Failed presidential candidate Al Gore is opening his mouth again, and when that happens, the truth always loses, as James Taranto points out:

Yesterday we noted that in an interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Gore had misrepresented the content of his own movie by characterizing his outlandish “climate change” doomsaying as having been merely an accurate prediction of last year’s weather.

It was left to one of Klein’s colleagues, the delightfully named Jason Samenow, to clean up another bit of the mess Klein allowed Gore to make. Gore claimed that “extreme events” like hurricanes are “more extreme” than they used to be: “The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6.” Samenow called the National Weather Service, which told him, in Samenow’s words, that “Gore’s statement about this new breed of hurricanes is patently false.”

In fact, a reader of Taranto’s points out:

Note that the newspaper columnists and scientists who have talked about introducing Category 6 storms (i.e., winds greater than 174 or 180 mph) reference storms that are mostly pre-global-warming-alarmism, most notably Typhoon Ida in 1958 and Typhoon Nancy in 1961, both with sustained winds of 215 mph, and Typhoon Tip in 1979 with sustained winds of 190 mph. The 2005 hurricane season is considered to be the worst ever, but, it didn’t have any storms of the ferocity seen in the Pacific in 1958, 1961, 1979.

Also, if you graph and calculate a linear trendline from the government’s “U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade” report, you see that the trend for major storms (Category 3, 4, and 5) since 1851 is very slightly negative, with the clear peaks, again, in pre-global-warming eras.

This part of our supposedly overheated planet, by the way, is experiencing a drought … of tornadoes. The number of tornadoes in the U.S. this and last year is significantly below average.

Klein noted that Gore wants to demonize those who disagree with his climate change claptrap:

Well, I think the most important part of it is winning the conversation. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them to shut up. We’re winning that conversation.

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace. But the political climate is changing. . . . The deniers are being hit politically. They’re being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.

To which Taranto replies:

The bit about nuclear arms seems out of place. It’s true that the arms race has essentially ended. But that isn’t because the “freeze movement” won, it’s because the Soviet Union collapsed before reaching the finish line. The “freeze movement” was a mid-1980s flash in the pan. Does anyone even remember the “Great Peace March”? Suffice it to say it wasn’t exactly the march on Washington.

When we toss that example, we’re left with the “conversations” about racism (of which slavery and apartheid are subcategories) and homosexuality. Suddenly Gore’s strategy is clear: He wants the global warming debate to follow the civil-rights model–or, perhaps more precisely, the identity-politics model of the post-civil-rights era.

You can understand the appeal of this approach. Identity politics has enormous cultural influence. If you belong to a group that acquires accredited victim status, influential people will tie themselves into knots to satisfy whatever demands you make. …

The compassionate impulse that underlies all this bizarre solicitude is not wholly misplaced. Nor, we hasten to add, does it excuse his crimes–but our point here is simply that there is a well-meaning aspect to identity politics.

There is also, however, a vicious aspect, of which Salon’s Joan Walsh provides as pure an example as one could hope for.

Walsh tells the story of Antoinette Tuff, an accountant at the Ronald McNair Discovery Learning Center in Decatur, Ga. On Tuesday a man named Michael Hill showed up at the school with a rifle. …

Walsh’s conclusion: “I can only pray that a white woman faced with a heavily armed, mentally ill young black man would have done the same thing.” (Tuff is black.)

The gratuitous racial reference–not surprising from the author of a book called What’s the Matter With White People?–is bad enough. But the headline is atrocious: “The Story Bigots Hate: Antoinette Tuff’s Courage.” The URL includes the string “the_story_the_right_hates,” making clear that Walsh seeks to stigmatize all conservatives as bigots. Astonishingly, there is not a single fact in the story to back up the headline. That is, Walsh provides no shred of evidence that “bigots” who “hate” the Antoinette Tuff story even exist.

Gore’s strategy for “winning the conversation” about global warming is to stigmatize and demonize the opposition, just as the left attempts to demonize and stigmatize those who express politically incorrect views about race, sex, sexual orientation and other elements of identity politics.

It won’t work. To the extent that identity politics make any claim on the moral imagination, it is because of the compassionate element of it–the appeal to the human dignity of victims of discrimination or bigotry. Such appeals, and the attendant claims of victimization, are often taken to absurd and unjust extremes or used, as in Walsh’s case, to justify one’s own bigotry. But global warmism cannot even claim to have at its core a concept of human dignity. It has nothing to offer but fear and hatred.