Today’s Washington Times print edition has an op-ed by Jack Kelly (“Cold water on Gore fever”), with an accompanying cartoon depicting a teacher dialing up the thermostat to uncomfortably warm levels to set the stage for screening Gore’s alarmist (and now judicially discredited) “An Inconvenient Truth.” Believe it or not, this is a ploy employed by none other than Gore himself, as admitted in a recently aired PBS Frontline special “Hot Politics” which aired in April of this year.
In this encomium to the alarmist movement, former Senator Timothy Wirth (D., Co.), now head of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation, revels in having engaged with Gore in precisely such ploys for the first “global warming” hearing, chaired by Gore himself, in 1988:
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.
The wonderful Jim Hansen [NB: still Gore’s advisor and cheerleader today] was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.
Frontline then showed the desired shot of a sweaty Hansen that made the national news coverage of what Wirth laughingly calls “stagecraft”. That’s one word for it.
Frontline is no stranger to such nonsense, as in the very same special PBS huffed about how this 1988 hearing left Congress poised to strike, champing at the bit to adopt “global warming” legislation, only to be derailed by President George H.W. Bush distracting the nation with one of those Bushes’ wars in Iraq…in 1991. Hungry like the wolf, that Congress was.
It also indicates that CEI’s global warming ads (which didn’t run until 2006) helped defeat the proposed Clinton-Gore Btu tax (which, unlike Frontline’s claim, was not sold as a global warming measure, and even if it were it would’ve been a remarkably clumsy tool seeing as how it hit wind, solar and nuclear as well). That tax of course was proposed, and died, in 1993.
It seems Gore and Wirth didn’t corner the market on “stagecraft”, but only passed it on to the next generation of the alarmist industry.