Al Gore: architect of fear

An excellent article by Marc Sheppard: Al Gore's Real Assault on Reason:

In the opening chapter of The Assault on Reason, its seldom reasonable author accuses the Bush administration of exploiting people’s fears “to short-circuit debate and drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts, or the public interest."

[...]

What’s most confounding about these stinging allegations is that they were penned by the very same man whose Oscar awarded fear-exploitation-film proclaimed – in a gross distortion of prevailing evidence and facts -- that: “Humanity is sitting on a time bomb."

Al Gore has made the exploition of people's fears into an art form. Hypocrisy is no stranger to the former VP. He is himself one of the great architects of anxiety and fear:

As fear of impending doom plays such a crucial role in hysteria-building, it’s no wonder that AGW has been blamed for everything from lighthearted Costa Rican Frog Die-Offs, Australian cockroach migration, Swedish beetle-infestation, Great Britain’s puffin decline, a rise in hay fever and even staff shortages at Bulgarian brothels to deadly serious outbreaks of Malaria, Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus and Cholera, the killer Indian Ocean tsunami, and even last week’s Lake Tahoe wildfires.

In fact, when U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon wrote a WaPo piece this month actually blaming the genocide in Darfur on AGW, his was, not all that surprisingly, not the first. In fact, back in April, Stephan Faris had suggested in an Atlantic Monthly article that:

“The violence in Darfur is usually attributed to ethnic hatred. But global warming may be primarily to blame.”

A good read.