In his bracingly acerbic blog, Walter Russell Mead takes on Al Gore. Mead, while disclaiming expert knowledge, believes that increasing carbon emissions may well produce global warming with possible negative effects for which the leaders of affluent societies should be on the alert and be prepaered to mitigate if possible. He also believes that the global warming alarmists’ project of getting the world’s nations to stringently reduce carbon emissions, at great economic cost, was in words I used in my Sunday Examiner column, a bridge too far—a goal that was always unrealistic and whose prominence prevented milder but more useful steps from being taken. And who is to blame? Let me quote:

“Frankly, I blame Al Gore. Unlike naive scientists who know little about life beyond the lab, or eco-activists whose concepts of the international political system come from writing direct-mail solicitations to true believers in rich countries, the former vice-president had decades of experience with high politics. It was his job to provide the leadership that could channel the energy and concern of this movement into an effective political program. Perhaps there’s a story we don’t know yet about how Mr. Gore labored quietly and in vain for many years to explain to his fellow global greens about the difficulties and intricacies of the political process. Perhaps he reminded them that it takes 67 votes in the US Senate to ratify a treaty, and that the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol were preemptively rejected 95-0–such a thorough beating that the Protocol itself was never even submitted to the Senate while he was in office. Perhaps he tried to explain to them that a global movement for a treaty was setting itself up for a colossal and comprehensive failure and begged them to take a more realistic course. Perhaps he urged them to be their own harshest critics and to make sure that any information and projections that came out the movement and institutions like the IPCC should be scrubbed cleaner than clean. Perhaps he begged them to make sure that the IPCC was staffed and led by competent, thoroughly vetted and full-time people whose tempered judgment could lead the institution through the inevitable storms it would face.