Al Gore, Nobel Laureate
Aziz P
As expected, Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, along with the entire UN Intergivernmental Panel on Climate Change. Reportedly, Gore will donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Of course, as Christopher Hitchens also noted a few weeks ago, this event puts the question of whether Gore will run for President into renewed focus.
and, in case my own preferences aren't obvious, RUN, AL, RUN!
Related Posts (on one page):
- Is This the Best We've Got?
- Al Gore, Nobel Laureate
That's a new one on me. Learn something new everyday.
All we need now is to get George Lucas the Nobel Prize and he's set for a run for the Oval Office in 2012. We can do it!
What better way to ensure that a Republican sits in the White House for another four years?
Plus, there'd be the extraordinarily amusing entertainment of the Democratic Party self-destructing.
if you disagree with Al Gore that's your perogative, but don't pretend the prize and aziz's hopes for a gore presidency are predicated solely on the basis of an inconvenient truth.
I think the notion of an 'implosion' of the Democratic Party is a bit overwrought, but the fight between Hillary and Gore for the nomination would certainly be epic. Hell, maybe Gore would recapture the characteristics that made him so attractive as a candidate in the 90's.
But I doubt it.
Pretty much sums up why i don't think he'll run.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
This moral abdication on the part of the Nobel Committee to instead reward the world's trendiest doomsayer is sad and irresponsible.
Just to be clear- you state there are no egregious exaggerations or outright erroneous statements in An Inconvenient Truth?
I'm not pretending. At least about the prize. Can't speak about Aziz.
Michael,
Well, Aziz provides a good starting point:
But he clealry shows his bias for the man with this statement so I'm not trying to convince him. There's no showing Aziz he's wrong. I've long learned that.
The British judge is, like I said, a good point to start but how about this article from the Canada Free Press about scientific dissent from the film? Here's a detailed breakdown of the errors, misrepresentations and more. It covers both the book and movie.
Two seconds looking on the net is all it takes. More time than Aziz is willing to spend it would appear.
"Hey Fred, want to go bomb a building?"
"Are you kidding, it's 140 in the shade! Let's just stay in the air conditioning and order take out..."
That the process turned far more difficult does not diminish what they tried to do. And Arafat turned out to be a colossal disappointment who failed to live up to the potential that history handed him.
Still, awarding those three the prize for their actions in 1994 made sense. This year ... I'm not sure. Slate's Timothy Noah makes a bitingly satirical case that the prize committee should have thrown out its nomination rules and handed the prize to the Burmese monks. I think the prize should have gone that way, too.
With the Nobel Peace Prize, the committee has one opportunity each year to focus the world's attention on a cause worth fighting for. That the committee chose to direct attention to global warming is disappointing. Not that I doubt global warming. Rather, enough attention is already being channeled there -- and the committee failed to point attention elsewhere, where it might actually have done some good.
--|PW|-
But it would very likely help Republican chances in the house and senate about four years later, when people decide that an Inconvenient Truth was better as a movie than as a basis for real, actual policy, and want their confiscated cars back.
Alfred Nobel's will specifies that the peace prize would go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
Revised 2007 edition:
Alfred Nobel's will specifies that the peace prize would go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for
fraternityagreements on carbon emission limits between nations, for the abolition or reduction ofstanding armiesgreenhouse gasses and for the holding and promotion ofpeace congressesglobal warming benefit concerts, movies, and conferences."The Johnston compilation is indeed full of FUD.
As one example, the whole 'water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas'. Which is true only if you're not considering how to CONTROL greenhouse gases. Water vapor may produce the most significant affect, but it has a well known mechanisms for controlling itself. When there is too much, evaporation stops, and precipitation starts happening. Warming increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold, but it doesn't keep building up and up like CO2 is.
So water vapor is typical FUD that gets thrown out there quite often. It allows for snap answers and responses that distract from human-controllable effects on the environment.
As another example, sea level rise is rising slowly, and nowhere near the 20' type stuff mentioned in the film. BUT, Gore was quite clear that those 20' rises would happen if the ice sheets of greenland and the antarctic were to collapse, which if they did, would be true. He did not use those numbers to refer to the gradual rise of the oceans that is occuring. He didn't put any time frame on those two events either, just said that they were possible catasrophes that are being warned at by the melting of the greenland sheets and what happened to the floating ice sheet in the antarctic. He's been asked to put a time frame on when that might happen, and has refused, saying correctly that we don't know, it could be soon or far off, but in geological terms thats hundreds to thousands of years.
Those sorts of distraction are all throughout the compilation. Course, there are some good points in there, but not about the falseness of the movie, but about the need to do things like get off our rears and launch DISCOVR and do more research to figure out what is happening more closely as well as generally.
Giving Arafat a "Peace Prize" is the equivalent of making Charles Manson our Attorney General. However, since Ramsey Clark, defender of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic was a genuine Attorney General under Johnson, this sort of thing is nothing new. And then there was the Kissinger's prize.
Everyone wants peace, they just define it differently, which is why a peace prize is objectively useless.
In any case, Gore's Inconvenient Truth had some value when discussing the effects of global warming, but it was severely lacking when it came to offering solutions. There were very few real solutions offered, and there was no proof that these meager solutions would work.
If Gore does decide to run, the left will see him as their champion, not because of this peace prize, but because of the 'stolen' election of 2000. The left is still enraged about this.
With his heroic story of persecution, political death and subsequent rebirth, Gore is the Left's Vanilla Jesus. He's their favorite son, a shining savior who will put those neocon brownshirts in their place. If he does run, the zealotry of Gore supporters will make Ron Paul's zealots look second-rate.
Here's a NY Times link:
PS &Full Disclosure: I am neither "conservative" nor do I deny global warming.
I won't comment on whether I think this is true or not, but the Nobel committee's reasoning was that catastrophic climate change brought about by AGW will lead to unprecedented competition for scarce resources and thus unprecedented warring between resource rich and resource poor nations. Therefore, by working to slow or reverse AGW, the climate scientists are in essence preventing WW3. Again, whether that's true or not is something I'm not prepared to comment on, but that is the connection to peace.
if you're not pretending then i think you are misinformed. gore's concern, rightly or wrongly placed, about the environment extends further back than 2006.
But he doesn't mention how unlikely scientists believe that scenario is; it's like arguing the Earth might crash into the Sun someday, without mentioning how unlikely it is in what time frame, and demanding billions to study gravity so we can better understand the threat.
FUD indeed. Spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt is exactly what An Inconvenient Truth and GW alarmism is all about.
the logic is that awarding the Award for restoring peace is one thing, but preventing a war is even better than stopping one. And if even the slightest of the predictions comes true, we are looking at a bloody century ahead. awareness is the key and might help build political will to intervene at the outset if the prcess rather than the end.
Then the U.S. military deserves every Nobel Prize for the last 50 years.
And if even the slightest of the predictions comes true, we are looking at a bloody century ahead.
No, we aren't. If the IPCC consensus estimates are correct, the effect will minimal -- about a foot of sea level rise in 100 years.
Global warming may become a serious problem in the next 100 years, but no one knows that for sure. And the consensus -- remember how important consensus is supposed to be? -- is that it won't be.
I just want to note that the award is for the living - it can't be awarded posthumously.
Yes, that sentence should be read with the bitter taste of sarcasm in one's mouth.
the response I give you is simple. One foot may not matter that much to you, and maybe the US east coast can get by ok. What about the Indian Subcontinent?
also, this from Phil Carter:
In September 1998 Bangladesh saw the most severe flooding the modern world has seen. Although only 1,000 people were killed, 30 million were made homeless and 130,000 cattle were killed, 50 square kilometres of land were destroyed and 11,000 km of roads were damaged or destroyed. 66% of the country was underwater. There were several reasons for the severity of the flooding. Firstly, there were unusually high monsoon rains. Secondly, the Himalayas shed off an equally unusually high amount of melt water that year. Lastly, trees that usually intercept rain water were cut down for fire wood or to make space for animals.[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh
The UN has been telling them for decades that they shouldn't be living on and deforesting the flood plains in the first place. But they have to, because they're mostly poor subsistence farmers and the plains are fertile.
Literacy is 50% and governance is a joke. What they need is a transition to an educated, liberal, democtratic, industrial society -- and yes, that will increase CO2 emissions.
bottom line:
even 15% of the land flooding after one foot of rise would displace 60 million people. extra credit: why would that be bad for world peace? I know you can get this one.
"screw them" isnt exactly the most humane response you could have offered.
Did you not read the post? That happens anyway.
You're the one spreading fear, I'm saying NOT to be afraid (or at least to focus on more serious, and more solvable, problems).
Spending trillions to NOT save people who are going to be flooded no matter what we do is not only not compassionate, it's fairly stupid besides.
Bangladesh is sinking even if waters don't rise, because of plate tectonics, and even if that didn't happen, the area floods fairly often regardless. The solution is to get the people off the flood plains.
I'm giving an actual solution: help them tranaition to a society that doesn't live on flood plains. You're not offering any solution.
You're entitled to your opinion. However, I never said Gore's environmentalism was recent. Never once. Ever. So, I don't know where you got that idea. It would appear that, perhaps, we're both misinformed.
my point is that AIT is not even a majority of the whole story behind the peace prize.
In a world of limited resources, you have to choose which problems to allocate those resources to. War, government repression, famine, disease, and earthquakes are all going to be more deadly than GW in the next 100 years, and dealing with them will be more cost-effective uses of our limited resources.
If you want to feel good, celebrate Al Gore. If you want to do good, help Bangladeshis establish a modern society.
I disagree. TallDave cites the criteria for the award above:
How does Gore qualify using this criteria? What has he done to bring nations together? Reduce or abolish armies? Peace confrences?
If you show me where he's done these things you'll have gone a long way to convince me I'm wrong. I'll tell you I've honestly not heard anything that ore has done that fits the criteria above.
I cited above the peace prize committee's reasoning for selecting gore. as i said above, agree or disagree with their reasoning, that's fine. just don't claim it's due to AIT and nothing else.
After getting back up, I found that they were not kidding. Anna really is dead and Al Gore was given the headline over the real scientists on the UN Panel.
So, I go to class. The guest lecturer in my Philosophy of Science class is a well known physicist who just happens to whole-heartedly believe in anthropogenic climate change.
I thought God was trying to tell me something.
He needs to send a better messenger.
The lecturer let us know that opponents of his paradigm are politically motivated and in, some assessments, possess naivety or are practicing deception.
Good God. Not only did this guy bring nothing new (or terribly compelling) to the table, he expressed the exact sentiment about AGW opponents as many have said about Al Gore...politically motivated, naive and / or full of shit.
I was disappointed. I really thought that this professor could help me to understand.
No solutions. No reasonable quantitative analysis.
Oh yeah. He never once mentioned a little thing called the rain forest. Neither does big AL, ever. It seems that the subject of the rain forest (extremely key to both the hydrological and carbon cycle) is not politically expedient. Although, there just might be some answers to what reasonably can be done.
Interesting link, thanks. My opinion on the global warming debate is that it takes a great deal of study to have a truly informed opinion, few people study it in any detail, and many people have a strong opinion. You do the math.
Regarding Gore: I personally find him distasteful (and am, by extension biased on his film and Nobel), because of his radical shift in rhetoric regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq threat to ME stability and WMD, specifically some of his more outrageous presentations. This makes it hard for me to find him a credible source, though I can't dismiss his film based on this bias.
Beyond that, as others have stated, I find the global warming topic and "peace" tenuously related, and can think of many more deserving folks that fall in line with examples of true bravery and/or diplomacy.
And finally, I get a bit uncomfortable with the recent trend of the Nobel Committee to use their efforts to make political statements. I can't argue that Gore's award is solely or primarily based on that factor, but it played a part.
OSLO, NORWAY-- "The Nobel Peace Prize Committee today awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to Monica Lewinsky, with the accompanying explanation: ". . .as a symbol of all of the women, men, and farm animals who have served the cause of peace by relieving the tensions of powerful men in time of crisis."
Probably a fake--but hearing the arguments in favor of Al winning is causing me to wonder. . .
In essence preventing WW3? Do you really believe this is what they thought when they gave him the award? Hey, you could be right. They might be that nutso crazy.
But I find it telling even you won't say if this belief is true or not. Why not? Is not the judgement of the commitee enough to sway you? They gave the peace prize to a man trying to prevent WW3! Surely that should mean something, shouldn't it?
And had An Inconvient Truth not been made Al Gore would not have received this award. It simply wouldn't have happened. It gave thier leftist cause all the publicity they could have dreamed of.
That there's serious scientific dissent from it is utterly meningless to them.
Al Gore got this award for a film that's little more than propaganda. That's it.
And that they gave it to a man championing a cause that may not even exist over real people spilling blood in the defense of freedom is inexcusable.
Shame on them. And shame on anyone that defends Al Gore and this worthless award.
this is precisely my point. you are pretending it is all about AIT and it isn't. like i said, disagree with their reasoning, but there are plenty of other reasonable reasons to disagree with the nomination that your casting unreasonable aspersions is totally unnecessary. AIT is just the tip of the iceberg when considering gore's committment to AGW. obviously you think AGW is bullshit so you can disagree with gore's committment, but you're acting like it's all about AIT when in reality the award is for the hard work of the scientists involved and gore's longtime support of them, of which AIT is only one part.
Also, you have to keep in mind: that's over 100 years. Most of those putative 60 million displaced people won't even be born for decades! And they'll have a century to adjust.
And again, the whole issue is moot if the plains flood every decade anyway, which seems to be the case. They really need to move beyond subsistence farming.
What percentage of the population will move to a new home within 100 years?
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.