Al Gore, in a scene from his documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (image credit: Juampe López’s Flickr photostream).

What’s the world coming to? Al (‘Albert Arnold’) Gore, the moderate poker-faced ex-politico, 45th vice-president of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who was raised on a tobacco-and-hay growing/cattle-raising family farm in Tennessee, appears this month in Rolling Stone, that politically very incorrect magazine, the sine qua non of 1960s-hippie-flavoured San Francisco rockist-music-obsessed counter culture, with gloves off, single-handedly, and ably, taking on ‘the merchants of poison’.

‘The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

‘The evidence that it was real was palpable: “They’re really hurting each other! That’s real blood! Look a’there! They can’t fake that!” On the other hand, there was clearly a script (or in today’s language, a “narrative”), with good guys to cheer and bad guys to boo.

‘But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these dramas was the referee: Whenever the bad guy committed a gross and obvious violation of the “rules”—such as they were—like using a metal folding chair to smack the good guy in the head, the referee always seemed to be preoccupied with one of the cornermen, or looking the other way. Yet whenever the good guy—after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any reasonable person could tolerate—committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him. The answer to the question “Is it real?” seemed connected to the question of whether the referee was somehow confused about his role: Was he too an entertainer?

‘That is pretty much the role now being played by most of the news media in refereeing the current wrestling match over whether global warming is “real,” and whether it has any connection to the constant dumping of 90 million tons of heat-trapping emissions into the Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere every 24 hours.

‘Admittedly, the contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee because it’s a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues.

‘The referee—in this analogy, the news media—seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business. Is he responsible for ensuring a fair match? Or is he part of the show, selling tickets and building the audience? The referee certainly seems distracted: by Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, the latest reality show—the list of serial obsessions is too long to enumerate here.

‘But whatever the cause, the referee appears not to notice that the Polluters and Ideologues are trampling all over the “rules” of democratic discourse. . . .

‘This script, of course, is not entirely new: A half-century ago, when Science and Reason established the linkage between cigarettes and lung diseases, the tobacco industry hired actors, dressed them up as doctors, and paid them to look into television cameras and tell people that the linkage revealed in the Surgeon General’s Report was not real at all. The show went on for decades, with more Americans killed each year by cigarettes than all of the U.S. soldiers killed in all of World War II.

‘This time, the scientific consensus is even stronger. It has been endorsed by every National Academy of science of every major country on the planet, every major professional scientific society related to the study of global warming and 98 percent of climate scientists throughout the world. In the latest and most authoritative study by 3,000 of the very best scientific experts in the world, the evidence was judged “unequivocal.”

‘To sell their false narrative, the Polluters and Ideologues have found it essential to undermine the public’s respect for Science and Reason by attacking the integrity of the climate scientists. That is why the scientists are regularly accused of falsifying evidence and exaggerating its implications in a greedy effort to win more research grants, or secretly pursuing a hidden political agenda to expand the power of government. Such slanderous insults are deeply ironic: extremist ideologues—many financed or employed by carbon polluters—accusing scientists of being greedy extremist ideologues.

‘After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda on the quality of democratic debate wrote, “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”‘

Read the whole (great) piece by Al Gore in Rolling Stone: Climate of denial: Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?, 22 June 2011.

Read ILRI’s latest report on climate change in ILRI’s News Blog: In the crosshairs of hunger and climate change: New CCAFS-ILRI study maps the global hotspots, 3 June 2011.