Appearing on Larry King Live last evening to honor the retiring host, former vice president Al Gore spoke publicly for the first time since the National Enquirer reported he was investigated for soliciting sex from a masseuse in a Portland, Oregon hotel.

It was all a misunderstanding. I was indeed staying at the Hotel Lucia that night.  Checking my e-mail on the lobby computer, I found an anonymous message, with attachments, claiming prominent climatologists I’d been working with had been fudging numbers.

Visibly disturbed, I printed the material and started for my suite to study it in private when the night manager asked if he could help.  In jest, I replied, yes, find someone skilled in massaging climate data and send that person to my room.

Later, someone knocked on my door.  It was the masseuse.  She told me she had never massaged data before, but she thought shiatsu and a light touch on the keyboard would do the trick.  When I explained the mix-up, she laughed.  We talked a bit, and she left.  End of story.

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In yet another case of willful blindness, our formerly august mainstream media all but ignores Al Gore’s global warming millions.  Their secular saint, Prophet Al, has become a very rich man off his global warming “science.”  Yet, whenever he is interviewed by those virtuous paragons among the media elite, you’ll hear nary a peep on the fact that Prophet Al stands to become the “World’s First Carbon Billionaire,” if and when governments – especially ours – enact the cap and trade legislation, of which Mr. Gore is the most vociferous proponent.

The lying hypocrisy of it is just too much for an honest person to bear.

Mr. Gore has, in effect, declared economic war on the middle-class American family through his global warming faux science.  The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the cap and trade legislation, which passed the House last year, will cost the average American family $890 per year.  But the conservative Heritage Foundation immediately challenged this figure.  Using a more inclusive analysis, Heritage raised the estimate to at least $1,870 per year.

Heritage also took the trouble – on behalf of American families – to take into account the larger picture, significant details completely ignored in the CBO’s accounting: (more…)

Please click for Part II and Part III.

How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science – but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.

It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog – a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.

The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the file’s introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.

Not entirely the “death of global warming” as many have claimed – what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement – that of peer-to-peer review. (more…)