Al Gore is getting rather desperate to get people to take him super serial on climate change. The Hill reports that the former VP has now taken to equating it to the Civil Rights Movement, hoping to build some enthusiasm among youth for a great carbon crusade:

Against this backdrop, Gore said it’s vital to continue pushing for policies that would put a monetary cost on industrial emissions. “Putting a price on carbon” is the goal of cap-and-trade plans and other proposals to ensure emissions cuts, but such measures face gigantic hurdles in the current Congress. Gore said the Civil Rights movement was fueled by youth questioning their parents about legal discrimination, and he drew a link to climate change. “When they could not answer that moral question coming straight from the conscience of young people, that is when the laws began to change,” Gore said. “You need to ask, ‘tell me again why its al right to put 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, 20 percent of it will still be there in 20,000 years.’” “You need to ask that question and other related questions. Don’t they see the evidence, don’t they hear what the scientists are saying, do they actually believe this lying from the large carbon polluters, that the scientists are making this up?” Gore added.

Ah, evidence. I got a first hand look at some evidence here in Minneapolis this morning:

It’s not terribly unusual to have chilly weather here into April, but this looks like about a half-inch of icy snow. It fell most of the night. This doesn’t prove global cooling, of course; it’s just weather. But it certainly seems that the last two winters here have both been especially long, even for Minnesota.

As for more evidence, Gavin Atkins notes that the UN seems to be missing 50 million missing people:

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production. The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.

Well, they used to provide a handy map. That link has gone dead at UNEP, oddly enough. Wonder why?

However, a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.

Don’t worry, however, because Anthony Watts found that the UN is as incompetent at memory holes as they are in meteorology. Looks like every other prediction outcome for AGW hysterics: false. That doesn’t keep them from moving the goalposts, however:

Climate change is forcing a lot of people–50 million by 2020, to be exact–to skip town, prompting the world’s scientists, farmers, filmmakers, and urban planners to frantically seek out ways to accommodate environmental refugees. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting this weekend, scientists warned about looming food shortages and other climate change-induced migration catastrophes. “When people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate,” said UCLA Professor Cristina Tirado.

Their evidence? Rebellions in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt that they blame on food price increases caused by global warming. It doesn’t appear to cross their mind that the rebellions might have something to do with the dictatorships that oppress the people to the point of rebellion, or that the dictatorships themselves are the problem in food prices, with their top-down control of their economies. In fact, if Gore wants a civil-rights cause, perhaps he should be fighting those dictatorial systems in order to end top-down statist economics.

Except, of course, that’s exactly what Gore is espousing with his AGW hysteria — top-down control of energy production, and therefore entire economies.

I’ll mull that over while I sweep the April snow off of my deck, and wait impatiently to escape to Rome’s sunny clime in two weeks.

Update: Noel Sheppard has the video and transcript at NewsBusters.