Poor Al Gore just can’t catch a break. First, he was largely ignored during the 2016 Presidential election, then it seemed he was being elbowed out of the mainstream by more popular Democrats. Desperate for relevance, he released An Inconvenient Sequel, which barely made a blip at the box office.
And now, poor Al is being outsold on Amazon by an unknown scientist who’s written an e-book challenging Gore’s theories on global Climate Change … by a lot.
Climatologist Roy Spencer’s An Inconvenient Deception (second edition) has been selling like gangbusters on Amazon, despite being a self-published tome, less than 100 pages in length. The University of Alabama Huntsville professor (and former NASA Senior Scientist for Climate Studies released the book years ago to counteract Gore’s first documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and recently updated it to take on claims Gore makes in his sequel.
Although, the book claims, it’s possible that global climate change is occurring, and even at a more rapid rate than in years past, the author challenges Gore’s assertion that human activity is a marked contributor, pointing out not just that climate has changed little in the past several centuries, despite massive leaps forward in industrialization, but that Gore’s own carbon-spewing activity is evidence even Gore does not believe his own theory: that curbing capitalism would somehow save the planet.
Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel handbook — a 320 page textbook on how to “save the planet” — is ranked #51,031 for e-book purchases in Amazon’s Kindle Store. Spencer’s book? #1,201.
That’s not subtle.
Spencer is no softie, either. As Gore has embarked on a coast-to-coast book tour, promoting his own remarkable foresight (Inconvenient Sequel has an entire segment devoted to things Gore gloats that he “got right” in his first documentary), Spencer has challenged Gore to produce scientific data for his assertions.
Spencer claims that Gore mangles his own climate science, and conflates correlation with causation, refusing to look beyond a conveniently selected segment of time, consider long-term trends, or explore the wider causes of climate change. Sea levels are rising, Spencer says, but at a slower rate and for a longer period of time than Gore admits.
Of course, Spencer isn’t the first (and probably won’t be the last) expert to challenge Gore, who famously consumes far more carbon than the average American, and once took millions in fossil fuel “blood money” from Qatari oil barons for his now-defunct news network Current TV.