Al Gore and The Revenge of the Nerds

Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting take on Gore, Climate Change/Science and Bush. Bush is boxed in by the rightwing of his party: science and religious fundamentalism are hard to reconcile. The President also has never been intellectually curious, nor is he an avid reader. Mallaby is correct, times like this call for a policy wonk, who is passionate about the Environment, Science and Technology. It doesn't hurt that Gore has spent the last few years in a variety of private sector ventures, giving him exposure to some leading-edge technologies and ideas:

... Republican dishonesty reaches its extreme on the issue of global warming. Yes, climate science is complex, and nobody can forecast the earth's temperature with complete confidence. But the fact that scientists don't know everything isn't a license to ignore what they do know: that the earth is warming, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an accelerating pace -- and that these changes are driven at least partly by fossil-fuel consumption. The U.S. National Academies have confirmed this; their foreign counterparts have confirmed this; and so has the world's top authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . None of this is controversial.

Except among Republicans. Candidate Bush acknowledged that climate change was a problem; once elected he denied it; then he denied the denial but refused to let his administration do anything about climate. Lately he has talked about ridding the nation of its oil addiction, but that's because oil finances Arab extremism. Bush has been silent on the link between oil and global warming.

Meanwhile, others have been vocal. James Inhofe, the Republican who ironically chairs the Senate environment committee, has described global warming as the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." He avoids scientists who might put him right: His star witness at a hearing last year was Michael Crichton, a science-fiction novelist.

... Well, the most authoritative and up-to-date statement on climate science is contained in a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is circulating in draft form. According to scientists who have seen it, Chapter Four says: "Taken together, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking." As to the possibility that the melting of some ice caps is offset by the growth of others, the draft also says: "Thickening in central regions of Greenland is more than offset by increased melting near the coast."

In other words, the ads are nonsense. So are some of the assertions on the CEI Web site. The group suggests, for example, that polar bears have nothing to fear from the melting of their habitat. But the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment , a top-notch peer-reviewed source on this subject, has something different to say: "the reduction in sea ice is very likely to have devastating consequences for polar bears."

Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting.