Monday saw CNN’s airing of a political infomercial masquerading as a good faith information delivery endeavor, with Anderson Cooper and Al Gore joining forces to hype “climate change”; a euphemism for the narrative of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Below are the nearly hour-long political infomercial’s most noteworthy takeaways.
1. Cooper And Gore Hype “Scientific Consensus” Narrative
Cooper’s introduction described “climate change” as “the climate crisis,” framing the narrative as axiomatic and an acute danger to humanity’s survival. He hyped “consensus” while lamenting the political dimension of “climate change”:
Consensus in the scientific community is clear: Sea levels are rising. The oceans are warming. But there’s not a consensus, at least among politicians here, what to do about it.
Gore echoed the “consensus” narrative when teed up to do so by Cooper and ostensibly good faith audience participants:
And, so, yes, the scientific community is nearly unanimous in saying, absolutely, this is disrupting the water cycle, leading to these much bigger downpours and the floods and, in some areas, mudslides that result from them.
Below is a frame from the political infomercial introductory animation.
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2. Gore Inadvertently Admits His Mission To Spread Fear And Alarmism
Gore pondered aloud how best to sow fear in his fellow Americans regarding the “climate change” narrative:
One of the challenges of this issue is taking what the scientists say and translating it into terms that are believable to people where they can see the consequences in their own lives. And I get that and I try every day to figure out ways to do that.
A left-wing audience member — presumably a plant — invited Gore to offer advice on how to sow the seeds of fear across America regarding “climate change”:
My question is, how do we convince the skeptics that climate change is scientifically real?
3. Gore Hypes Solar- and Wind-Sourced Energy
Gore presented both solar- and wind-sourced energy as viable alternatives to the energy backbone of all modern economies, fossil fuels, insisting that both solar- and wind-based energy solutions are less expensive than fossil fuel alternatives. Despite his claims, he called for taxpayer subsidies for both solar- and wind-based energy technology and solutions:
We have heaven sent, so to speak, enough solar energy in one hour to provide what the entire world uses for a full year. And from wind, we get 40 times as much energy as the entire world needs. We have the tools available now to solve this crisis. …
If you look at all the new electricity generating capacity that was built, almost 75% of it was solar and wind. …
There have been contracts signed for solar in the last few months in three different places at rates unsubsidized less than half of the cost of electricity from burning coal.
Cooper offered no meaningful challenges to Gore’s framing of solar- and wind-based energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
4. Gore Links Zika Virus To “Climate Change”
Gore linked “climate change” to the recent and minor spread of the Zika virus in Florida. Other microbial diseases, he added, could worsen in severity and prevalence should America and the world not undertake his policy proposals to regulate the Earth’s climate:
Changing climate conditions have affected where [tropical diseases] take root and become endemic.
And, of course, in the case of Zika virus, it’s carried by this one mosquito, mainly, and its reproduction rate increases when the temperature goes up and the incubation of the virus inside the mosquito speeds up dramatically. And since they’re coldblooded, in the warmer temperatures, they bite more. And so — and there was just a mosquito-transmitted case of Zika in Texas on the Gulf Coast the last few days. …
The scientists say that the relationship between humanity and microbes has always been mediated by climate, and a warmer, wetter, more chaotic climate favors the microbes and works against us. …
Mosquitoes reproduce faster. They expand their range. The Aedes Aegypti mosquito is the one — it — most fingered for this one. And it expands its range northward in the United States. It also goes to higher altitudes and it bites more frequently.
Also the same with tick-borne diseases which are really exploding this year and there are other so-called vectors is the way, the word they use and snails and fleas. And there are a bunch of them.
But, you know, in the higher latitudes far north in our hemisphere, there has been relative freedom from the overburden of these diseases that have really been an oppressive burden of people in the tropics and subtropics, and that is changing because of the movement of these climate bands northward.
5. Cooper Tees Up Gore To Hype Doomsday Prophecies
Cooper referred to unspecified “peer-reviewed studies” hyping the Earth’s temperature as rising beyond Gore’s predictions within 83 years; teeing up Gore’s doomsday prophecies:
You know, one of the things the benchmark that you have talked about for a long time is that the Earth will warm by more than 2 degrees Celsius, which is about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. There was just two new peer-reviewed studies that are saying the Earth may actually warm by more than that by the end of the century. …
I think a lot of people hear 2 degrees Celsius and think that doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Why is it, in your opinion?
Cooper did not offer any dissenting scientific literature or personalities to challenge Gore’s “climate change” narrative.
6. “Rain Bombs” Are Now A Thing
Both Cooper and Gore referred to “rain bombs,” framing the neologism as scientific. Heavy rainfall, they implied, was a harbinger of an incoming ecological apocalypse.
Gore postured as being familiar with a thousand-year history of global rainfall phenomena.
Partial transcript below.
COOPER: Rain bomb is what they’re calling it.
GORE: Yeah, that’s what some scientists are calling them now, yeah, because so much more falls at the same time. In the last seven years, we’ve had 11 once-in-a-thousand-year such events here in the U.S.
7. “Climate Change” Causes Droughts AND Floods
Both droughts and floods are caused by “climate change,” alleged Gore. The severity and length of both droughts and floods are exacerbated by “climate change,” he added.
All manner of weather- and climate-related disasters are now functions of “climate change,” suggested Gore.
Gore described the aforementioned disasters as “climate-related extreme weather events,” with all manner of dangerous and destructive climate phenomena worsening in the absence of restrictions on humanity’s burning of fossil fuels:
I live in Nashville. Not too many years ago, thousands of my neighbors lost their homes and businesses in one of these events, and they didn’t have flood insurance because it had never, ever flooded in the areas affected. And unfortunately, that’s happening a lot more frequently.
It affects the spread of tropical diseases northward into the latitudes where so many Americans live. And the droughts get deeper and longer. So — and by the way, the 2 degree figure is just — it’s not a, you know, a scientific threshold. It’s just sort of a compromise between what the scientists say is getting into the real danger zone and what the politicians felt like it might be possible to hold the increase to.
Cooper cast natural disasters as functions of “climate change,” introducing a Louisiana woman who connected 2016’s floods in Baton Rouge to “climate change.”
Partial transcript below.
COOPER: Let’s just get to our first audience question. The first question comes from Kevia Bolds from Louisiana. She’s lived through two natural disasters. She’s here with her daughter. Kevia, welcome. What’s your question?
QUESTION: Hi, hello. Last year, my family and I went through the flood of Baton Rouge. Within a 24-hour period, the water went from being knee-deep to over eight feet of water.
GORE: Wow.
QUESTION: Which meant that we had to be rescued by boat by my brother. Also, living in Louisiana, we’re always receiving weather alerts, flash flood warnings trying to prepare us for the disaster, but nothing would have prepared my family or myself for having to start over after going through Katrina. So my question to you would be, how do you think the warming trends have affected these disasters?
8. Gore Thinks Carbon And Carbon Dioxide Are The Same Thing
Despite posturing as scientifically inclined, Gore regularly refers to carbon dioxide as “carbon”; he describes CO2 as a “pollutant.”
“The climate crisis is still inconvenient for the large carbon polluters,” said Gore, indirectly referring to large companies as “carbon polluters.”
9. Those Rejecting His Narrative Are “Climate Deniers”
Gore deployed the term “climate denier,” a nonsense term coined by leftists and alluding to Holocaust denialism:
[President Donald Trump has] surrounded himself with a rogue’s gallery of climate deniers. And I actually did feel there was a real chance that he might come to his senses and stay in the Paris agreement. But I was wrong about that.
10. CNN Played Part Of Gore’s Upcoming Agitprop Film
Below is the official trailer for “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power.”
CNN played a segment of Gore’s upcoming agitprop film, complete with dramatic music, evocative editing and computer-generated animations:
11. “Climate Change” Is A “Right And Wrong” Issue, Like Civil Rights
People will realize that acceptance of the “climate change” narrative is the moral and right thing to do, asserted Gore, using the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a historical analogue. In so doing, he also referred to “gay rights”:
When I was a boy growing up a lot of the time in the South, I remember when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. I’ll tell you, the resistance to civil rights laws was just as fierce, if not more so, than the resistance to solving the climate crisis. But ultimately, we crossed a political tipping point and people realized, oh, it’s just really a question of right and wrong.
Take the gay rights revolution. If somebody had told me even five years ago that in the year 2017 gay marriage would be legal in all 50 states and would be accepted, honored, and celebrated by two-thirds of the American people, I would have said, “Well, I sure hope so, but what are you smoking? Because it doesn’t seem very likely.”
But it happened when the strawmen were pushed out of the way and the underbrush was cleared and you saw that it was really a choice between what’s right and what’s wrong. The climate movement is getting to that point now, and the solar energy revolution is getting to that point. When my movie came out a decade ago, that technology curve had just started to go up. Now it’s gone way up. It has really increased dramatically.
12. Jesus Believes In “Climate Change”
CNN scheduled a Catholic priest to hype “climate change” as a “spiritual issue,” teeing up Gore to frame his narrative via co-option of Christianity.
Father John Rausch cast “climate change” as illustrative of Godly and ubiquitous interconnectedness.
Partial transcript below.
RAUSCH: Vice President Gore, as a priest living in Central Appalachia, I’ve come to realize that the climate crisis, I believe, is a crisis in spirituality.
GORE: Yeah.
RAUSCH: And I mean by spirituality a connectedness, a connectedness, a spiritual connectedness that we all are connected, we are connected to nature. We’re also connected to God. OK.
Appalachia has really fueled the prosperity of America for a long time, through its coal and other natural resources. Now, many people in Appalachia have done very well by that, and we have some very terrific middle-class people in Appalachia. There are many who are living in poverty, and they’re not only living in poverty, they’re living right next to polluted streams and mountains that have been destroyed.
So my question, Mr. Vice President, how can we influence people to see a spiritual connection in their consumer habits that they can see the consequences of their buying, those consequences have on people in Appalachia and also in other parts of God’s kingdom?
GORE: Well, thank you, Father.
And thank you for what you do. I’m a Protestant, but I’ll tell you, because of Pope Francis, I really could become a Catholic.
RAUSCH: Yes.
GORE: He — I’ll tell you, he is really an amazing spiritual leader.
And one way to answer your question would be for people in all faith traditions to read “Laudato Si,” the encyclical from Pope Francis which really addressed the question that you’re asking here.
My daughter, Karenna Gore, runs the Center for Earth Ethics here in — at Union Theological Seminary. And she was part of a study group, multi-faith, reading that. And so I got deeply into it because of her.
And, yes, the habits of over-consumption and looking for happiness in just more things, that definitely is a part of the issue, for sure.
Now I was taught in my church that the purpose of life is to glorify God and if we are heaping contempt on God’s creation, then we’re not living up to the …
RAUSCH: Right.
GORE: — duty that God is calling us to.
And so this — the way we live our lives is definitely connected to this. It is — it’s not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual issue. And thank you for bringing that up.
13. Cooper Never Challenged Gore
At no point did Cooper ask Gore about his income — almost entirely from governments via agitation related to “climate change.” Also ignored were any economic consequences related to the implementation of state controls over the exploitation and/or consumption of fossil fuels.
State-driven corruption related to “green energy” (i.e. Solyndra) was also ignored by Cooper.
Cooper presents himself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media figure. CNN similarly markets itself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media outlet, billing itself as “The Most Trusted Named In News.”
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