Sorry, some of us are disappointing you - not meeting your “standards" - but nobody is twisting your arm to post here. It’s optional.

Dislike of Bush does not equate to making Gore “god.”

You’ve got your facts a little wrong. If you will stick with me, I'll demonstrate that.

George Walker Bush lived in the Texas Governor’s Mansion (at public expense) from January 17, 1995 until he resigned on December 21, 2000. Previously he had owned the Texas Ranger baseball team, but not a ranch.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/21/se.03.html

He had purchased “The Ranch” in August, 1999, probably with the idea of running for President in mind. You know, he had to have a place to live between the time he moved out of the the Texas Governor's Mansion into the White House.

The ranch, of course, served some other purposes, too. It allowed Bush to be the “Marlborough Man” without the cigarette – the rugged he-man - baking in the Texas sun raking brush. I’ll bet he put the rake in the shed as soon as the cameras were gone.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...75BC0A96F958260

He owned the ranch for eighteen months before taking presidential oath of office on January 20, 2001. He now lives at public expense - both in Washington and Camp David. He owns the ranch, but all the apparatus of the presidency goes with him while he's there, including the utter "inconvenience" of the press corps and at times Cindy Sheehan.



Bush does not stop being president when he’s tumbling off his mountain bike or propping his boots up on a coffee table at the ranch.



Uh huh, I get the idea. You are comparing apples and oranges. You cannot make an apples/apples or oranges/oranges comparison until Bush leaves office.

1. Much of his carbon use has been political rather than official. He still uses AF-1 when he goes to a fundraiser, even though his popularity is such that he’s less in demand than he used to be.

2. We can begin to make an accurate comparison when Bush leaves office. Will he keep the ranch? With probability that the Bush Library will be at SMU in Dallas, will he move there? If not, will he commute from the ranch? How often will he commute to and from the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine? Will he “write,” maybe with a lot of help, a book and travel widely to promote it? Will he use a lot of carbon getting out on the speaker's tour?

The fact is we don’t have a good theater for comparison at this time and may not for a few years to come.



Gee is this a prediction or are you just getting in a little practice "tooting the horn"?

Agreed. I seem to have mistaken this as an honest debate forum, my bad. You people can continue the delusion Gore is not a hypocrit, I cannot force reality and the meaning of words upon you. I can only tell you what is fact. Don't be alarmed though, there are people on this planet that also believe it's still flat as well. Have a good debate..I'm gone.

I'm sorry to hear you are going trumpetplayer, but coming onto a board calling members, (PE and I) who have been here for years, dishonest on your 3rd and 4th posts is a best a rather inauspicious beginning.

What a very bad premise.

"Carbon 'indulgences'"?

It would seem from your post that you do not know what a 'carbon offset' is or how it works. Essentially, it's an investment in 'greener' energy measured to literally compensate for co2 production by matching the carbon dioxide emmisions produced with investment in green and reuptake solutions. It is therefore theoretically possible to have a negative carbon footprint through the use of offsets.

This is not 'buying atonement' as the Gore bashers are wont to say, this is buying solutions to the problem and erasing your own pollution output.

It can be argued that these 'carbon offsets' aren't that efficient right now because the industrial base and infrastructure to make it more cost effective are still in their infancy.

The only question we need to ask to make the determination that Gore is or is not a hypocrite is this; "Is Al Gore preaching something need be done and doing NOTHING about his own consumption or doing SOMETHING about it?"

Being that the answer to that question is an unequivocal 'Yes', the only conclusion that can be reached is that Al Gore is not a hypocrite.

The logic is simply flawless.

Now what we can debate on this issue is whether or not he is doing enough about his consumption. Since that is an entirely subjective argument, and since he can 'always do more', then really no one is doing 'enough' who is not a Tibetan Monk.

He does a damn sight more than the vast majority of those with his income and lifestyle, so he cannot be considered a hypocrite. Not liking him or being jealous of him does not change that.

{on edit}- Also, if Gore has invested in a company that offers carbon offset solutions, that makes him very much a part of the solution rather than a mere capitalist. Again, you don't seem to understand what 'carbon offsets' are and how they work as the rich who purchase them do so to erase their "extravagant pollution". Do you also have something against people making money? I'm curious as I frankly have no idea whether selling offsets is all that profitable. I imagine not.

Do you happen to know, or are you just assuming so for the sake of heaping derision upon Gore?

1) If Al Gore actually believes what he espouses then Yes, he is a hypocrite he should live his life as an example, that is leadership.

2) More then likely his espousing of the green / anti-capitalist / anti-globalist rhetoric has likely more to do with electoral power than electrical power.

3) the idea that man made carbon dioxide which accounts for 2% of total CO2 emmissions which are only 5% of total greenhouse gasses (man-made CO2 = .1% of all greenhouse gas) is driving global warming ( which has been going on since we came out of the little ice age in the 1850s ) is asinine.

solar wind is what is driving surface warming ... not human activity ... we are insignificant compared to nature.

edited to remove "Communist" from the list

I do not know this daleing of which you speak

GA you have lumped a lot of things together. If you are going to use the word "communist" in post-Cold War days, then you need to offer some justification/definition, other than just "Daleing" us, with emotional charged, meaningless, empty words.

the "Offending " word has been removed,

Much of the "Green" political movement is just reclothed anti-capitalism that was the driving political force in many communist countries.

I did not mean to offend,

what is this "Daleing" of which you speak?

According to this, it is your conclusion that Al Gore does not lead by example and does not take steps to reduce his own energy consumption. Is that your assertion?



Please, I'm not familiar with Al Gore's Communist and anti-capitalist beliefs, could you provide some examples?



Clearly you do not understand what happens when you introduce foreign factors to a complex system. According to your logic, there's no need to fight a virus because the body is responsible for 99% of it's total temperature.

Just as an example, go into your computer's registry, change one letter out of the thousands of lines of code, restart your computer and see what happens.

Small changes to complex systems can certainly have disasterous results.



So the sun's radiation warms the planet you say?

Forgive me if I'm not shocked at this revelation. See, when that radiation is reflected in mass quantities by ice sheets, there is less warming, when it is retained by greenhouse gases, there is more warming.

Please link a source, I'm curious to know how 'solar wind' is fully responsible.

Meanwhile just how is Gore a hypocrite if he actively utilizes more efficient and cleaner energy?

It's a coined word that has meaning only on this board.

See…

This Post

And…

This Thread

It explains it all.

It really is very simple,

the level of cloud cover is directly influenced by the amount of high energy cosmic particles striking the atmosphere, when they do they create ionized seed particles that water vapor uses to condense on creating the mist that forms clouds,

clouds are the primary reflector of solar thermal and infra-red radiation.

higher solar wind activity shield us from these cosmic rays and lower the incidence of cloud formation.

also 95% of all greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR while less than

I had this all detailed and set up but i accidentally hit the back button on the wrong browser window and wiped out the post i had been working on.

i will quickly try to get supporting links.

these are simple to understand.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...2/11/warm11.xml

[snip]Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.

This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.
[/snip]

http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/Usoskin_AG06.pdf

i will do a better job of this tomorrow i am too tired and more than a little agrivated with my mistake to do this properly at the moment.

I hate when that happens. Your effort are not unappreciated.



Actually, I'm a bit busy right now myself. For now I'll say this;

-Yes, ionization is important for cloud cover and clouds do indeed reflect a good bit of sunlight with a correlation to altitude.

I do have a point to make on what you seem to be alluding to, but I'll try to get a chance to read your links and see if there's anything new there first.

I have also have been too aggravated to try to re-compose a post after losing to connection failures and 'user error' many times. Thanks for taking a second stab at it.

Here's an update.

Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

http://www.msn.com/

What a pleasure to feed sour grapes to the anti-Gore crowd.

What, and significant global warming has not been caused by human action? The facts are in on that one, my friend. There are truckloads of papers and books on this point, and the scientific community is essentially unanimous. Arguing the contrary is like arguing that the Earth is only 8,000 years old and that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's flood. Or that divine intervention is necessary to explain life's variation. These propositions have their whackjob defenders, but these persons really do deserve ridicule. Their personal beliefs are so dear to them that they would rather ignore reality itself than surrender them.

Yes, this is going to make it more difficult for the alternate reality bunch to dismiss his popularization of climate change science with sarcasm. I'm sure they will continue to try, however.