This guest post was originally published on PonderPost on March 29, 2009 by Tim Jones. It is reprinted here with permission due to the changing mission of PonderPost.com.

I was born and grew up in the Red River valley (that’s Red River of the north) in Breckenridge and Moorhead, Minnesota. As happens every year, the Red River is flooding this valley, as the spring thaw occurs. This year, however, the river is projected to rise higher than ever recorded  (although, recent reports show it will not be as high as projected) – already above the previous record set in 1997.

I still have many friends in this area, although all of my family has since moved out of the region (one due to the fact that she lost her home in the 2006 flood). These floods can be as damaging as a hurricane is to those of us along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, only these floods occur in freezing cold weather. Please keep these people in your thoughts and prayers, as they fight to save their homes and families.

I do wonder, however, why you don’t hear any reports of WHY the river is cresting so high.

You see, in order to crest at record levels, the snowfall for the previous winter, as well as the depth of the freeze must also have been at record levels to produce so much water as the snow and ice melt.  This in the time of critical “man-made” global warming?  Something doesn’t seem right, here.

Maybe Al Gore has a good explanation for it.  Then again, I doubt it.

Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are co-winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

What a shame that the Nobel committee chose to make a political statement instead of honoring true advocates for peace or individuals who advanced causes that promote peace.

Why did the Nobel committee not award the prize to the Buddhist monks who are being brutalized and killed for their efforts to promote human rights and democratic reforms in Myanmar (Burma)? The international recognition and prize money alone would have given their peaceful efforts a much stronger voice. Instead the Nobel committee chose to honor an environmental hypocrite whose work does not reflect a balanced view of science. Shame on them!

In my last post (yesterday) I argued that Al Gore’s hypocrisy was destroying what little bit of his credibility remained. Well today I read a press release from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research about Gore’s home energy usage and it shocked me. Gore’s household used more than 20 times the national average in 2006! We’re talking about nearly $30,000 in electricity and natural gas bills last year for his Nashville-area household.

I find this extremely hypocritical of someone who calls on Americans to conserve energy and reduce their consumption. Ironically, according to this report, Gore’s energy consumption increased in the months following the release of his “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth.

By the way, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is not part of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” claim.  According to their own words, they are “an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization dedicated to providing concerned citizens, the media and public leaders with expert empirical research and timely free market policy solutions to public policy issues in Tennessee.” This organization is unlike any others I’ve seen in that they offer a “Guarantee of Quality Scholarship” that “guarantees that all original factual data are true and correct and that information attributed to other sources is accurately represented.”

Al Gore’s planed 07/07/07 Campaign for a Candidate in Crisis, um, I mean Climate in Crisis, just rubs me the wrong way. Think about this with me if you would and see if Gore is not being a bit hypocritical. For this campaign we’re talking about 24 hours of concerts on all 7 continents. We’re talking about an estimated 3 million actual attendees and an anticipated 2 billion online and television viewers. We’re talking 100+ popular entertainers.
Think of how much energy will be expended to make this happen — jetting people around, driving equipment around, electricity to power all the lights and equipment, power for the computers and televisions, and on and on. Think of all the promotional efforts — printing, advertising, news media coverage, etc. — that will lead to lots of new polution and resource consumption.

I don’t like being preached to by Gore’s entertainer and Hollywood friends who tend to live extravagent lifestyles. I don’t like being preached to by Gore either, who in my mind, lost his credibility years ago.

But I saved the big one for last and this one really irritates me: a concert on Antartica. How absurd! How disgusting from this group who claim to be helping save the planet. They’re going to bring a bunch of hot air, waste, polution, and more people to a place that they claim is very fragile and melting away at an alarming rate. I couldn’t believe it when I first read it in their press release. So hypocritical.

I’m sure Gore will say this will be a “carbon-neutral” event. However, carbon neutrality doesn’t address all the other polution. In fact, it doesn’t adequately address the carbon produced now. Offsets by trees can take years. How long will it take to offset the carbon they will produce? Again it strikes me as hypocritical.

What I think they should do if they really cared about offsetting carbon is do like Johnny Appleseed and plant trees for the sake of planting trees. They should skip the concerts and waste and just work. They should not strive to be merely neutral but to actually produce change in themselves. If they did this first, they might begin to earn some credibility to actually merit being listened to.