Al Gore

Bill Clinton's had an awfully good week.

First, Al Gore gets embarrassed by Masseuse-gate.

Ed Rendell has been dogged for months by rumors of a possible romantic relationship with a 40-year-old aide. A Philadelphia magazine reports on the rumors in an issue hitting newsstands Friday, but apparently finds no one who will go on the record, and no real concrete evidence.

In other words, if the subject were a Republican running for president, you'd call this piece New York Times quality.

Harrison Ford owns seven airplanes, but only flies "one at a time." For environmentalist critics who say this is a contradiction, he has this message:

"I’ll start walking everywhere when they start walking everywhere.”

Ed Begley's coming for him! But really slowly, on a bicycle, so he doesn't have that much to worry about.

Will An Inconvenient Truth go down as one of the most ironically titled films in the history of American cinema? It just might, as the "consensus" that human activity is primarily responsible for global warming slowly falls apart under its own weight. Ed Morrissey has a fantastic post where he notes that the "Australian and British press have eaten the American media’s lunch on the collapse of credibility at the IPCC and in the anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) movement." He then runs down a bunch of stories that have poked holes in the IPCC report and other claims of global warming hysterics and concludes:

To this day, the American media has had almost nothing to add to the growing list of exposés accomplished by their Anglospheric cousins.  Bear in mind that our current government plans an unprecedented intrusion into the energy sector, entirely on the basis of the IPCC report that has been systematically dismantled by bastions of journalistic accomplishment like the Times of London, who got many of the above scoops.  Such a policy would give the federal government vast power over the economy and allow it to accrue massive amounts of fees and taxes, while dictating the rationing of both retail energy use and the means of producing it.

Why the blinders? Simple: American newspapers and television news bureaus are staffed with people for whom skepticism of the U.N. and politicized climate scientists is tantamount to heresy. Note the line in Al Gore's February 28 New York Times op-ed where he says that "what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption." This isn't a scientific debate. It's a religious one.

A political hockey fight has broken out over whether or not the recent nasty weather in Washington, D.C., proves or disproves global warming. The argument misses the point; weather is different from the climate, and one cannot make generalizations based on the temperatures or snowfall on any given day (or small set of days). While folks in the Beltway are trying to dig out from under record snowfall, folks in Vancouver have to use helicopters to fly in snow in preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Which is the more important story from a "global" perspective?

Global warming causes less snow in Washington, D.C.

Global warming causes more snow in Washington, D.C.

Is there anything global warming can't do?