Al Gore has depleted all of his political capital

A few days ago, I was somewhat excited by Al Gore's Climate Parody Day because I was sure that it would be harmful for global warming alarmism – this assumption was correct – but I also hoped that it would be a big enough event so that it would be seriously harmful and maybe lethal: the latter hope turned out to be completely and utterly unrealistic.



This lady seems busty rather than fat. At any rate, Al Gore has negated the proverb about her. The proverb wants to say that you shouldn't say "it's over" prematurely; Al Gore disagrees and thinks you should scream "the world is over" billions of years in advance.

Climate Parody Day turned out to be such a complete non-event and big yawn (and, according to Fox News' title, "just as boring as ever": no other media even wrote about it), that I think it's incorrect that it has ever received any space on this blog because when it's over, we may see that it clearly didn't deserve it.

Based on my observations that covered, with some interruptions, three hours (as a climate blogger, I considered it my duty to know what the event actually was even though it was a painful experience to waste time with that), I think that the event boiled down to the following. A live video stream on the main server of the event was pretty much repeating a one-hour slide show that was mindlessly and shamelessly linking any unpleasant weather event to CO2 emissions 24 times – over and over and over again. Indeed, that was the climate science for the least demanding audiences only. This one-hour presentation was being mixed with words spoken by the most average random people (sometimes manifestly stupid, emotional, and still "authoritatively preaching" people) picked across the globe who have been personally trained and paid by Al Gore to parrot his scientifically nonsensical proclamations.




The content of the show is something you could easily predict. It was raining in the Solomon Islands last Thursday which the people didn't like it so it was surely caused by the CO2 emissions and the right solution is to stop the industrial economy on this world. Those who think it isn't the right answer are uniformly paid by the big oil companies which are identical to the tobacco companies because you may pour Camels (which, I learned, were the best cigarettes according to the doctors' tastes, pretty much the only useful thing you – and even a non-smoker such as I – could learn from those 24 hours) instead of gasoline into your gas tank, too.

By the way, complaints about the profits from the tobacco industry sound really bizarre from the mouth of Al Gore whose family farm was growing and selling tobacco even long years after Gore's sister's death due to lung cancer.

I haven't watched and I don't plan to watch Al Gore's final one-hour presentation because it looks like a complete waste of time to me. My assumption is that the content is the same – instead of the savages from random Pacific islands, the supestitious garbage is going to be pronounced by Al Gore whom we know. If someone manages to watch it and see something unexpected or interesting in it, let us know.

Instead, let me look at some of the "economy" of such events. The total number of people who have ever opened the main Climate Parody Day server (at least for a millisecond) was 8.6 million (unless this number was fabricated, which is quite plausible, but I will assume it's real). That is about one thousandth of the world population and clearly makes no difference for the global warming debate even if all of these people were miraculously converted to Al Gore's mindless and dumb version of alarmism.

In reality, many more people were probably discouraged by the breathtaking stupidity of the show (and occasionally useful skeptics' comments and links in the chat next to the video that remained largely uncensored, so it was mostly dominated by skeptics aside from some insanely primitive believers who were asking how to save the Earth and praising Al Prophet Gore all the time) so when you add pluses and minuses, I would estimate that the result of the show is that a few thousand new skeptics were created which is nice but not something to be terribly excited about. The ClimateGate has created hundreds of millions of new skeptics.

Let's think what all these numbers mean. There were 9,000 Facebook accounts that were donated as spam robots to Al Gore's show. I don't know the exact number for Twitter but let's assume it was similar. The Climate Reality Project generated about 100 spam messages per account per day – usually of the type "I joined @algore in saving the Earth, you have to watch this link as well, better than Viagra".

In total, it means that about 2 × 9,000 × 100 = 1.8 million primary spam messages have been generated during the day. You may see that the average Facebook or Twitter update – including all of its "retweets" and other echoes – generated about five clicks that led to the main Climate Parody Day server. That's a sensible number, neither too high, nor to low.

The typical Internet users in this ensemble of 8.6 people who clicked and got to the Climate Parody Day server saw a streaming video with some rain at a faraway place of the globe, with comments that someone didn't like the rain. Obviously, most people don't care whether or not the weather has anything to do with CO2 or not. Some of them saw white-on-black slides with silly quotations by James Hansen. A big part of the 8.6 million users cought the show when someone was speaking in a different language and those comments were rather unprofessionally being translated to English. The kind of boring foreign press conference except that instead of the chieftain of Micronesia, you get an average farmer in Micronesia who parrots Al Gore's delusions.

The only exception whom you would want to watch because of her charisma was Lucy Lawless (Xena) of New Zealand. Unfortunately, her satellite connection was powered by a wind turbine so her speech was interrupted at the beginning as soon as the wind stopped. Also, Al Gore wanted a top scientist who was good in Miss USA. Unfortunately, Miss Florida wasn't available so he chose Miss Rhode Island. She is a great scientist who thinks that some maths should be taught at schools: only addition, not... uhm... ×... times. At any rate, her knowledge about the sea levels was clearly more comprehensive than the knowledge of the "real" scientists chosen by Gore.

If you're not kind of "professionally" linked to this topic – like your humble correspondent – you don't have to listen to it at all, you don't want to listen to it for more than 30 seconds, and I am pretty sure that most of the 8.6 million people closed the window in less than 30 seconds. So the impact is like 8.6 million clicks at a Viagra ad coming to your spam folder.

What about the expenses?

The Climate Parody Project is a non-profit organization. It doesn't mean that its employees are not making profit. On the contrary, it means that they divide all the profit of the company among themselves as a "salary" and they leave no profit for the "owners" of the organization. The non-profit status is irrelevant because most of the money ends up in Al Gore's wallet, anyway.

I am sure that they have collected millions of dollars in donations from irreversible imbeciles across the world so the event was profitable. (However, I doubt the donations crossed a billion of dollars. Note that Al Gore who was a near-billionaire last Spring needs to double his wealth to get where he was a year ago because 1/2 of it was moved to Tipper's place.) But imagine, for a while, that there wouldn't be any imbeciles on Earth who are capable of paying millions of dollars to the lowest possible quality climate porn you may imagine. What would the economy be then?

Al Gore had to personally train about 3,000 random people from the whole globe. The idea is that he is the prophet so anyone who ever touches him immediately gets the status of a priest in his community, a kind of medium religious rank. (This is, of course, nonsense. Even primitive people in the Solomon Islands will say at most "did you meet Al Gore? Cool" and that will be the end of the dialogue.) Climate Parody Day was the most important, and perhaps the only significant, result of these Al Gore terrorist training camps.

What were the expenses? Well, each of those 3,000 people surely had to fly to a different place. Many of them had homes that are very far from Al Gore's villas, essentially on the other side of the globe. So the average price of air tickets plus some hotels and other expenses per trainee was at least $3,000; it is totally plausible that the actual expenses were orders of magnitude higher.

Multiply $3,000 by 3,000 and you will get something like $10 million. It's my lower bound. A single click ending on the Climate Parody Day server cost more than a dollar. And you shouldn't be shocked if the actual price-per-click was ten dollars. No doubt, you can get a click by a random person (and Gore's viewers were nothing else than random people) for much less than one dollar (via ads) so the complicated event including trainees and Facebook spam robots was a waste of time and money.

Thank God, the media almost totally ignored the non-event in this case. Well, in fact, even a huge majority of the alarmist blogosphere (not just Real Climate) remained silent about this bummer. An opinion piece at Fox News said that the event was as boring as ever. In a Guardian blog, a left-wing alarmist called Leo Hickman asked the question: Is Al Gore now a help or hindrance to the global warming cause? His answer is that Al Gore is mostly a liability and a vast majority of the commenters agreed, indeed.

One Canadian (Sun News) TV report compared Gore to tele-evangelists. Marc Morano gives his opinions after 6:40 and it is not flattering, either.

If you want to dedicate half an hour to Marc Morano, see the interview led by Alex Jones: first part, second part

A neutral summary of the event – which is a surprisingly positive one – was shockingly offered by Andrew Revkin. He's neither fish nor fowl and sometimes he looks reasonable but he is also able to thank Gore for this low quality climate porn (although the rest of Revkin's thoughts are negative).

Al Gore is no longer capable of producing the interest of the people and the media even if he invests all of his time and all of his mujahideens into the planning. He is a walking dead body, a political zombie. Of course, he doesn't financially care because he will always extract millions of dollars from the mindless imbeciles dispersed all over the globe. His employees such as Kalee Kreider whom I communicated with a little bit don't care about the complete failure of the event, either. Her salary is almost certainly disconnected from the actual impact they make.

We may be annoyed, and I am sure that most of us are annoyed, that the U.S. government is so inefficient exactly in the sector where it should work – and it fails to place Al Gore in the prison for the rest of his life because of the hundreds of millions of dollars that he fradulently acquired. However, think big. This is just a detail. What is important is that Al Gore is no longer capable of influencing the majority of the population or the policies that the countries of the world will adopt. He is no longer capable of threatening the U.S. economy or the world economy and I am convinced that several years ago, he was.

99.9% of the world population remained completely unexposed to his "event of the year" if not the "event of the decade" and even among the remaining 0.1% of the world population, most of the people are really against him. If he is trying to influence the global warming debates, he is completely detached from the reality. His show claiming that "every weather event is bad and due to CO2" would be naive even 5 years ago. It could be enough if you tried to brainwash some uneducated tribes that have never heard about "global warming".

But the world is no longer like that; well, at least the part of the world that knows how to use the Internet has moved on. A vast majority of the world population has heard about "global warming" and has heard about the nonsensical claims that "CO2 is the cause of every weather event". Al Gore is famous enough and should not look for "any publicity" which is what this event clearly did (that's only a good enough strategy for someone who is unknown and needs to increase her visibility); he should already try to get a predominantly positive publicity and in this task, he unequivocally failed.

More importantly, the people who are actively interested in these matters know that most of those claims are self-evidently absurd (even the alarmists, except for the most ignorant ones, know so) and even if you could find an example where the influence on some atmospheric event is at least worth your thinking, you must be careful about hundreds of disclaimers (and Gore and his parrots surely weren't). And the viewers' knowledge is generally orders of magnitude more advanced and more detailed than Al Gore's knowledge. The idea that this show could "convert skeptics" is laughable, indeed.

Al Gore could have affected the world population when it was completely uninformed about climatology 5 years ago or so. But we live in 2011 and Al Gore is just a piece of irrelevant parasitic immoral garbage whose lousy quality (and financially driven egotism and hypocrisy) is acknowledge pretty much by everyone, whether you are a cautious climate skeptic or a mediocre hysterical climate crackpot.

If Al Gore ever dares to show himself to the world again, I may assure him that it will be an even more self-evident failure than his Climate Parody Day.