Monday, May 06, 2013

New York Magazine reminds us that Al Gore chartered a fossil-fueled 6,471-ton 370-foot luxury icebreaker to cooling Antarctica to dramatically illustrate the perils of global warming

Al Gore on His Golden Years and Why He Thinks Obama Has Failed on Climate Change -- New York Magazine
wherever Al Gore is, it’s hard not to get the sense that there are dark clouds lurking. This is partly because of his core identity—the man who should have been president. And it’s also because his writings are apocalyptic—like nature hikes through the Book of Revelation, a phrase he sometimes uses in a different context. His environmental writings are replete with biblical images of the destruction that awaits unless we change our ways.
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Gore shifts us inside—it’s gotten a bit cold...Now that Current TV has been sold, he is once again on the global-warming trail. “It is my mission in life,” he intones.
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In January 2012, Gore threw himself a coming-out party of sorts. His Climate Reality Project, which he founded and helps fund, chartered the National Geographic Explorer, a roughly 370-foot icebreaker, to take him and 142 carefully selected paying guests to Antarctica, where he could dramatically illustrate the perils of global warming. He’d stocked the cruise with more than a dozen of the world’s top climate scientists—they came for free. The rest of the manifest was a sampling of Hollywood, do-gooders, business leaders, political loyalists, and, he hoped, future funders—the net worth of the passenger list easily was upwards of $20 billion. Tommy Lee Jones, famed actor and ­Gore’s classmate at Harvard, was aboard; so were Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw, Laurene Powell Jobs (Steve Jobs’s widow), John Doerr, and Richard Branson, whose Virgin Media carried Current in the U.K. and whom Gore had personally convinced over breakfast that climate change was real.

And, in one of her first public appearances, Gore showed off his new girlfriend, Elizabeth Keadle, a dark-haired, attractive woman in her fifties. Keadle is the anti-Tipper
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Floating off Antarctica, with the assembled luminaries looking on, Gore and Keadle donned bathing suits and took a ceremonial plunge into 33-degree water. “Twice,” says Gore.
National Geographic Explorer - cruise ship profile page
TONNAGE: 6471 gross tons
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POWER PLANT: Diesel electric (two 3,200 horsepower engines)
Antarctica Cruises - Luxury Expedition - National Geographic Explorer - Southern Explorations
This new luxury Antarctica ship features a main lounge, a glass-enclosed observation lounge and bar, chart room, library, global gallery, fitness center and wellness spa with two treatment rooms, a sauna and a business center with Internet access. The guest decks are connected by an elevator.
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The Explorer has two restaurants that serve passengers in one sitting with unreserved seating.
2012: Al Gore’s ‘melting’ Antarctic claims refuted by reality — Climate Depot’s A-Z Global Warming Report counters Gore | Climate Depot
Gore Effect strikes again! Below normal temps awaits Gore, NASA’s Hansen & UN IPCC’s Trenberth for trip to Antarctica – ‘Al [Gore], James [Hansen] and Kevin [Trenberth] are headed to the Antarctic summer, to showcase melting winter ice. Temperatures in Antarctica have been consistently running about 10C below normal for several weeks’

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