Former Vice President Al Gore, like most in his circle, is angered by our withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. The liberal media and progressives have tried to spin this move by the Trump White House as the harbinger to the apocalypse. On ABC’s This Week, the former vice president said that the weather lately has been something out of the “book of revelation.” Also, host and former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos mentioned that when we withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol under George W. Bush, sustainability innovations continued (via RCP) [emphasis mine]:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: So, does it really make all that much difference, then, if the United States pulls out of Paris climate accord. Remember back, you know, the United States under George W. Bush pulled out of Kyoto, yet the innovation continued after that.
AL GORE: Well, we lost a lot of time when the U.S. did not join the rest of the world community then. And while it is true that we have the sustainability revolution underway, and it's very exciting, it has the magnitude of the industrial revolution but the speed of the digital revolution. But we're still not changing fast enough, because it's not just the scientific community warning us now, it's mother nature. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the book of revelation.
70 percent of Florida is in drought right now. Missouri just declared an emergency with another one of these historic climate-related downpours. We have had 11 once in a 1,000-year downpours in less than ten years in the United States. So, we have to move faster.
It's good news that the rest of the world is, it's good news that states and cities and businesses are, but we need presidential leadership. We're going to -- since he's not going to lead, the American people are stepping up.
Yet, the weather hasn’t been all that bad if you extend this past 2016-2017. That is not to downplay the droughts in the Midwest, but in 2013-2014, we experienced the calmest Hurricane season in 30 years and the quietest tornado season in 60 years. Around 19,000 Manhattan islands worth of sea ice were created, and the Arctic Ice Cap, which was supposed to have vanished by 2013 per the BBC, actually grew by 533,000 square miles. Oh, and we’re at the most industrialized point in human history–and air quality couldn’t be better, according to the EPA. That’s not necessarily apocalyptic, Al.
Gore even admitted on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, that the Paris Agreement wouldn’t stop global warming, but it sends a powerful message to society, or something. Also, James Hansen, a former NASA scientist called "the father of climate change awareness," also said the provisions of the agreement were a "fraud." So, in all, it was a bad, non-binding agreement that wouldn't have done much to curb global warming.
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