Ross Clark Ross Clark

The unhinged environmentalism of Al Gore

Al Gore at Davos (Credit: Getty images)

Lucky old Americans. They only had to put up with one fruitcake as president, in Donald Trump. It could have been worse. But for a few hanging chads in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, they could have ended up with Al Gore. 

It isn’t just the hanging chads, though, that have become unhinged, but Gore himself. In an extraordinary speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, an increasingly crimson Gore angrily berated the rest of the world – Greta Thunberg and other youthful activists excepted – for failing to realise just how close we are to climate apocalypse. ‘People are familiar with the thin blue line which astronauts bring back in their pictures from space,’ he began. ‘That’s the part of the atmosphere which has the oxygen and it’s only 5 to 7 km thick. That’s what we are using as an open sewer.’   

The trouble is, Gore’s own grip on science doesn’t seem all that great

Actually, the troposphere is twice that thick, and there is plenty of oxygen in the much-thicker stratosphere which lies above it.

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