Al Gore Really is Stupid

By Richard Baehr

Yesterday I attended the Cubs home opener, as I do most seasons. At scheduled game time of 1: 20, the temperature was in the mid 30s, windy, with a steady rain. The game start was delayed an hour, and the rain lasted through the first 3 or 4 innings. All in all, a perfect day for baseball in Chicago (the Cubs won 4-0, on a combined one hitter by starter Ted Lilly and three relievers). This late home opener -- April 13^th, and the late start to the season on Sunday, April 5^th, was a result of the World Baseball Classic, which pushed back the start of the Major League baseball season by a week.

If you were cold at Wrigley Field yesterday (so far the new owners have not renamed the park Ameritrade Stadium), there are warmer days ahead. Al Gore, speaking to a near empty theatre in Chicago a few weeks back, on a bitterly cold day of course (he seems to bring this weather with him everywhere he speaks) assured the few true believers willing to pony up to hear him that by mid century, as a result of global warming, the Cubs could be playing baseball in February.

Really? There are many people who have overrated Al Gore, but this level of stupidity needs to be examined. The February average temperature in Chicago is 33 high, 17 low. Even Al Gore's most hysterical model for temperature change by the year 2100, is for a 6 degrees centigrade shift, or 10 degrees Fahreneheit. So by mid century, take half of that increase, or 5 degrees fahrenheit. Would baseball be routinely played in an environment where the average high temperature was 38,and the average low was 22? These average temperatures, of course require swallowing Gore's whopper of a 6 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures by 2100. In the last 150 years, all that global warming we have been hearing about, has raised world temperatures by 0.44 degrees centigrade.

Al Gore grew up in Tennessee and Washington DC. His northern exposure was due to his "child of a famous person affirmative action" admission to Harvard (Gore's father was a US Senator). I doubt that Al Gore ever sat through an opening day at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, when the weather was as it was in Chicago yesterday. And I will wager that neither his heirs nor anybody else will get to sit through baseball in Chicago in February 2050.