AL IS BACK, LET THE YAWNING BEGIN – AT 8:34 A.M. ET:  Little noticed, and for good reason, Al Gore surfaced over the weekend on The New York Times's op-ed page, arguing that nothing has changed in the science of global warming.

Not so fast, says Investors Business Daily.  Gore's "truth" may be inconvenient, but it isn't the truth:

If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."

Perhaps he's trying to protect his investments as he knows them, for he is heavily involved in enterprises that deal with carbon offsets and green technology. If the case for climate change is shown to be demonstrably false, a lot of his green evaporates like moisture from the ocean.

Wonderfully stated.  "Follow the money" used to be a principle of journalism.  Today it's "Follow the conservative money."

Interestingly, it's that moisture from the ocean that he uses to defend his failed hypothesis. The blizzards that have buried the Northeast, he writes, are proof of global warming because record evaporation due to warming is what produces record snows. Except that supporters of his theory not long ago argued exactly the opposite.

Hey, what's a little contradiction?  It's what makes a Georgetown party interesting.

He speaks of "recent attacks on the science of global warming." These presumably include the unearthing of e-mails between researchers associated with Britain's Climatic Research Unit that revealed an effort to discredit skeptics and deny them peer-review, the destruction and manipulation of data, and the use of "tricks" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.

When you're saving the world, you have so little time for these obstructionists.

Exposure of the CRU e-mails was not an attack on science but an attempt to restore science to its rightful place.

Gore says the e-mails were "stolen." The New York Times used to call such revelations investigative journalism worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. We guess it depends on whose ox is, uh, gored. He says the CRU scientists were "besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics." That used to be called defending your thesis and proving your facts.

Finally...

As for the Himalayan fraud, Gore says it's one of "at least two mistakes in thousands of pages of careful scientific work" from the IPCC and its chief, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. Yet Dr. Murari Lal, an editor of IPCC's Fourth Assessment report, has admitted to the London Daily Mail that he knew the 2035 data were false, but included them in the report "purely to put political pressure on world leaders."

That's what it was all about, the creation of scary scenarios based on flawed computer models and manipulated data to promote government action and control. Now the curtain has been pulled back to reveal Al Gore shivering in the cold like the rest of us.

COMMENT:  As we've said here many times, what we too often get from the global-warming "community" isn't real science, but political science. 

The whole thing cries out for a major, neutral investigation of the "science" of global warming.  Considering who's in power in Washington, we're unlikely to get it.

March 2, 2010