Al Gore was in Australia Thursday promoting his new video, “An Inconvenient Sequel,” the follow-up to Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth.” While speaking to attendees of the EcoCity World Summit in Melbourne, the former vice president compared climate change advocates to those who worked to end slavery, promoted civil rights and women’s suffrage, battled apartheid in South Africa, and worked for gay rights. He said those activists had also experienced “ferocious resistance” to their cause.

Global warming advocacy is a movement that stifles dissent from the dominant scientific view, ruins the careers of people who disagree, threatens to throw skeptics in jail, and actively works to prevent the publication of alternate theories in respected scientific journals.

But resistance to global warming hysteria is “ferocious.”

A group of conservative black activists has taken issue with Gore putting climate change activists on the same side as anti-slavery and civil rights workers.

The Daily Caller:

Horace Cooper, a former assistant law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, criticized Gore for appropriating the moral fight to end slavery to lend credibility to the push against global warming. “When Al Gore, Jr. associates these moral movements of history with one grounded in questionable data, he gives climate change activists unearned moral credibility they haven’t earned and don’t deserve,” Cooper wrote in a press statement Friday.

Cooper is the co-chairman of Project 21, an initiative within the Black Conservative Leadership Network. He pointed to the opposition of Gore’s father, a senator in the 1960s, to many civil rights initiatives of the era.

Cooper also suggested that Gore’s father’s general support for segregation makes the former vice president’s comments inappropriate. Al Gore Sr. voted against several important civil rights initiatives during the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He did support the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however. Gore’s global warming investment group, Generation Investment Management, has not responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comments about the speech or his comparison. Gore has made similar comments in the past. Gore told reporters in 2013 that so-called climate change “deniers” are like alcoholic fathers who act belligerently when someone mentions the issue. “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,” he said at the time. Other activists within Cooper’s group weighed in on Gore’s remarks as well. Project 21 Co-Chairman Stacy Washington, for instance, suggested Friday that Gore’s comments were baffling. “Fighting people being owned as property and debased in an entrenched system enshrined in law is akin to worshiping the idea that humans can materially impact the climate?” Washington said in Project 21’s response to the Gore’s speech. “He cannot be serious!”

Sadly, I’m afraid he is. But what’s truly remarkable about Gore’s ranting is that he appears to be unaware of just how dominant liberals have become since those days in the 1960s.

The left may have been the underdog at one time. But today, they bestride the cultural, academic, artistic, and political universe like a Colossus. They have the power to destroy any opposition and they use it frequently.

But that self-image of liberals just doesn’t cut it. The left needs to feel persecuted, hounded, beset on all sides by powerful enemies — in short, they need to feel like losers to justify their anti-democratic, anti-human worldview.

This heroic self-image breeds a special kind of arrogance, steeped in the echo chamber they’ve created and filled with contempt for the common man who usually suffers the “unintended consequences” of their schemes.

There is no “debate” over climate change. There never will be as long as the left is able to prevent opposing views from seeing the light of day and ruining those who dare question their theories.