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Breaking news from Stockholm is making Al Gore's trip to the Nobel celebrations into a bigger PR morass than it already was. Al Gore used a private plane from Stockholm to Frankfurt when he left the celebrations to head to Bali according to Swedish blogger Henrik Alexanderson. The story has also been picked up by mainstream media, such as Expressen after Alexanderson broke the news.

The Nobel Committee made a publicity stunt out of Al Gore's means of transportation to Oslo, when he showed up here (yes, I am in Oslo now) to receive his undeserved Nobel Prize earlier this month. But Al Gore's long standing record of "do as I say, not as I do" quickly turned the publicity dream into a publicity nightmare.

Friday morning on the 7th of December, Al Gore arrived at Gardermoen Airport. After a brief Q&A session with reporters, he and his entourage walked across the airport and took the escalator down to the Airport Train concourse and hopped on the train to downtown Oslo with the entire gang of dispatched reporters. Well downtown, they walked the three minutes across the downtown park from the rail station to his hotel, cameras in tow.

This was of course running live on Norwegian television, and the head line on all edited television reports and the next morning's newspapers was "LOOK AT HOW ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY HE IS!!"

The honeymoon lasted only until Sunday when the reporters in the largest newspaper in the country asked the first question I had when I saw the reports; where is his luggage? All the other reporters covering the Nobels had gone all gaga and star struck over the former senator gone opportunist.

The Gore luggage had been picked up and sent by van from the airport, and the Nobel committee PR staff was not happy to be asked the question by VG. The spokesperson expressed dismay stating, "Such incidental logistics could hardly be newsworthy".

I have yet to find information on how Gore made it to Stockholm, but the press secretary of Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation stated that lending the private jet of the executive cabinet of Sweden "was the solution that made it possible for Gore to come to Sweden."

It is illegal for anyone but members of the cabinet to use the plane, so the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation had to accompany Gore on the plane and fly back. At least we know which is the most expendable member of the Swedish Cabinet through this.

This is not the first time Gore is caught saying one thing and doing another. His own inefficient private jet, which he uses extensively in the US, and his energy hungry household in Tennessee, is widely known in the US. The news has reached Scandinavia, but has barely gotten any traction.
If we are to believe Brendan O'Neill's review of Al Gore's speech in Bali, Gore will reveal more of his do as I say, not as I do sentiments now that he is getting more comfortable in his own skin. O'Neill quotes from Gore reveal Gore as an anti-democrat.

Year of Global Cooling

by Julie Walsh on December 19, 2007

in Blog

Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.

Andrew Lilico, a British economist, has an interesting discussion of the economic aspects of global warming politics over at ConservativeHome.  This is particularly illuminating: 

Now the Stern Review has been subjected to extensive methodological criticism, and I think it’s fair to say that the position amongst economists is something like the following:

  • If we want to do any work on environmental economics for any government agency, we take the results of the Stern Review as given and unquestionable.
  • When we are down the pub, or chatting in meetings with other economists, almost no-one takes any of its results seriously.

Confirmation bias is alive and well in Her Majesty's Government.

We doubt this came up last week at the United Nation's conference on global warming in Bali, but Britain's top government scientist says the best thing women can do to ease global warming is "stop admiring young men in Ferraris."