Al Gore’s Hurricane Katrina hyperbole

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans on August 29, 2005. If the storm wasn’t deadly and devasting enough, political idiocy began rising faster than Katrina’s floodwaters receded. Everyone with an ideological ax to grind began blaming their political opponents for causing the storm or exacerbating its damage.

The tactless blame game was later mercilessly lampooned in a South Park episode titled “Two Days After the Day After Tomorrow.” The stand-in for the storm was a flood caused by the destruction of a nearby beaver dam. Rather than prioritizing the rescue of flood victims, the boys and the townspeople focus instead on where to place blame. Targets included global warming, George Bush, terrorists, the mayor of the town and FEMA.

Of course, the farce wouldn’t have been finished until Eric Cartman (the show’s reliable anti-Semitic jerk) blamed his friend Kyle Broflovski (who is Jewish) for not using his “Jew Gold” to help flood victims.

Al Gore must have missed the episode, because he certainly didn’t get the joke.

Less than a year later, he released An Inconvenient Truth, the climate change Doomsday documentary that won him an Oscar and a Nobel Prize (certainly one of the few films, if not the only one to ever win both.)

This period of unprecedented calm following immediately on the heels of Gore’s hurricane hyperbole really was—to borrow his analysis— “one for the books.”  If Gore proved anything at all, it was that Mother Nature might be real, with a wicked sense of humor, and she decided to spend 11 years making a mockery of his movie.

As explained in a January 2023 Capital Research magazine report on Gore’s career, he was happy to toss some Katrina-shaming into his narrative:

“We have seen in the last couple of years, a lot of big hurricanes,” said Gore, in the 2006 film. “The summer of 2005 has been one for the books.”

In his history lecture on the hurricanes of 2005, Gore claimed the lesson to learn was that we had been ignoring “warnings that hurricanes would get stronger” because of human-inflicted climate change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hosts a regularly updated webpage titled “Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results.” The update as of October 2022 has this to say:

We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.

The NOAA lists six named hurricanes making landfall on the continental United States in 2005, including four major ones.

What Gore knew (or should have known) but did not mention when he claimed there had been “a lot of big hurricanes” was that the four “major” storms of 2005 were all measured at Category 3 intensity when they made landfall. This includes the star of Gore’s presentation, the obviously devastating Hurricane Katrina that ravaged New Orleans in August 2005.

Category 3 is the lowest category that still qualifies as a “major” hurricane by the NOAA’s definition.

What neither Gore nor anyone else knew was the hurricane silence that would follow.

In 2006 not a single hurricane of any kind made landfall in the continental United States. And then, over the next 10 years through 2016, not a single major hurricane hit the USA. During seven of those years (2009–2015) just four total hurricanes of any kind made landfall, three of them Category 1 and one a Category 2.

No comparable era of docile hurricanes appears in the NOAA records going back more than a century. This period of unprecedented calm following immediately on the heels of Gore’s hurricane hyperbole really was—to borrow his analysis— “one for the books.”

If Gore proved anything at all, it was that Mother Nature might be real, with a wicked sense of humor, and she decided to spend 11 years making a mockery of his movie.

The deadly Hurricane Katrina obviously wasn’t funny at all. The real story needed no exaggeration, but that’s what it got from An Inconvenient Truth.

The full Capital Research magazine report also covers three decades of Al Gore errors on subjects such as melting of the glaciers at Glacier National Park by 2020 (still there!), the end of the snowpack on Mt. Kilimanjaro by 2015 (also still there!), and the success of Germany’s Energiewende war on oil, gas and even nuclear power (which is not going well at all for the Germans).

Gore even dwells on what the regime media now claims is an existential threat to democracy:

“I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next president of the United States,” said Gore, early in An Inconvenient Truth, to adoring laughter and applause.

This was a reference to the 2000 presidential election when Democratic nominee Gore lost the state of Florida—and thus the White House—by 537 votes to Republican George W. Bush. As the votes were being counted on Election Night, Gore initially conceded the presidency to Bush.

But as Bush’s reported margin of victory in Florida narrowed, Gore called back to announce he had changed his mind. An incredulous Bush reportedly asked: “You mean to tell me, Mr. Vice President, you’re retracting your concession?”

During the ensuing weeks of recounts, it was revealed that Floridians using paper punch ballots didn’t always do a nifty job of fully punching through the paper to indicate their vote preference. This allegedly fouled up the ballot-reading scanners.

In their theory of the case, Gore partisans seemed to argue that Florida Democrats were disproportionately incompetent at punching holes in paper and that jurisdictions disproportionately run by Democratic voters were particularly incapable of counting votes correctly.

Gore’s joke at the start of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrates the degree to which he had not moved past this theory and the belief he would have won if we had just kept recounting Florida.

Today, it is common for the corporate media to refer to these delusions as “election denial,” but they leave out references to Gore.

The full report can be read at these links:

Al Gore’s 30 Years of Climate Errors

Part 1: Glacial Recount 

Part 2: Snow Job 

Part 3: The Scary Seas

Part 4: Bridge Fuel to Nowhere 

Part 5: Favoring Failure 

Part 6: Blood & Gore

Part 7: It Could Have Happened Here

An Inconvenient Truth was produced by a now defunct left wing film company, which is profiled in InfluenceWatch: Participant.

Another example of Participant’s heavy, blame game ideology, as explained in the profile, was the feature film Promised Land:

In January 2013 Participant released Promised Land, a fictional story portraying alleged dangers of natural gas extraction. Hollywood actors Matt Damon and John Krasinski both star in and direct the feature film. The plot portrays hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. “fracking,” in real-life a popular and highly effective process used to extract domestic natural gas) as the cause of contaminated water that kills cows. A fictional energy company in the film is portrayed as deploying an elaborate and sinister conspiracy to conceal the supposed fracking dangers.

Shortly before the release of Promised Land, Participant confirmed that Image Media Abu Dhabi was a financier of the film. A Heritage Foundation report showed that Image Media Abu Dhabi was “wholly owned by the government of the UAE [United Arab Emirates].” The UAE is a major exporter of oil and natural gas and a prominent member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) price cartel. The UAE government has a major economic interest in preventing non-OPEC nations such as the United States from becoming more significant oil and natural gas producers.

Naturally, South Park would have done it better. Participant closed down last year.