Captain Planet for veep

In fact, the "fact" of a 600 ppm C02 concentration in 2032--a crisis that many would live te see and the prospect of which should horrify us all into voting for Gore-is not only "not in dispute"; it is utterly unsupportable. To get from 355 to 600 ppm in forty years, C02 would have to grow at an average rate of over 6 ppm per year over that period. The present rate, based on data (gathered at the Mauna Loa Observatory) shown earlier in the book, is about 1.8 ppm per year today, up from just under 1 ppm a generation ago. For an average growth rate of 6 ppm, beginning with today's 1.8, the rate in 2032 would have to shoot past 10 ppm. Such exponential growth simply cannot be credibly projected from the Mauna Loa data, the most accurate we have. A projection bounded by realistic projections of fuel use points toward at least a century before C02 could reach 600 ppm; we have more like five generations of grace to curb C02 emissions. Indeed, in the latest worst-case scenario from the Stockholm Environment Institute (a group that includes Paul Ehrlich and other enviro-hysterics), CO2 emissions only double by 2032.

The growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration is dependent on the growth of populations, industries, and endeavors which are themselves dependent on the use of fossil and biomass fuels. (The effects of deforestation are minuscule compared to the fossil-fuel effect.) For his prediction to come true, world fossil-fuel consumption would need to increase five- to six-fold over the next four decades. World GNP would need to more than quadruple--and another trend of the last generation, declining CO2 production per dollar of GNP (a result of technological progress), would have to stop. Gore's "science" ignores all past and present progress in energy efficiency, nuclear safety, and renewable-energy research. Given his evangelism for fiber optics and NASA's Mission to Earth, it is hard to understand his neo-Victorian vision of a twenty-first century whose fastest-growing industry is mining coal to raise steam to produce electricity to make steel for cars that (gasoline being long gone) presumably burn whale oil in their diesels.

Even that dystopic scenario will not come to pass in the world according to Gore--all life on earth will be extinct first. His most magisterial display of scientific illiteracy is reserved for his graph of the accelerating rate of species extinction on page 24. (His source is the sui generis environmentalist Tom Lovejoy.) Interestingly, the senator, a Harvard political-science graduate, cannot even read his own graph properly: his text notes that species "are now vanishing around the world one thousand times faster than at any time in the past 65 million years," though his graph shows species loss of one per year through 1800 and 10,000 in 1992. More importantly, we can extrapolate his hyperbolic curve. Since his vertical axis is logarithmic, it is plain that Gore's world will lose some million species a year by 2020 or so, and earth's five million or so species will all be gone well before 2032. It's a great day for Keynes and Fukuyama: in the short run, we are all extinct, and so is history.

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