Gore wins: Facts lose

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The world has become such a difficult and dangerous place that I am deeply appreciative of recent amusing events — which seem as if they were written by the Marx Brothers or Monty Python. I have in mind, it should go without saying, Al Gore winning both an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize. The very sentence sounds like a punch line. But I can't quite figure out who is supposed to be the butt of the joke. I rather suspect that he has one more award to come — the trifecta of absurdism. Perhaps he will be pronounced the world's greatest jockey, or the world's most graceful dancer. It only makes sense, given Mr. Gore's acknowledged role in bringing the Internet to humanity. Whatever the award, the world will receive it with the same demeanor as it displayed in appreciating the emperor's new clothes several centuries ago.

It is hard to say which of Mr. Gore's awards seems more improbable: His Academy Award, although he does not possess a single skill required for filmmaking, or his Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, although he has no technical skills in that area and he has profoundly misled the world as to the danger. It just goes to show how good life can be once you are officially designated a victim of George W. Bush. Once Mr. Gore lost the 2000 election (before which he was scorned and mocked by the liberal world), the world fell over itself showering him with wealth and honor. If only he could arrange to lose another election to a Republican he could be chosen pope, homecoming king and champion of the Soap Box Derby.

Before reviewing Mr. Gore's various inanities that won him the Nobel, it is worth taking a look at one of his related projects: carbon offsets. As chairman and founder of Generation Investment Management — a firm that purchases carbon-dioxide offsets, Mr. Gore stands to further profit from what he sees as mankind's misery — which is OK by me. I'm glad to see he has finally developed the capitalist instinct (like his dad did with Occidental Petroleum and Armand Hammer).

But carbon offsets are a rather strange concept. Let me use a simple metaphor to explain it. Let's suppose that Mr. Gore goes to an Italian restaurant and eats a loaf of garlic bread, a plate of lasagna, a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, an extra large pizza with seven toppings, a couple or three bottles of chianti and a large assortment of pastries. As a result he puts on another 10 pounds. But he is deeply concerned that mankind is getting too fat. So, he pays 10 peasants in Asia 10 dollars each to eat nothing for a week. Although they are already thin, by starving themselves for a week they each lose a pound. As a result, after a week, mankind is weight neutral. Mr. Gore weighs 10 pounds more, 10 Asians weigh 10 pounds less — and Mr. Gore gets another Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in keeping mankind's waistline in check.

Of course, this example is not quite fair to Mr. Gore, because that imagined humanitarianism actually cost him cash money. In the real carbon-offset business, he looks forward to being paid for directing other carbon consumers to invest in carbon-neutral projects. But when Mr. Gore is personally using carbon, as when he flies in a Gulfstream jet belching carbon into the atmosphere, one of his companies would pay some other fella not to fly or to plant a tree or do something to offset Gore's carbon belching.

But Mr. Gore's carbon-offset shuffle is small potatoes, as it were. His great accomplishment is to have shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the thousands of scientists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change while contradicting their scientific findings. (Danish climate expert Bjorn Lomborg's wonderful article in the Boston Globe last week had more of the details.) For example, Mr. Gore warned the world in his Academy Award-winning movie to expect the world's sea level to rise 20 feet over the century. His co-award winners said about one foot, the same increase in sea level experienced over the last 150 years. So much for the Eastern seaboard being underwater.

Mr. Gore also warned that the world is endangered by the fast melting of Greenland's glaciers, while his co-award winners (the scientists) concluded that if sustained, the melting would add at most just three inches to sea level. I guess we'll still have Miami and London despite an inconvenient truth.

Mr. Lomborg points out that while Mr. Gore was (amazingly) technically accurate to warn that up to 400,000 people might die by 2050 due to global warming, he carefully failed to point out that 1.8 million lives will be saved from the cold that global warming will replace. So, global warming will save a net of 1.4 million lives, rather than cost 400,000 lives. In a week or two I will review Mr. Lomborg's superb new book "Cool It," which blows a hole in the need for Kyoto treaty compliance that even Mr. Gore and I could walk through.

Until then, take comfort in knowing that the former vice president's warning about shrinking populations of polar bears is also wrong. Their population is rising. The award that Mr. Gore truly deserves, and the one for which I hereby nominate him is: Best scary campfire story teller. (He should beat out the hook on the car window story handily.)