1. He does not care if he looses $9 million over the next 20 or so years. He will get enough utility out of the property before the rise.
2. He knows that he can collect on insurance.
3. He believes that interventions will be enacted that will stop the warming.
3. He does not really believes that sea level will rise much.

I suspect his understanding of banking and real estate is not exceptional. At least, like you, I don’t have any objective reason to suspect otherwise.

I mean, c’mon, you can analyze the facts however you like. You can “read between the lines and tell us what you “suppose” Al Gore meant by the things he says. You can tell us you think he’s wrong (I’ll agree with you for the most part) in the conclusions he draws. But don’t tell us he said something that he didn’t. That’s lying. Unless that’s your intention. To put out information that you know to be false for the purpose of shaping public opinion.

“despite his belief that it will soon be worthless,”

This element of your argument is not in evidence.

Then you say “I would say that buying land that you believe will become worthless sooner than others think it will become worthless means that you must therefore believe it is currently overpriced. ”

but what if we changed this to say “…you believe will become worthless sometime after you are dead…”.

Is it impossible to believe something is priced fairly now even if that thing is sure to become worthless later? By your own example, then isn’t every airline ticket a bad deal? Since the resale value of every ticket becomes nil as soon as the plane leaves the gate.

Your argument can only be valid if we assume that the value of this home as a financial investment was the determinant factor in Gore’s decision to buy it. But he may have chose to buy a house that will be worthless in a century for sentimental reasons, or because it requires so much fewer fossil fuels per sq-ft to heat and cool.

I’m not sure what premise I’m crafting out of thin air,so if you could identify the balloon for me that would be appreciated.

In response to your question, I would say that buying land that you believe will become worthless sooner than others think it will become worthless means that you must therefore believe it is currently overpriced. That does not mean the same thing as saying that you think it is worth less to you than the current price, simply that the market has not adequately reduced its value in recognition of risk.

An airplane ticket loses its value once the plane leaves the gate. It is one-time use. Buying a house that might soon be worthless is less like buying an airplane ticket that must soon become worthless than it is like, say, buying a house.

If Gore wanted to live in California, and had decided that the way to do so was to purchase land and a home there rather than rent it, then the presence of information that that land and that home are likely to become worthless far sooner than the current price indicates cannot possibly make the home worth more. It very well might make a plane ticket there worth more.

Suppose I ran around and told everyone that I had unequivocal, settled evidence that Rochester NY would be an uninhabitable swamp sometime in the next 100 years. Would land and home prices rise or fall? What would you conclude about my credibility if I was purchasing land and homes in Rochester while making this claim? These are very basic questions, and they shed some light on this situation. Of course it’s possible that he believes everything he’s said and he still thinks this home was worth the price. It’s just odd to see someone purchasing something when they have spent years trying to convince everyone else that it is overpriced.

EDIT: Just saw the updated information on the actual elevation of the home, and most of this post could be thrown out based on that. However, if one were to assume a low elevation, the points would remain valid and un-vaporized.

The climate around this house has an average yearly temperature of 64 degrees. There are a few months where the highs get up to 78-79 degrees and a few months where they get as cool as 41.

In terms of actual energy usage, I suspect he could get by using as much energy each year as my old 1500 sq. ft house in Michigan.

I looked up some electricity usage statistics and the yearly kWh per capita in California is less than that of Michigan (about 3 million kWh vs. 3.5) But Gore’s new place is in a region of California even milder than the state average so it stands to reason that he would need to use climate control less and on fewer days than the California average.

I really want to know how your mind can justify this statement to mean anything except: “I had absolutely no intention making any effort whatsoever to ensure the message I was typing was accurate.”

Please explain to me how it is that you didn’t know that you could type in “what is Al Gore’s new California home address” into google.

You claim on your blog profile that you are an attorney. That seems like a profession that requires a fair bit of intellectual capacity. You had to go to a school to learn that one right? Didn’t you have to research things in school? They didn’t teach you what would be and what wouldn’t be available in public records at law school?

You didn’t know you could look for information, relevant to the topic you were speaking on, with a simple internet search? Yet you advise in one of your blog posts “anybody with even a smidgen of Internet know-how (and many without) can figure out the legal name of the author with a few minutes snooping at most”

You seem pretty internet search savvy there. I would assert, like the case you made against Gore, that you really are not as mind numbingly stupid as your explanation for your actions would require you to be. But instead you are a a self-conscious, witting liar and in the most dispassionate, common-sense meaning of the term, a fraud.

Al Gore’s new home is 480′ above sea level. A measurement critical to the validity of your argument. It took me about 6 minutes to find a free web interface to the USGS topographical maps containing elevation. And before that all of 10 seconds to find the address of his home. His home was on MOUNTAIN Drive for god sakes!

I guess the real question comes down to this: If you had done that minute or two of research necessary to factually establish the entire basis of your argument. And in doing so discovered that every bit of ice and snow on this earth could melt at ten times the predicted rates and the subject of your ridicule would still have a fine home in Santa Barbara County, would your blog post have been written differently?

I don’t believe that Gore’s house is in any danger if even the least likely of his predictions came true. At least not during Gores lifetime and I suspect Gore agrees with me.

But suppose he believes that within 20 years his favorite place to live in the world will be destroyed. We’ve established that he is wealthy enough so that taking a 9 million dollar loss wouldn’t be the end of the world and even then the loss would be realized around the time he’s 80 years old?

Tell me again how, even pretending that your premise is not crafted out of vapor, how is this a bad bet for Al Gore?