Aw, Al…

In Slate, Steven Landsburg shows how Al Gore has hidden behind generalities and vague proclamations in his global warming rhetoric:

The moral of that story is …. that assumptions really matter. Therefore you need to be clear about your assumptions, and you need to be prepared to justify them. If you’re not talking about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you’re blathering.

And of course, Al Gore doesn’t do this, preferring to couch his argument almost entirely in friendly generalities and scare stories about unlikely scenarios.