It's not easy being green. Or Gore.

Got the following from my brother Bob, presumably from theonion.com or someplace like it:

Al Gore Caught Warming Globe To Increase Box Office Profits
December 18, 2006

Dozens of eyewitness reports indicated that former vice president Al Gore deliberately attempted to raise the earth's temperature in order to boost box office receipts for An Inconvenient Truth, his documentary film about global warming that was released in May.

"We have accounts from concerned citizens that Mr. Gore purchased a Cadillac Escalade SUV several months before [his film] opened in theaters," said Kimberly Blume, spokeswoman for the California-based environmental group Friends Of The Earth. "Not only did Mr. Gore use his new gas-guzzler to make short trips to the grocery store, he also left the vehicle running 24 hours a day in the driveway of his Tennessee home with the air-conditioning on full-blast."

In the weeks following the film's release, witnesses reported additional sightings of Gore engaging in activities such as discharging can after can of 1980s-era, CFC-laden aerosol into the air, and single-handedly clear-cutting over 6,000 acres of Amazon rain forest.

Gore is also rumored to have set a four-acre tire fire outside Akron, OH, and ordered his Secret Service detail to shoot on sight anyone who attempts to put it out.

"It's sad to see a man we thought was a passionate defender of the environment despoiling it for his own monetary gain," Blume said.
Blume said that she and many environmentalists had momentarily expressed relief in late November when Gore appeared to cease his months-long practice of dismantling old refrigerators in order to release ozone-destroying freon into the atmosphere. Blume soon learned, however, that Gore had resumed the activity in Antarctica, where the earth's ozone layer is most fragile.

Environmental groups have called for the federal government to step in and put a stop to Gore's actions, but officials say they do not have the power to stop him.

"There is no legal recourse anyone can take against the former vice president," Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said. "Mr. Gore is well within the emissions standards set by the current administration."

By year's end, Gore failed to slow his assault on the planet's delicately balanced climate systems. Satellite surveillance revealed what many believe to be a snowshoed Gore jumping up and down on an ice shelf in Greenland, chainsawing glaciers in the Alaskan wild, and urinating in the Gulf Stream waters off the coast of Newfoundland.

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I'm as green as the next guy (probably even more so - I recycle like no one's business, and actually practice packing out garbage I find in the woods or the beach), but I've come to have serious doubts about the whole "global warming" thing. I read Michael Crichton's rather exhaustively footnoted State of Fear, and found all my assumptions about such things turned on their collective ear. I've since done a small amount of personal research on the subject, and am coming to believe that some of the hype is just that - hype. I'm old enough (barely) to remember the "scare shows"of the 70's (I seem to recall a particularly ghastly episode of "In Search Of..." with Leonard Nimoy, for example) that railed about global *cooling.*

I'm finding myself in the camp of "global temperature fluctuation" - the earth's weather is such an immensely complex system that forecasting for even two weeks is iffy. Regardless of whatever happens, one thing in the Crichton book that really blew my mind was the issue of the polar ice caps melting. A character in his book points out a very simple concept mankind has known for centuries, thanks to Greek scientist Archimedes: the principle of displacement. If you put some ice cubes in a glass of water, and the ice cubes then melt, does the level of water rise? No, of course not. The ice cubes displace exactly the same amount of volume. Therefore, even if the entire north pole were to melt, the subsequent change to the ocean levels of the earth would be nonexistent. Granted, this does not factor in melting of ice that is on land surfaces, like Greenland and Antarctica, but the point is made, in my opinion, that there's a great deal of hysteria out there with not a lot of common sense attached to it.

When I asked several college-educated adults what would happen if the north pole ice cap were to melt, they all answered the same way: the ocean levels would rise, South Seas islands would disappear, low-lying coastal cities would be flooded, etc. Simple science shows this to be questionable. Anyone wishing to review the charts and graphs from NOAA (check the footnotes in State of Fear) can see that there is actually evidence that, while unquestionably certain glaciers in Greenland are melting, others are growing.

Don't believe everybody you read, including Michael Crichton, Al Gore, or even me. Find out the information for yourself. The more I research, the more I find I've been sold a bill of goods.

It's not gonna stop me from rinsing out my cans, separating my newspapers from my regular paper and and setting them out every Monday night for the recycling truck, though.