Al Gore, still thinkiing what might have been is

Al Gore, in the New York Times:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

Here are some plausible interpretations of Gore's essay:

Jeez, I went long on windmills when I should have gone short.

My side really had balls. Imagine, we got by with comparing temperatures guesstimated by measuring tree rings with temperatures measured by thermometers. That's one way we got those huge temperature swings.

We got by, for a while, with wiping the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) out of our memory banks, but it came back to bite us.

We can't lose our edge. You may have noticed that in January, when lots of people found that their houses had become igloos, we were talking about January being the hottest month on record.

If we show weakness, our critics might start talking about prosecuting us. I might lose my Oscar.