“”We are in a transition time in history when the only way we can get to where we need to be is by starting from where we are.” — Al Gore, this weekend at Live Earth (Hat tip: Power Line)

It seems foolish for me to add my own thoughts about this past weekend’s Al Gore-led “Live Earth” events – after all, there are times when the target is so easy to pick at, it’s not even worth it. I mean, what can I say that has already been said? Can you spell f-i-a-s-c-o? But just so you don’t have to waste time doing it yourself, and/or feel as if you might have missed out on something incredibly important and essential to your life, allow The Great White Shank to provide this service at no extra charge!

Was it successful? Drudge has the reaction, here and here. And David Wissing as more about it here.

OK, so maybe a whole planet can be wrong. Was it important? Well, National Review Online’s Mark Hemingway actually live blogged the proceedings, figuring that folks like you and I had better things to do – I know both me and Cosmo did. This seems to about sum it all up, at least as far as I’m concerned:

6:26: Al Gore’s personal troubadour, Melissa Etheridge, takes the stage. Etheridge wrote the turgid theme song for An Inconvenient Truth, and today is premiering two new songs. The first, “Imagine That,” near as I can tell, is written from the perspective of Cindy Sheehan. Etheridge is the only musician I’ve seen today that seems really revved up about the cause. Unfortunately, for her there’s really just no way for her to sing lyrics this overtly political and not have it be extremely awkward:

A mother was grieving he loss/her soldier the ultimate cost/she went to the man who’s been told he’s a king/waited outside of his compound to ask him a few things/she said “for what noble cause did my son have to die/where are there weapons and why’d you have to lie.”

No artistic interpretation needed there.

Unfortunately, the sub-par dirge-y “Imagine That” lasts almost eight minutes because in the middle of the song, Etheridge begins to break it down and lecture the crowd to get her political rocks off. Too bad she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about:

“AmeriKKKa! [emphasis added] What happened to us? I mean last thing I remember I was in like eight grade, right? I was in about eight grade and I remember that was the first time I heard about this global-warming stuff, whatever, something’s gonna happen in the future. I remember sitting in my eight-grade social-studies class, thinking “oh yeah, I’m sure glad that’s going to be taken care of so when I become an adult I don’t have to worry about this global-warming stuff” because people were doing stuff back then. Because it was it was America, people were doing things. People were standing up when there was an unjust war.”

Where to begin? It’s incoherent for starters, and I’d like to forget the bile-inducing Sixties’ nostalgia. Most importantly, it’s completely factually wrong. As for the scientific consensus on global warming, everyone agrees that there is no significant evidence that global temperatures were starting to rise until 1979. Melissa Etheridge was born in 1961, and by my rough calculations that puts her in the eight-grade in 1975. Here’s a Newsweek article from that same year that begins, “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production — with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.” Naturally, the article is discussing the emerging scientific consensus on global cooling…

Or, more to the point, and short and sweet, this from The Washington Post’s review of the concerts:

“If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down!” Thus Madonna revealed her plan to combat global warming. Clad in a black satin leotard, she gyrated with dancers and simulated sex with an amplifier and a guitar.

What a friggin’ load of crap and a waste of time, effort, and – yes – hydrocarbons. There is one good thing about this whole Live Earth debacle: methinks this indicates that the whole Global Warming movement canard has finally reached it’s ‘jumping the shark’ point, and not a moment too soon. And that’s something we can all be grateful for. Thanks, Al.