The Big "What If?" Question

Al Gore has suddenly become the Richard Nixon of his generation: a two-term vice-president who narrowly lost a presidential election (although we all know he won in 2000), sits out the next election and then quietly, but effectively, reinvents himself. This is exactly what Gore is doing, with everything fromthis new film about the environment to his recent appearance on "Saturday Night Live."

So I throw out two "What If" questions for you to chew on: (1) What if we had put Al Gore in the White House in 2000 - how would the last six years been different. Obviously (1) we never would have gone into Iraq and (2) the environment wouldn't be the mess it is today. What else?

Also, What If Gore makes a shot in 2008? Would you give him a second chance?

Here's a recent column from the Washington Post:

"Liberals famously love John McCain, but that's not the weirdest political
coupling. The oil industry and its Republican allies are rooting for Al
Gore, albeit unintentionally.

Gore stars in a movie that opens this week in New York and Los Angeles. The
film features the once and maybe future presidential candidate lecturing
about climate change: There are charts, bullet points and diagrams; there
are maps of ocean currents and endless iceberg pictures. It's hard to say
which menaces the nation more: movie stars who go into politics or
politicians who go into movies.

Ordinarily this film would never have been made, let alone scheduled for
release in hundreds of theaters. But President Bush and the congressional
Republicans have created a Ross Perot moment: a hunger for a leader with
diagrams and charts, for a nerd who lays out basic facts ignored by
blinkered government. By their contempt for expert opinion on everything
from Iraqi reconstruction to the cost of their tax cuts, Republicans have
turned Diagram Gore into a hero. By their serial dishonesty, Republicans
have created a market for "An Inconvenient Truth" -- the title of Gore's
movie.

Republican dishonesty reaches its extreme on the issue of global warming.
Yes, climate science is complex, and nobody can forecast the earth's
temperature with complete confidence. But the fact that scientists don't
know everything isn't a license to ignore what they do know: that the earth
is warming, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an
accelerating pace -- and that these changes are driven at least partly by
fossil-fuel consumption. The U.S. National Academies have confirmed this;
their foreign counterparts have confirmed this; and so has the world's top
authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
None of this is controversial.

Except among Republicans. Candidate Bush acknowledged that climate change
was a problem; once elected he denied it; then he denied the denial but
refused to let his administration do anything about climate. Lately he has
talked about ridding the nation of its oil addiction, but that's because oil
finances Arab extremism. Bush has been silent on the link between oil and
global warming.

Meanwhile, others have been vocal. James Inhofe, the Republican who
ironically chairs the Senate environment committee, has described global
warming as the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." He
avoids scientists who might put him right: His star witness at a hearing
last year was Michael Crichton, a science-fiction novelist.

Then there is Conrad Burns, a Republican senator from Montana. "You remember
the ice age?" he asked Environment and Energy Daily this month. "It's been
warming ever since, and there ain't anything we can do to stop it."

Every quote like this plays into Gore's hands, turning his statements of
scientific conventional wisdom into heroic actions. But the Republicans and
their allies don't see what they're doing. Last week, in anticipation of
Gore's movie launch, conservatives unleashed two TV ads on what they called
"the alleged global warming crisis."

The ads are the work of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a group
backed by the oil industry that supplies the anti-scientific crowd with
arguments. "Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life," both
scripts conclude, as the camera homes in on a girl with a dandelion. The
ads' main scientific contention is that the talk of melting ice caps is all
wrong: "Greenland's glaciers are growing, not melting."

Well, the most authoritative and up-to-date statement on climate science is
contained in a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
that is circulating in draft form. According to scientists who have seen it,
Chapter Four says: "Taken together, the ice sheets in Greenland and
Antarctica are shrinking." As to the possibility that the melting of some
ice caps is offset by the growth of others, the draft also says: "Thickening
in central regions of Greenland is more than offset by increased melting
near the coast."

In other words, the ads are nonsense. So are some of the assertions on the
CEI Web site. The group suggests, for example, that polar bears have nothing
to fear from the melting of their habitat. But the Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment , a top-notch peer-reviewed source on this subject, has something
different to say: "the reduction in sea ice is very likely to have
devastating consequences for polar bears."

Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters
thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of
governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood
seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And
technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting."

What do you think? What if?