Al Gore: The gift that keeps giving

When we (Raoul Felder and myself) wrote about Al Gore and in our first book, we intended to leave him behind like a chewed-over pastrami sandwich left on a delicatessen table and move on to other Schmucks in our on-going tour of Schmuckville. But he does not permit us to do so.
We believed Al Gore would be happily retired, adrift in his delusions of inventing the Internet and discovering the Love Canal. We thought, like a punch drunk fighter, he would spent the rest of his days boring people, explaining he wuz robbed by the referee and could've been a champion.
However, leaving his chads behind – and from the look of Gore today, we have an idea of where he stuffed them – he now became the Guru of Global Warming.
Global warming is a highly politicized subject, so inculcated into our collective psyches by the liberal media as a reality that, notwithstanding the fact hundreds of scientists believe it is a merely a cyclical phenomenon that has existed for thousands of years, to even question its existence relegates you to the insanity of a Holocaust denier.
Gore, with no scientific training, assumed the role of the validator and spokesperson for global warming. He even made a movie about it, and in fact won an Academy Award for it.
Suddenly, all of this somehow propelled him into being a potential candidate for president. To prove how serious he was, he started losing weight. We have heard of women who lose weight to get into last summer's bikini, and of old men who also lose weight to stuff themselves into ancient tuxedos, but this is an historic first: joining Weight Watchers to become president.
Now, we are not scientists, but, to us, the winters seem colder not hotter. The carbon dioxide that is supposed to be the villain is actually good, not bad, for trees, which everybody says are good for the planet. In fact, governments all over the world are expending effort and money to preserve the forests and plant new trees. The statistics show that using alternate fuels for automobiles actually costs more (considering government subsidies) and in the long run requires greater overall energy consumption than does gasoline.
Apparently, a great deal of the ozone problem is caused by methane gas, a principal source being the flatulence of cows. It may be more efficient and less costly to buy some Gas-X for the cows than the more sophisticated and costly alternative means suggested.
All of Gore's sputterings might be the proper subject of honest debate, except for one thing. Gore, as we have all now learned, is patently a hypocrite. He lives in a house that in one week, consumes 20 times the yearly energy use of an average home, and he flies around in private planes consuming vast amounts of fossil fuel and spewing enormous quantities of hurtful gasses into the atmosphere. His justification: He purchases carbon credits.
While few in the world can understand exactly what they are, in principle the credits are traded, for a fee, by middlemen, with the extreme offenders of pollution being made to pay money that, in effect, becomes the "credits." These are now placed into an exchange and then sold to other violators – like Gore. All of this does not change the amount of carbon produced one bit, but does produce a profit for the exchange company. Oh yes, did we forget to mention – you guessed it – Gore owns a carbon exchange company.
The proponents of global warming say that in a hundred years, the ocean temperature will rise five degrees and, because of melting icebergs, the Atlantic Ocean will extend into the land an additional nine inches. Just in case, we will definitely sell our Miami Beach condominiums in 90 years. Of course, if Gore will just shut up, the hot air lost may be just enough to save the icebergs.