Another noble Nobel peace prize
Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
And just what has Gore done lately to advance world peace? Nothing, really. But the Peace Prize has become a sort of worldwide Miss Congeniality contest in recent years, when it’s not being awarded to terrorists such as Arafat who’ve done their bit to convince the gullible international community that they’ve changed their wicked ways, or to their apologists such as Jimmy Carter.
The Gore prize, awarded for his efforts to spread the word on climate change, amounts to what I believe is the first example of the Peace Prize and the Oscar being bestowed for the same work and apparently using the same standards.
Why am I so down on Gore? I don’t like the politicization of science and the concomitant twisting of facts in that effort. I certainly don’t mind him presenting a scientific point of view he believes is vital for the world to know, but the evidence is clear that Gore’s devotion to truth in his movie has been only a trifle behind that of Oliver Stone’s biopics.
Even a British judge, in an unusual decision, has ruled that Gore’s film plays fast and loose with the facts. That would be an inconvenient truth for Gore, except that it appears he’s hardly been inconvenienced by it at all.
Justice Barton, who ruled on the Gore film because a school governor had objected to a British government decision that it be shown in all British secondary schools, said that:
…the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change.
Barton went on to mention nine significant scientific misstatements by Gore in the film, although the Justice did agree with its basic premise that the bulk of scientific evidence supports the idea of global warming caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions. He ruled, however, that if the film is to be required viewing in schools, a rebuttal to it must be offered students at the same time.
Judges, of course, are not scientists. There’s no question that many reputable scientists would agree with Gore’s major thesis of human-generated global warming; there’s also no question that quite a few of the same ilk would disagree. This controversy will not be settled in a court of law nor by awarding prizes, however. It will be settled in the usual manner of science: research and evidence, made clearer by the passage of time and the amassing of more of same.
JWF, you left out Mohammed Al-Baradei & Yasser-Death to the Jews plus Jimmy, oh well. BTW, Gotta rant about JC & his stint on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show:
Jimmy Carter gets away with far more offensive comments than Ann Coulter’s about the Jews on CNN with Wolf Blitzer without a peep of protest simply because he is a man of the Left.
There is a ginormous double standard about everything in the media—-look at 30Rock mocking affirmative action and black entertainers. If it weren’t Tina Fey & Alec Baldwin, but a conservative group of actors, the screams and shrieks of the hyperventilating left would echo from the rooftops.
Instead, the unwatched 30Rock is the TV equivalent of Air America. As an SDS member who stayed at my Ann Arbor home [Mark Rudd had been on the cover of Time magazine the year before for a Columbia U. takeover in May, ’68], said to me among other mantras:
“No fault on the Left.”
Still holds true today, as does Mark Rudd’s second piece of advice to me:
“Dare to cheat, dare to win.”
Anyone watching “An Inconvenient Truth” will appreciate how apropos that little aphorism remains to this day.
Like hysteric Al. Or hypocritic Al.
Sorry, neo neo-con. I cross-posted above to Jammie Wearing Fool. I like your shrink background & also post on Dr. Sanity. I believe “displacement” is at work here, as the Eurotrash Norwegians & other weasal weenies can’t handle the truth of Islamist Muslim terrorists, so they displace their hysteric Al hypocritic Al reactions over to what Richard Feynman called nutjob Cargo Cult Science.
Now Feynman was an American who deserved the Nobel Prize!!!
Ever since the Peace Prize was awarded to Le Duc Tho, one of the architects of the massacre of Saigon, the term “Peace Prize” has been newspeak for “Fear and Ignorance Prize.” Gore has definitely been adept at spreading both, even going so far as to claim the Arctic ice sheet rests on the ocean floor, in order to claim is version of the “ice-in-the-bucket” buoyancy experiment is a valid model of it. Not unlike the Church of Climate Change’s computer models that need monthly revising to match actual, observed changes in climate, or the Saudi’s continuing research to calculate the epicycles of Venus, instead of just accepting the fact that Venus orbits the Sun, not the Earth.
Sceince? Research? What sort of crazy-talk is this? 🙂
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“there’s also no question that quite a few of the same ilk would disagree”
There are lots of those who disagree, namely almost all professional community in Russia. We have as many climatologists here as in the rest of the world, due to importance of this matter to Russian economy and an excellent school of computational mathematics. The notion of “nuclear winter” was introduced by Soviet specialists in computer modelling of climate. The resume of their finding about AGW can be found in a slide-film by Andrey Illarionov, former chef economic adviser of Putin, now in CATO Institute. But their opinions almost unknown in the West, because are published in Russian.
See http://www.gateway2russia.com/st/art_267961.php and
# an interview
Andrei Illarionov, “Kyoto’s smoke screen imperils us all”, Financial Times, November 15, 2004.
See also
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=927b9303-802a-23ad-494b-dccb00b51a12&Region_id=&Issue_id=
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It is a certainty that there is an enormous disconnect between scientists advocating different positions on climate change issues. The significant disconnect is between different asreas of interest. Scientists with a narrow time view, and the end of the last major glacial episode, about 10-11,000 years ago, have a very different view of climate change that those who look at the entire 4.6 billion year hostory of this planet. Perspective is everything.
I never liked the guy, but I don’t think he deserved this.
A Nobel Peace Prize for shilling for the theory of Antropogenic Global Warming? Let’s see how………….oh yeah, I get it. If it gets much warmer in the Middle East some of those poor Muslims might start blowing themselves up because they want to take over a country with a cooler climate. What the heck; makes perfect sense.
Oh yeah, he’s in excellent company there with Jimmah and Yassir. Does anyone think the old Nobel ain’t quite what it used to be?
Some errors are presenting as proven things that are only speculation but some things, like misrepresenting that carbon levels in ice core samples lag 800 years *behind* the temperatures that atmospheric carbon is supposed to *drive* are not presenting speculation as fact, they are simply wrong.
The disconnect on time view is an excellent point. The last article I read (they were laughing at it on Wizbang) had an Historical scope of about 30 years. With the exception of one reference to (something like) 1930, all references were to the 1980s or 1990s.
I’m not an AGW skeptic because I *distrust* science. I’m an AGW skeptic because I have a clue about science and like it and even if I can’t do the math, I can handle most any layman’s discussion of it. *And* I’m Norse. My world History *began* with farms in Greenland and grapes in Vinland. That’s only a 1000 year perspective but geez louise… 1930?
Apocalyptic threats lead to panic, not to well considered approaches to problems nor to perserverence in solving them. What Gore has created is a mass of headless chickens who will run from one catastrophe to another, one ill-conceived solution to another. They will end up producing a pile of dirty feathers.
Al Gore
The entire topic is fascinating and it is one of the difficulties in discussions that most folks seem to have a notion that modern climates are “Normal” or the “best” and quite the contrary is the case. Similarly the notion that current CO2 levels are odd is also contray to data easily found in the literature. In truth, throuh most of the last 560 million years (that is a very long period of time), the planet has been warm and ice free with high sealevels relative to land distribution. Interestingly, carbon dioxide levels were about 10-12 times modern levels. More significant, to me at least, is the amazing fluctuation in oxygen, 20.9 per cent now but as high as 35-38% in the past. I for one would be more interested in explanations of where all the oxygen has gone, much more significant then the level of CO2.
Modern (last 10,000 years or so) climates really represent an “interglacial” episode, often repeated in the last million years or so and representing warm or warmer episodes between advances of continental ice sheets. The most drastic example of climate change imaginable was the end of the last ice age when most of North America (a lot of territory) and much of Europe was literally covered by vast sheets of very thick ice. And then it warmed and sea levels, depressed bu more than 300 feet lower than at present, rapidly rose as all that ice on land and in the sea melted–300 feet!
For all the media hype about global warmin, there is no increase seen in sea level, except by local subsidence or other non-climate factors.
Indeed, perspective is everything.
Harry9000,
Even a skeptic (not denier) about AGW can agree that sustainable energy sources can contribute to energy independence and ultimately stabilize energy prices as world demand increases. There probably aren’t many in America who wouldn’t love to tell Chavez and his Middle East friends to shove it. If Gore had provided rational arguments, he might have had more cooperation on practical ideas. But when he courts Hollywood types who want to ration toilet paper, he is winning over headless chickens. He is an arrogant jerk.
DW,
I live in Germany, which thanks to the Greens swallows any climate hype. I can’t tell you how often one hears that this is the warmest April in the last 5 years or the biggest flood in the last 30 years. Forget perspective. These folks don’t even understand modern history. Nor do they understand the meaning of could. One of my favorites from Britain was that flies could increase in number if…
Expat raise some interesting points. Indedd there is a great deal of confusion between “weather” and “climate.” Of course a political component is introduced into the discussion and once can only be amused by the antics of Ms Boxer, from California for example, as she orates on global warming. Of some amusement recently, are the reports in the literatrure of the shrinking of the Martian ice caps, for example, or the measured warming of the moon Titan. Some astronomers have looked at the obvious–solar influences and thier impact on climate. It is almost like a bad Saturday Night Live skit at times.
Influence of green lobby in Europe became dangerous: this totalitarian sect can now seriously deform rational policy and silence critics. This can cost a lot both economicaly and politicaly due overregulation and expanding government bureaucracy.
Sergey is very much on target. The fear of doing more things such as exploring for energy resources, shifting to a nuclear economy, and looking at the world we live in as more than that thin onion skin at the surface, hinders all our futures. At the core is a very bad educational system throughout the world that does not stress knowledge and is more concerned with political correctness than content or debate. The ironic scene of Cuba granting peroleum exploration rights to the Chinese off Florida while American companies are not able to drill because both Florida and the federal government will not permit drilling highlights the silliness of ignorant environmental bliss. Discussing how we can not build coal fired generating plants in the U.S., while the Chinese open a new plant every month, as do the Indians, is another of those disconnects that appears less than sane.
There is a group now going around documenting the conditions at Temperature measurment stations in the U.S. One thing they have found at some is artificially high readings have been introduced due to things like parking lots being built right next to the thermometers and the heat end of AC’s being near thermometers. They are documenting this stuff on film. I have yet to see the mainstream media even admit this problem. Newsbuster’s Noel Shepard first alerted me to it on that site. Very good site and worth a look. Also, FYI, “Big Oil” Texas now generates more electricity from Wind Farms than “Green” California. I have sent links in to News Organizations regarding this. When Bush was Gov he really got the ball rolling on windfarms. I suspect that is why they refuse to cover it.I provide a link to the weather site here: http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
Al’s campaign reminds me of those old 50s sci-fi movies where the earth was facing destruction by aliens or meteorites or something. On the word of a lone scientist/visionary, the world’s governments and people would instantly put aside their petty differences, submit to some form of central organization, and begin working as one to avert the disaster.
I’m wondering if Al has something similar in mind. If so, I think we know who’s cast as the lone scientist/visionary in The Day the Earth Got Warm.
Also wondering if giant ants will appear at some point.
The best was The Day the Earth Stood Still with Michael Rennie as the space man and a real cool robot. Come to think of it, Al Gore and the robot, named Klatu as I recall, look an awful lot alike, and I have never seen them together…hmmmmm