AS IF Al Gore's last apocalyptic PowerPoint presentation wasn't boring and deceptive enough, he had to go and do it all again - for a marathon 24 hours.
A farrago of spurious connections, conspiracy theories and misrepresented facts as outlandish as any doomsday cult's, the former US vice-president's Climate Reality Project finally ended at 10am on Friday.
"The climate crisis is happening now and it's happening fast" was the message.
Gore and 24 presenters whizzed through slides of bushfires in Victoria and Russia, floods in Queensland and Pakistan, droughts in Texas and France, drowning people in China, starving children in Africa, singed koalas in Australia.
"Every extreme weather event for the past year was caused by man-made global warming and much worse is to come. The new normal is setting in ... it's the planet telling us we can expect more wacky weather in the decades to come if we don't do something about climate change," he said.
The only way to stop the climate crisis is to heed the oracle Gore. That we haven't is all the fault of evil climate deniers in the pay of Big Energy, who create potentially deadly doubts about the reality of the climate crisis and give the appearance of a debate where there is none.
The most insidious aspect of Gore's presentation was the way it targeted those who don't buy his superstitious nonsense, blaming them for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in what used to be called natural disasters.
It was hate speech posing as reasonableness and sound thinking. Gore essentially incites hatred against those who dissent from his evangelical thesis, which once looked so plausible. Ever since the overhyped 2009 Copenhagen climate summit flopped, opinion polls show the wheels have fallen off the climate alarm bandwagon.
This is what happens to the boy who cries wolf. No one listens any more.
In Gore's world, there are no scientists who don't march in step with him: 97 to 98 per cent of all the climate scientists in the world, who most actively publish in this field, agree, he said, rushing over the pesky subordinate clause.
Forget that the day before his 24-hour show, news came that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr Ivar Giaever had resigned from the American Physical Society in disgust over climate alarmism.
He wrote: "I cannot live with the statement by the society that evidence of man-made global warming is incontrovertible. The claim is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means the temperature has been amazingly stable.
"Both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this period."
Forget that eminent MIT atmospheric physicist Dr Richard Lindzen, an IPCC lead author, who accuses Gore of shrill alarmism, wrote this year that: "The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this."
Forget that Gore has been labelled "a gross alarmist" by one of the world's foremost meteorologists, hurricane forecaster Dr William Gray.
Gore doesn't care.
He just forges on and, it seems, has a particular affection for Australia, which featured prominently in the presentation.
Local presenter Vanessa Morris was billed grandly as founding executive officer of SEE-Change, a sustainability movement based in Canberra. An obscure one-time ABC radio producer, Morris displayed a photo of the Kremlin.
"This image really amazes me," she gushed, "because I always think of the Red Square as being freezing, but here we have bushfire smoke."
But surely it's not always winter in Moscow.
GORE popped up next, sitting on a couch with young Americans.
"Of course," he told them, "Australia's in the midst of a fierce political battle now and some of the climate denier groups in the US and UK that get money from the large climate polluters have been financing trips to Australia and speaking tours by climate deniers."
Gore's timing was exquisite. Just as the Gillard-Greens Coalition Government introduced its carbon tax legislation into parliament last week, Gore's show reminded us exactly how feeble is its justification.
Cheap, readily available electricity has been the essential tool of civilisation and human progress. The carbon tax is about taking away that tool from a wised-up public, against its will.
Proof that the carbon tax is anti-democratic was provided last week by economist Henry Ergas, who has found several sneaky "poison pills" embedded in the legislation which make it very difficult for a future government to unwind it.
Chief among them is the granting of legal property rights to anyone who buys an emission permit.
Then there is the unfettered power of the new carbon regulator, the Climate Change Authority. If a new government wants to reject its recommended emissions reduction targets, it has to secure a parliamentary majority. If that's not possible, then emissions are automatically cut by up to 10 per cent in a single year, crippling economic activity.
Little Australia has rushed lemming-like ahead of the rest of the world, exceeding even Al Gore's expectations. No wonder he loves us.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
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