Appearing on Larry King Live last evening to honor the retiring host, former vice president Al Gore spoke publicly for the first time since the National Enquirer reported he was investigated for soliciting sex from a masseuse in a Portland, Oregon hotel.
It was all a misunderstanding. I was indeed staying at the Hotel Lucia that night. Checking my e-mail on the lobby computer, I found an anonymous message, with attachments, claiming prominent climatologists I’d been working with had been fudging numbers.
Visibly disturbed, I printed the material and started for my suite to study it in private when the night manager asked if he could help. In jest, I replied, yes, find someone skilled in massaging climate data and send that person to my room.
Later, someone knocked on my door. It was the masseuse. She told me she had never massaged data before, but she thought shiatsu and a light touch on the keyboard would do the trick. When I explained the mix-up, she laughed. We talked a bit, and she left. End of story.
Also appearing on the show with Mr. Gore was the new head of the U. N.’s climate panel, Sucrose Sucrose-Ghali, sister of former U. N. General Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Both she and Gore acknowledged that global warming has been exposed as a sophisticated hoax perpetrated by several now-discredited climatologists. “The scientists responsible were vested in trying to prove something that wasn’t so in order to secure grants and garner honors and fame,” Boutros-Ghali said. “They assumed they’d never be found out. Shows what they know.”
In a startling reversal, Gore claimed that global cooling, not global warming, is really the greatest threat mankind faces. “The most recent reliable data suggest earth is actually heading into a Little Ice Age caused mainly by human activity. We now believe nuclear weapons testing in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly by the United States, shifted the planet on its axis, exposing less of the surface to the sun’s rays.”
Other reasons for the cooling earth, Gore added: “Widespread use of refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioners. They have become ubiquitous over the last fifty years, even in remote areas. Every time someone peeks in the fridge to see what’s in there, every time someone cranks up the AC, cold air escapes and temperatures decline worldwide. The result: falling sea levels as more and more water becomes locked up in polar caps and glaciers. That means less rain and, eventually, drought, famine, pestilence and a whole host of Biblical plagues.”
What to do? For a start, Boutros-Ghali suggested that everyone see Gore’s new feature documentary, An Inconvenient Truth II: This Time I’m Right. “To slow planetary cooling, Mr. Gore offers common-sense solutions, such as giving tax breaks for SUV purchases; burning more coal; revoking the ban on CFC compounds [found in aerosol spray propellants and AC units] to open holes in the ozone layer, allowing more solar radiation to reach the earth; and firing the Amazon rain forest, creating particulate barriers in the stratosphere to keep heat from escaping into space.”
The former vice president recently founded “Cooler Heads International, LLC, Ontario (CHILLCO), a Canadian-based firm which invests institutional funds in global warming technologies and concepts designed to combat global cooling.
Individuals also have a role to play in saving the earth from another ice age. Open up your doors and windows and turn up your thermostats; de-insulate your homes; have heated arguments about politics with your friends on the other side. Every little bit helps. We’ve got a planet to save here, people.
Sucrose-Ghali promised the U. N. would lobby the world community to declare cattle and termites protected species:
Bovine belching and flatulence produce significant quantities of methane gas, as do termite emissions. Because methane is a critical greenhouse gas in atmospheric warming, we must stop targeting these creatures for consumption or eradication. They are mankind’s allies in the climate crisis.
Band-aid measures for the short term? The former veep is pessimistic: “Our planet is sick, Larry. Mankind is the tapeworm in its gut. I am the doctor. My prescription: we eliminate the tapeworm to save the patient. I’d like birth rates at zero in fifty years, humans extinct a hundred years after that. That’s the only way we’re going to win this one. We can’t hide the decline any more, so let’s just get this over with.”