July 7, 2010

• Al Gore is soooo FAT

  My favorite internet meme/twitter meme is the new “Al Gore is Fat” meme.

  I have no idea where this meme came from, but I think I glean the simple reasoning behind it if you can call it that. Basically, people noticed that over the last few years climate deniers have continuously resorted to the most extraneous ridiculous arguments to try and counter the sound science behind climate change. Arguments tended to revolve around the personalities of particular scientists or advocate and not about the science itself. Other arguments were of the “of course it’s not happening” variety and “human beings couldn’t possibly effect the earth’s climate!” type. The worst arguments went so far as to imagine some vast liberal conspiracy planning to maliciously promote climate change in order to raise your taxes!

  Particularly remarkable of course were the people who often didn’t even bother to put forth an argument at all. Instead, rather than trying to engage the scientists they simply made fun of Al Gore’s weight gain and talked about his appearance, called him a liar and mocked him in a thousand different ways.

  Of course all of this is besides the point. Al Gore could be a modern day Hitler and could be the fattest man on the planet and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference in terms of the veracity of the serious dangers of man made global Climate Change.

  So progressives have recently fought back by mocking unintentionally ridiculous arguments with deliberately ridiculous counter-arguments.  Hence whenever there is news or reports that demonstrate, yet again, that Climate change most likely really IS happening, they’ve taken to the Twitterverse to proclaim that it is proof! Proof positive! No, not proof of any of the theories of man made climate change. People don’t want to hear that crap! Nooooo! It’s proof that Al Gore is, in fact, quite FAT. 

  Obviously that’s something that Americans REALLY care about.

  A variation of this simply declares the fact about the man made destruction of our environment and goes “But don’t worry! Al Gore is STILL Fat!” The idea being again that everything will be fine just so long as Al Gore remains fat because obviously nothing a fat man says should ever be believed by ANYONE no matter how many accredited scientists happen to agree with him. I mean come on, look at him! He’s so overweight! So everything will be fine. We’ll only have to worry about global warming if Al Gore miraculously loses weight!

  At times I wonder how Al Gore actually feels about this meme. I hope he’s okay with it. I mean it’s good natured mockery for a good cause. Far better, I guess, than his weight being used by those who want to discredit his message and what he believes in. Still, it must be strange to search for yourself on twitter and find all kinds of references to your weight.

  In spite of being overweight myself, I just find the whole thing hilarious. It’s sort of the perfect form of deliberate slightly subtle sarcasm.  I think it captures perfectly the heart of the battle between the pro and anti-science movements in this country. One side, bases its arguments on facts and reasoning and effective functioning institutions. The other, cares far more about appearances.

  So if it happens to be snowing, regardless of whether scientific models predict it or not, it doesn’t appear to be getting warmer on that day, so therefore global warming isn’t real.  So if it happens to be that a couple of scientists appear to be fudging the numbers, it doesn’t matter whether or not a careful study or analysis determines that they weren’t in fact fudging any numbers. So because we human beings appear to be small compared to the size of the Earth it makes sense to say we can’t effect the climate of the planet no matter what scientists who have made it their life’s work to study the climate happen to say about it.

  And just because it appears to be that Al Gore is fat, everything he’s ever said on the subject of global warming and climate change should be dismissed out of hand without study or scrutiny.

  Analysis versus supposition. Facts versus appearances.  Scholarship vs guessing. 

  Which side do you belong to? 

  We’re currently suffering from an extraordinary nation wide heat wave. This, of course, is no proof of anything by itself, no more than the heavy winter storms (actually arguably predicted by climate change) are proof that global warming wasn’t happening. But it doesn’t look good.  Especially when it is combined with the numerous careful analysis of global temperature readings that continue to show a global trend in temperature that goes upward and a ten year temperature average that is higher than ever before. Not to mention studies that show how we seem to be increasingly hitting more and more localized temperature records and more of them being high records than low records. And on top of all that investigation after investigation after investigation have fully cleared all Climate scientists involved in the so called climategate scandal of wrong doings and fully re-affirmed and validated the science of climate change. Even so called smoking guns that were supposed to show that the IPCC report was inherently flawed were soon found fully erroneous and had to be retracted.

  So what do you think?

  Does Al Gore still look FAT to you?

  • 2:35 pm
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