Goracle uses Myanmar cyclone tragedy as a book promo tool

Peter Foster at Canada’s National Post blog writes about the latest example of The Goracle proving himself to be the consumate opportunist – by using the Myanmar cyclone tragedy, which to date has left nearly 32,000 dead, another 30,000 missing, and over 2 million other devastated, to promote the paperback version of his alarmist scribblings:

With the potential death toll in Myanmar from Cyclone Nargis rising into the hundreds of thousands, last week’s attempt by Al Gore to use the tragedy to promote his “climate crisis” agenda becomes all the more reprehensible.

Promoting the paperback version of his book, The Assault on Reason, on a U.S. National Public Radio show, Mr. Gore said that “even though any individual storm can’t be linked singularly to global warming… nevertheless… the trend toward stronger more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures in the top couple hundred feet of the ocean, which drives convection energy and moisture into these storms and makes them more powerful.”

Mr. Gore went on to cite the current disaster in Myanmar, last year’s cyclone in Bangladesh, and the previous year’s storms in China, as evidence for his apocalyptic theories. The problem is that science doesn’t support him.

Violent storms have caused more property damage in recent years, but that is – as experts such as Bjorn Lomborg have pointed out — because there is more property to damage. The situation in Myanmar is somewhat different. There, the lower amount of property damage relative to the huge loss of human life is directly linked to the country’s poverty, which in turn is a consequence of the lack of freedoms under the country’s dictatorship.

Myanmar is evidence of how the main protection against extreme weather is wealth. For climate change activists, however, it is economic growth that is the villain rather than the solution.

Mr. Gore’s book, meanwhile, lurches between paranoia and megalomanic fantasies of a world that falls in step behind his vague “Marshall Plan” to save it from a climate catastrophe whose most turbulent storms lie inside Mr. Gore’s head.

The book’s title is appropriate, since it is filled with fallacies and illogicalities. Its central conceit is that the “climate crisis” will somehow make grand central U.N.-style plans – which have always and everywhere failed in the past – suddenly viable.

Robert Tracinski wrote about the book last May:

Early coverage of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, has focused on the fact that the book is largely an assault on the Bush administration. But they have glossed over the most significant and alarming theme that Al Gore has taken up: his alleged defense of “reason” includes a justification for government controls over political speech.

Judging from the excerpts of Gore’s book published in TIME, his not-so-subtle theme is that reason is being “assaulted” by a free and unfettered debate in the media–and particularly by the fact that Gore has to contend with opposition from the right-leaning media.

Developing a dangerous theme that the left has been toying with for years, Gore says that reason is being suffocated by “media Machiavellis”–that’s a veiled reference to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and Bush political advisor Karl Rove, the twin hobgoblins of the left. According to Gore, these puppet-masters take advantage of “the clever use of electronic mass media” to “manipulate the outcome of elections.”

Now here’s the really ominous part. This “manipulation” is rendering our representative government “illegitimate” because it only has the public’s “consent”–he repeatedly puts “consent” in scare quotes, just to emphasize the point that this consent is not, in Al Gore’s superior judgment, genuine or legitimate. As he puts it, “the ‘consent of the governed’ [has become] a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.”

[…]

His new argument doesn’t do anything to reverse that impression. His basic theme seems to be: if the left isn’t winning in the marketplace of ideas, there can’t possibly be anything wrong with their ideas. It must be the marketplace itself that is “broken,” and the left needs to use the power of government to fix it–in both senses of the word “fix.”

This is by no means a new theme on the left; Noam Chomsky has been peddling this stuff for years. We only think that we are free to write and to speak and to make our minds up for ourselves, the left tells us. But behind the scenes we’re being manipulated by the big corporate media, so the votes we cast and the consent we give to those who govern us is artificially “manufactured.” We need to be liberated–by having the left take control of the media and manage it in our best interests.

Yep, that’s pretty evident by the far left’s fondness for the unconstitutional “Fairness Doctrine” as well as Gore’s insistance that 1) global warming skeptics are nothing more than conspiracy theorist/flat earther types and 2) balanced reporting about global warming will have “severe consequences” on the environment.

Wonder how long it will be before he, too, starts calling for “Nuremburg-style” trials for gw skeptics?