Now that streets in the New York – D.C. corridor are clear of snow, Al Gore’s back on the climate-change Chautauqua circuit. And he’s blaming television “showmen” for stirring up skepticism concerning the man-made nature of global warming.

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Christianity Today ran that photo back in May 2006 with a caption that read: “Al Gore preaches the message of global warming.” The article read:

Al Gore is back. Not as a political candidate, but as a Baptist preacher with a moral message. His favorite sermon is about the judgment day that will come upon us if we do not mend our ways and stop contributing to global warming.

The man who flunked out of divinity school is still at it. In his  New York Times Op-Ed piece of February 28, Al naysays the manmade global warming naysayers while washing away the sins of omission and commission committed by leading scientists who follow his cause:

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed over estimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law…It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Hey, says Al, “scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes.”  After all, science is not an exact science.

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Al also waves away the harsh winter in much of the U.S. by blaming it on global warming, all the while reminding us sinners in his erstaz Church of Global Warming that:

Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Whatever that means.

With the exception of attributing the harsh U.S. winter weather to global warming, Al’s Op-Ed offers little that’s new, coming from him. With one exception, perhaps — he’s blaming television for creating naysayers.

[C]hanges in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

You suppose he’s talking about one or two persons on the FOX network?

If only, Al suggests, we could return to the days when newspapers and magazines dominated the dissemination of information.

Take, for example, an article on climate change that appeared behind this cover of TIME magazine dated June 24, 1974.

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The article was entitled “Science: Another Ice Age?”

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Now compare TIME’s warning in 1974 to its cover on April 3, 2006.

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So, Al, why should we assume TIME is right this time?