Goracular

Goracular

Al Gore, the infallible pope of global warming.

By JOHN FUND

Once again Al Gore has ducked the chance to debate critics of his global warming doomsday predictions. The former vice president loves to lecture others on the need to address global warming, but usually insists on appearing alone and largely unchallenged at conferences.

Al Gore

At the Wall Street Journal's ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, California, Mr. Gore was initially scheduled to appear with Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a noted skeptic on global warming. Mr. Gore changed his schedule so he could appear the previous day. President Klaus told me this week that the major reason he agreed to travel from Europe was the chance to interact with Mr. Gore. "I don't understand all of this reluctance to engage with others," he told me.

Sounds to me like a case of bologna rejecting the grinder. Mr. Gore knows that the science backing up his calls for dramatic reduction of carbon emissions is increasingly shaky and that even adopting the Kyoto targets for such reductions would do little to address the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Several other critics of Mr. Gore also tried to interact with him at the conference -- with little success. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at Harvard, asked Mr. Gore during the Q-and-A period what exactly he was trying to accomplish in practical terms with his proposals. Mr. Gore ignored the substance of the question and snidely said he was trying to save humanity.

The next question came from Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who has assembled a group of Nobel Prize winners who say many other global problems such as clean drinking water merit attention before futile efforts to deal with an exaggerated fear of global warming. "I don't mean to corner you, or maybe I do mean to corner you, but would you be willing to have a debate with me on that point?" asked Mr. Lomborg.

"I want to be polite to you," Mr. Gore replied. He then proceeded to say Mr. Lomborg's work had been discredited. "The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue," he said. "It's not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."

Mr. Soon noted to me that while some scientific journals have challenged Mr. Lomborg's early work, none have disputed his contention that many other problems should be addressed with a higher priority than controlling carbon emissions. "He once again won't engage his critics," he sighs, referring to Mr. Gore.

I have a possible explanation. The last time Mr. Gore did debate anyone it was during the 2000 presidential race when he took on George W. Bush, not exactly a stellar orator. Mr. Gore managed to demonstrate enough arrogance and pomposity that he is generally thought to have lost those exchanges and blown his lead in the polls.