Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Weather Channel Founder Wants Al Gore Sued

Apparently the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, a disbeliever in global warming, feels that his own Weather Channel has lost its way in advocating global warming as a reality. He wants to sue Al Gore and anyone selling warming credits to expose the "fraud" of global warming since the press won't give anyone of the opposing viewpoint the time of day.

I say, good for him. Interesting that I can't find this story anywhere on the New York Times or CNN.

Sue Al Gore for Fraud

Weather Channel Founder: Sue Al Gore for Fraud

That's an interesting idea, sueing al and taking all his money. Might take him down a peg or two? I doubt it though, Al's part of that elitest mindset that thinks everyone ELSE should do their part while he continues to live ostentaniously. I'd think it would be hilarious justice for HIS wealth to get spread around a little more evenly. The sad fact is that it would mostly be the lawyers who get the money, and I disrespect lawyers about as much as I disrespect hypocrite limosine liberals.

Seriously, why doesn't he go around buying "enviro-friendly" vehicles for us "small folk" with his vast wealth? Why doesn't he sell that huge energy consuming mansion of his (with the mercury laden "enviro-friendly" light bulbs) and use that money to purchase biodegradable toilet paper for everyone...that'll fix the planet.


TEEEEEEJ

Al Gore has gone off the deep end -- or I'd believe that if he wasn't making so much money at this. He's even selling "carbon credits" to himself from one of his own companies to "compensate" for the huge carbon footprint of his house. Nice racket, if you can get away with it. Unfortunately, the little people like us don't have the resources or the chutzpah of Enviro-man.

My problem with climate change is that the climate is always changing. I have a great deal of skepticism about humanity having much to do with it -- and I definitely don't think we should enact radical changes in the way we live that can damage the economies of whole nations without being a little more sure of our facts. Remember, those who shout the loudest about their concern for others frequently have motives that won't stand up to the light of day.

Nan

DH and his step dad always joke about the carbon credits or whatever. Talked about printing some up and selling them on Ebay . I'll have to forward these articles on to his step dad - he'll get a kick out of them.

That said... the movie Gore did - I forget the name of it and the exact facts but a judge in Great Britain somewhere said that the vast majority of the science was faulty or misleading etc., and the articles I read said like 3/4 of the rest of it was things like the 2000 election and nice scenery and waxing poetically. I haven't seen it and probably won't, but I found that interesting.

Not that I remember... but in the 70s, wasn't another ice age coming? I think, like Nan, that the climate is always changing and, while we probably shouldn't go out of our way to make a bigger carbon footprint, going out of our way the other way isn't necessarily necessary either. For instance... we're probably getting a big SUV in the next couple of years - we already have 4 kids and no room for friends etc so that's the next stop. Am I opposed to a hybrid? Not if I can find one in my price range that does what I need it to, etc. Am I going to go spend an extra 8G or whatever it is JUST so I can have a hybrid? No.

I'm with you on those light bulbs TEEEJ. They look funny, apparently they can cause health problems if broken etc., and soon that's all they're going to make :p .

Carol

Yeah, that light bulb fiasco really ticks me off. All in the name of some weird environmental science where saving a couple of pennies per bulb in energy costs is worth the extra cost to the environment of all that mercury we get to expose our kids to. And we have to pay more for these polluting fluorescents, too.

That said, I get headaches when around fluorescent bulbs too much and have my office lights on as dim as I can get them. Without having incandescent light bulbs to use to get rid of those headaches, do these people think we should all start reverting back to pre-Edison days and start using candles again? Doesn't all that smoke and wax pose health hazards too?

I tried replacing the canned lights in my den once about four years ago with some of these fluorescents just to see if i could put up with them. What surprise I had when I flicked the light switch on and it stayed dark. Huh? It took about five to ten seconds before they got even a little bit bright and a full minute before these bulbs warmed up and actually got to their full brightness. That ended the experiment immediately. What good are light bulbs that don't get fully bright immediately? I'm sure they've improved since my ill-fated experiment and probably get brighter a bit faster but still, they don't hold a candle <g> to incandescent.

Oh Carol, that movie you're thinking of is "An Inconvenient Truth." I wouldn't waste your time on it. The "science" on that is so bogus it might as well have been made by Michael Moore.

Too bad I couldn't find the original article but here's a story referring to Newsweek Magazine's 1975 article about the terror of the upcoming Ice Age and the threat of global cooling where scientists were also "unanimous" about all the scientific data.


Hot Tempers on Global Warming

I have no clue about Al Gore - haven't been paying attention - but, personally, I am sick and tired of rich and famous people lecturing the rest of us on how we can save the planet by not keeping our TVs on standby. :rolleyes: I reckon I've have to keep it on standby for several millennia before I match the waste their excesses cause.

I'm more than willing to do my bit for the environment, but I am finding that the environmental lobby is becoming increasingly hysterical and illogical at times. It seems as though something becomes a cause, the media gets all hysterical too, governments jump on the bandwagon - and no one is actually asking if it's really helping.

Case in point: plastic carrier bags from supermarkets. Cause of huge uproar in the UK right now. The government even threatened in this week's budget to impose a ban on the things. Yet we are told that the paper bags they want to replace them cause 6 times the carbon emissions to produce and transport.

Most plastic bags are degradable these days (they claim it takes a thousand years to do it, but I'm not sure I believe them). I - and many other people - after bringing them home from the supermarket use them as rubbish bags, which I then put in my wheelie bin. Surely much better than the black heavy plastic binbags we used before? Which can't be as easily degraded, AFAIK. And - following the advice to dog owners from our council - I use them to pick up after Homer when he's out in the woods and then dispose of them in the dog waste bins dotted around the area.

Seems to me, they're an environmentally useful item which are less damaging than the alternatives. But all that seems to have been lost in the rush to ban them in a hysterical atmosphere.

I have to confess here that I'm certainly not in tune with most of the opinions here on global warming as an issue per se. But I do think solutions need to be thought through and targeted. And, too often, at the moment, it seems, the government thinks any solution means a new or increased tax (tax seems to be the only way they can see to fix things :rolleyes: )and some environmentalists are leaping into the fray before engaging their brains.

LabRat

Yeah, I'm all for protecting and taking care of God's Green Earth but I do think the libs sometime go overboard with this whole global warming thing. I'm no expert but I do remember learning in school that the climate goes in cycles so what's the big deal? I know our ozone layer is depleting but the climate still has it's cycles regardless. (someone correct me if I'm way off).

As for Al Gore, I can't believe he won the Nobel Peace Prize for that movie/study/whatever. I never saw it, don't want to see it. I think the title was fitting though because apparently the truth is way too inconvenient for him. I got this in an email and checked it out on snopes.com. It's true. Not sure how this will post cause I just copied it from my email...



A Tale of Two Houses


House #1 A 20 room mansion ( not including 8 bathrooms ) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool ( and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400 per month. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern "snow belt" area. It's in the South.

House #2
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university. This house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house is 4,000 square feet ( 4 bedrooms ) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground.

The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.

~~~~~
HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of the "environmentalist " Al Gore.

HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas; it is the residence the of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

An "inconvenient truth."

You can verify it at:
Snopes Bush vs. Gore House

So neither one of those prominent politicians practices what he preaches? What a shock.

Paul

(Who is not going to rehash global climate change yet again)

P.S. Stephnachia, would you mind removing some of those dashes in that long line there? It's kind of messing with the formatting of the page.

Done!

Steph, I've also heard that Gore doesn't practice what he preaches to others. I have to disapprove of him for that. But for all of that, he might still be right about global warming.

I know that you've had an ice cold, snowbound winter in the United States and Canada, and it has been freezing in China, too. But in Sweden we have had the warmest winter on record, and the media have shown us pictures of glaciers which used to be big and impressive, but which have melted to almost nothing now. You have to admit that a pair of pictures like these ones give you pause:



Ann

Much better. Thanks, Stephnachia.

And I guess I'll say it one more time...

Either you agree that we need to clean up our air (which, BTW, we want to do for other reasons... ) and possibly we save the world in the process or you gamble that a significant number of prominent trained experienced professional scientists are wrong and you live with dirty air and risk global catastrophe. It kind of seems like a no-brainer to me.

And the simple fact that WE can do nothing to save, enhance or destroy the world is a pretty simple no-brainer to me. WE have no control over climate, or volcanos, or asteroids, or anything else the universe is going to throw at us, there is NOTHING we can do. If I'm cleaning up my own back yard, it's because I want my back yard to look nice.

You want to see some REAL truth about this environmental crap, some no bias no BS coverage? I recommend Penn & Tellers BullS*** You'll find out everything you EVER wanted to know about what a waste of time and money recycling is.

TEEEEEEJ

I clean up my own messes and do my best not to dump junk all over the planet -- but it infuriates me when a bunch of scientifically know-nothing politicians start making laws to correct a problem which isn't yet firmly established as a problem and about which they are completely ignorant. Especially when those laws are going to affect my life, my finances and my family's standard of living.

I see an awful lot of political opportunism in the "climate change" debate. Leave it to politicians to grab onto something of this sort to help enrich themselves and increase their power. Heaven forbid that they should listen to any side of the debate that won't help them with the above objectives.

Here is a link to an article written by the President of the Czech Republic on the politics of climate change.

http://heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22902

And here's an article I found a while ago in Newsmax which at least presents a counter argument to the shrinking glaciers.

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/global_warming_or_cooling/2008/02/19/73798.html


Nan

If you want to check up on glaciers and their size changes, you might want to check here, too:

http://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm

http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm

Yes, some glaciers have shrunk. Many more have grown.

There are a lot of links on that second page. You might want to check them out.

Tara

Hmmm... so many different views as far as global warming goes. Honestly, global warming has never really been a big issue with me. I say, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

I am totally for cleaning up the environment, though. I do know there is a lot more litter everywhere and I'm no big fan of smog or chemicals in my drinking water. Although I'm not out there picketing or hugging trees, I do love this Earth and hate to see it trashed. I live near New Braunfels, TX where there is(was) a beautiful clean river (Guadalupe). Sadly, it is getting trashier and trashier every year because of drunk teenagers and careless people who throw their empty beer bottles & used condoms all over the place. Same thing is happening with the Frio River, another beautiful river that seems to be going downhill.

And who doesn't want their car to produce less smog? I mean, I for one don't like walking on the sidewalk only to choke every time someone drives by. It really does come down to politics though. The technology is out there and yet they make it so unavailable. I'd like to buy a Hybrid car but why do they have to cost an arm and a leg?! Daryl Hannah, who is a major environmentalist, has a car that runs on left over grease from fast food restaurants. She said her exhaust smells like donuts. Now that's something I wouldn't mind smelling while I'm taking a walk. So like I said, if the technology is there, why isn't it being utilized properly. I mean, hell, there's plenty of fast food grease to go around!!

So, I guess I'm not so annoyed with people who are so lovingly referred to as 'tree huggers', but more so with the politicians who promote it so much and yet do nothing to make changes. I am a firm believer in practicing what you preach so when I read about stuff like Al Gore's friggin monthly electricity bill, while he's out there shaking his finger at America, I just wish I could give him and every other stupid liberal politician a swift kick in the ***.

But just to be equal, Republican politicians sometimes bother me too because they act like they don't care at all about the environment. They're not out there tisking America, they're completely ignoring the issues. Which I do think taking care of our environment is an issue, not so much global warming.

This pretty much sums it up for me. I don't care what the cause of recent changes is, but I don't see that the best response is to sit back and do nothing, either way. It seems much more logical to me to do all you can to reduce the effects just because it's doing something.

No matter what you do or how little, it seems to me doing something is always better than nothing. If we adopted an 'we can't do anything so let's do nothing' attitude elsewhere in life, think of the trouble we'd be in and the problems we'd still have that were never fixed by those who decided, "I might not solve the problem, but by god I'll lessen it!".

BTW, talking about depleting the ozone layer - I love the story of poor Thomas Midgley Jnr. Who solved the problem in the 1920's of car engines knocking by introducing lead into petrol.

Several years later, he was devastated to realise he'd been responsible for polluting half the planet as a result.

Determined to make up for it, he turned his attention to fridges, which at that point used a highly dangerous chemical in the refrigeration process...and invented CFCs to solve that little issue.

Thankfully for Midgley, he probably never knew that he was responsible for depleting the ozone layer as a result and went to his grave never knowing he had earned the title of 'Most Destructive Single Person on the Planet".

Poor Midgley. Talk about your good intentions paving the way to hell.

LabRat

I don't think anyone is against keeping the planet clean. What I *am* against is people jumping the gun, passing laws that will increase taxes and decrease freedom before we know if there is a real problem that should be addressed and if so what the right way to address it is. And I am very much against holier-than-thou celebrities, political figures and self-appointed gurus shaking their fingers at the rest of us while they single-handedly cause more pollution and waste of energy than any fifty ordinary citizens combined.

Nan

You ever hear of the ozone hole? Big gap in nature's protection against some of the more harmful rays of the sun. Started out over the south pole and grew to encompass a fair chunk of the southern hemisphere. Skin cancer rates in Australia have skyrocketed. UV and other radiation levels are demonstrably higher.

We made that. In a frighteningly short time. If we hadn't wised up and adopted more responsible policies, it'd be over our heads by now.

Then there's the Dust Bowl. Cloud of dust that literally blackened the sky over vast portions of the country back in the 1930s or so. We made that, too. If we hadn't wised up and adopted more responsible policies, the plants in our farmland would have died off from lack of sunlight, among other major consequences.

We've also driven more than a few species into extinction by hunting them faster than they could reproduce and by poisoning them with chemicals such as DDT. We'd have killed off a lot more if we hadn't wised up and adopted more responsible policies.

And we're destroying the forests (particularly rainforests) much faster than they can regrow. Which is a problem because, among other things, plants are what clean up and recycle the air for us - producing oxygen and reducing pollutants. To feed our hunger for beef, the forests of South America are being slashed down, burned up, and then replaced with pasture land for cows. So we're destroying the plants that could clean up the mess, creating clouds of smoke, and then putting methane-producing cows in place to eat up what's left. And destroying countless species of plants and animals in the process.

Yes, human beings can affect their environment. One or two of us? Maybe not. Billions of us? You bet.

Don't believe me? Go take a swim in the bay of any major city. And then think about how many major cities there are.

Whether you believe in climate change or not, this is a pretty far reaching statement. Are you saying that polluting the air or the water - which humans have unquestionably done - isn't destroying the earth? For example: God gave us water to drink. Due to our actions, a great deal of it is now unsafe to drink. We destroyed it. If we corrected the problem, we'd be saving it. To me, that's the simple no-brainer.

Lisa, who will at least agree that the world can't be enhanced - it was perfect when God gave it to us.