The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Al Gore, the former American vice president, and to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their work to alert the world to the threat of global warming.
Gore, “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said. The United Nations committee, a network of 2,000 scientists, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.
In New Delhi, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the United Nations committee, said he was overwhelmed at the news of the award. “I expect this will bring the subject to the fore,” he said.
“I’m only a symbol of a much larger organization, the IPCC, and it’s really the scientific community that contributed to the work of the IPCC,” Pachauri said, according to Reuters. “They’re the real winners of this award,'” he said.
Pachauri has it right. Living in a nation where politics and superstition are damned near inseparable, I’m pleased to see prestige and political stature offered to work that suggests science should lead ideology.
#14
Purchasing “carbon offsets” does not mean squat. Buying environmental indulgences does not make you any more environmentally friendly.
So, if Gore talks about environmental change then he gets a pass for being personally unfriendly to the environment. If his stumping does nothing, then he still gets a pass. Nice.
#22 – Haven’t had time to dig through all of this, but it appears he might not even be buys credits from himself , but stock: http://tinyurl.com/2u98lb
Double scam.
#23 – Big Al tried every illegal recount he could and finally had to give up because he legally lost.
#24. – Hey. Right on Frank. Keep those dirty little facts comming. I knew there had to be something two-faced about the guy.
And as for the “network of 2,000 scientists” who have “created an ever-broader informed consensus”…. I seem to remember the original number was once touted as being over 2500. Have 500 scientists changed their minds so soon? That’s a 20% reduction!
Anyway, to compensate for their loss, they beefed up the description to an “ever-broader informed” consensus. I guess that supposed to mean that the remaining 2000 scientists are now +20% bigger. So by weight, they’re the same as 2500 normal scientists would have been.
Let’s hear it for Global Fattening!
Glenn –
Al Gore is the Elmer Gantry of the enviromental movement. It is more likely that come January 20, 2009, he will be awaiting sentencing for stock fraud, then waiting to take the oath of office.
Whoah… great catch, IGW, in spite of the source.
#29 – Frank IBC,
If the USA is such a polluter, how come it’s India and China (both exempt from Kyoto) which are under the Asian Brown Cloud, not the USA?
Keep in mind, when it comes to China, a large part of their carbon output is actually to produce stuff … and ship stuff … TO US!!
If we ditch the externalities and take the responsibility for our carbon, I’m sure it still comes out with us in the lead. But, that’s splitting hairs. Even if we leave the accounting alone, we are still, by far, the largest emitters of carbon per capita. This means that as Americans, we can do more to curb global warming than any other people on the planet.
And yet you say it’s wrong to apply this same standard to Al Gore.
Ah… so none of the carbon generated by the USA is “to actually produce stuff”, right…
#4,iGlobalWarmer , that article you link to exactly illustrates why I have a persistent doubt of the “consensus” of global warming. For instance, where is the research and resultant “peer reviewed” papers that study the -benefits- of an increase of global temperature?
We area WARM blooded species after all.
#39 – Frank,
For export??!!? Not a whole lot.
Here’s another. The IPCC has essentially discovered that man can affect climate change for the whole of earth. That in itself would be the discovery of the millennium. If we can affect it by accident… CO2 emissions, … then the first logical question would be can we control it on purpose. But surprisingly, this newfound incredible power of the human species on this planet is diminished to “oh no, we’re all going to die!”
So far, I’ve enjoyed the best vegetable garden i’ve ever had this year, and my roses are still blooming.
Jimmy Carter was awarded the Prize as a political statement against the President, they admitted so at the time.
I’ve decided not to argue about Al Gore today. It isn’t like this topic ever goes anywhere anyway… It’s just reasonable people vs. the Right Wing, and that gets boring to even me sometimes…
But I will add that when I first read the headline, at a glance, I thought it was saying Gore and ICP (Insane Clown Posse) win Nobel Peace Prize…
And that would be really cool. (if cool meant “totally weird”)
What other prizes does Gore have coming to him? A Grammy is in the bag once the Clinton’s stop writing books. How about a Broadway version of his show for a Tony, and a Hugo too. Then an Edgar award for best mystery, namely why didn’t he speak out on global warming more when he was in office and running for President? In the debates, he practically apologized for his position.
here’s another. We were supposed to have another “global warming” generated hurricane season this year. What happened? The majority consensus scientists with their peer reviewed papers are scratching their heads. How is that possible when they are 100% right?
It seems that … surprise surprise… that upper atmosphere winds have increased dissipating the formation of intense storms.
The action against global warming hasn’t increased fraternity between nations. Other countries are mad at the US for not going along, and soon they will be mad at China, India, and Russia too. Plus the EU hasn’t been able to meet its targets and is likely to go for a continental-wide tax to prevent individual countries form cheating. This has nothing to do with peace. If they really wanted to link global warming and peace, they should be giving awards to Exxon for its funding of skeptics, and Steve McIntyre for single-handedly destroying the environemntalists’ biggest talking points:1998 was the warmest year on record and the hockey stick.
Countries that are having trouble feeding their people are more likely to go to war, so economic growth leads to more peace than energy restrictions.
You know – George W. is going have to send Gore a message of congratulations. His bunghole will probably be so uptight over that he couldn’t pass a blonde pendejo.
Eh, pedro? How’s it feel?
#40 – JimR,
Regarding the fact that we are warm blooded …
Keep in mind that the human species has survived ice ages. We have not survived periods significantly warmer than this. The global average temperature difference between the last ice age and today was just 5 degrees centigrade.
We were not yet around as a species when the planet was truly warm, so don’t know whether we would survive a situation like the PETM
Wow. Lots of mudslinging being done here in an attempt to smear Gore or to tarnish the significance of the Nobel Peace Prize, and therefore marginalize the significance of Gore’s work.
Surprisingly little–if any–comments that challenge Gore’s argument or the science behind it.
Republican/neocon/pinheads resorting to smear tactics to discredit the speaker rather than his argument? Who’d a thunk it?
Methinks they’re just jealous.
I don’t see how you can make that claim, Scott, given that it was quite a bit warmer during the Medieval Warm Period and there was no A/C back then.
I’m sure Scott will find a way to blame the Paleocene/Eocene Warming Period on Republicans in SUV’s, though.
Clarification to my previous post:
I don’t see how you can make that claim [that humans “have not survived periods significantly warmer” than today] Scott, given that it was quite a bit warmer during the Medieval Warm Period [than today] and there was no A/C back then.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/corporate_law/article2633838.ece
Gore doesn’t make any real scientific arguments. He is a scaremonger.
It’s the Nobel Committee that has tarnished their significance, though at least this time they didn’t give the prize to outright villains. I thought maybe they would go for Ahmadenijad.
#53, Frank:
Umm…
http://tinyurl.com/7avvb
He got the prize for “raising awareness” about Global Warming.
Thank God for Al! If it wasn’t for him, we’d have never heard about Global Warming. After all, it barely gets any coverage by the media!
And thank God for all those other movie stars, rock stars, celebrities, etc, doing their fair share by helping Al raise awareness.
Imagine the prize they’d give if he’d actually done something!
#56, Mike:
Umm… The judge found An Inconvenient Truth to be, on the whole, accurate:
Any inaccuracies in Gore’s documentary were basically just matters of opinion or instances where a possible “worst case” scenario was used rather than a more toned down scenario.
#59, pedro;
Thanks for proving my point and continuing the smear campaign.
#53 – Frank IBC,
natefrog (#57) already answered that. But, even if you think that we’re only as warm as the medieval warm period, you’d have to show that we survived a warmer period than a minimum of 2 degrees C warmer than today. And, with the rate we’re taking action, we may be looking at the high range of the estimates, not the IPCC estimates either, they’re too conservative as noted on the other thread going on at the moment.
You know, in a court of law you can not prove the sun will rise tomorrow.
And quite rightly too!
62–Scott==are you confusing the human species with current modern culture? I think homo sapiens is quite capable of “surviving” much higher average temperatures than today–people live in Phoenix afterall?