to
offset their carbon footprint so they can continue with their
greedy energy consumptive lifestyles. What's that you say? Mr.
Gore founded such a carbon footprint removal company in 2004? How
convenient. Meanwhile, the rest of us must change how we live or
else.
Here in New York, Con Edison has started a program offering free
compact fluorescent light bulbs to replace the incandescent ones,
as Mr. Gore recommended. But scientists have been worried about
how to dispose of these special bulbs because they contain
mercury which is poisonous. So has anyone wondered about the
impact of millions of these bulbs leaching mercury into
landfills? Common sense would be nice once in a while. Human
beings can do a lot to clean up the environment by not polluting
the air and water, but the climate is controlled by Mother
Nature.
Sadly, I probably won't be getting any special press passes to
the red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival, and I would have
enjoyed seeing "Spiderman 3." But as for Al Gore, I
think we dodged a bullet in 2000. Let the hate mail begin.