Environment & Energy

One wonders how the forces of darkness who successfully prevented Gore from taking office allowed a black man to be elected just eight years later, and how they failed to get his orange faced successor re-elected in 2020. I suppose it is because, unlike Bush, he did not have a sympathetic supreme court.


As for whether there was a wind shift against the climate starting in 2,000: Even with Al Gore as his VP, Clinton was no climate champion. ‘W’ actually appointed a Cabinet Committee on Climate Change Science and Technology Integration. They brought in the National Academy of Sciences to advise them. On June 11, 2001, he gave an address, based (in large part) on the report from the National Academy of Sciences, where he made it clear that Climate Change was a global threat, that needed a global response.

He also maintained his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, and did his best to emphasize any and all uncertainties in the science, but, for a man who ran as a climate skeptic, that was quite a statement. His eight years in office were (at best) a “mixed bag," certainly not good for the climate, but compared to the current administration… or (God Forbid) the Reagan administration well… Let’s just say, “It could have been much worse."

Had Gore been elected in 2,000, he likely wouldn’t have made An Inconvenient Truth, which, to me was one of the most successful efforts made to educate people and shift their thinking about the climate (short lived a shift as it was.)


So, did Tornado Alley up and move in response to the election of George W. Bush? No. The shift was already in motion by the mid-80’s.

Coleman, T. A., R. L. Thompson, and G. S. Forbes, 2024: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Spatial and Seasonal Shifts in Tornado Activity in the United States. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 63, 717–730, https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-23-0143.1.