In establishing the conditions for awarding this Prize, Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that it go to the individual who had done "the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace conferences."He concludes,
The problem is that neither Nobel nor any of his succession of executors of the Peace Prize has ever had any fundamental knowledge of the requirements of "peace" ...
By awarding Gore the Peace Prize, which he will share with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Committee revealed itself as being on the same intellectual level - a very, very low and clueless one - as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which earlier this year awarded an Oscar to Gore's propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth.
It is interesting to note that it was Hollywood that made Gore's movie possible, and not any special marketing savvy of the former vice-president's... Leave it to West Coast, anti-American lefties to help a failed politician perpetrate a fraud, a big lie... From one perspective, one cannot help but view Gore's An Inconvenient Truth as his vengeance for having lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush... From a more fundamental perspective, however, environmentalism, which has become a no-questions-permissible secular religion (and the last graspable straw of the left wing), is Gore's Allah, to which he is urging everyone to bow - or else.Read Gore's Pulp Fiction - Ed Cline, The Rule of Reason.
UPDATE: One of Eddie's favourite bloggers, physicist Lubos Motl, has a round-up of reactions to The Goracle's award.
19 comments:
If by 'definitive' you mean filled with insults, ad hominem, and that peculiar sore-loser mentality that you find in market fundamentalists baffled that real people actually reject the commandments of the Ayn Rand religion, then, yes, absolutely. Well spotted.
More Gore Derangement Syndrome.
It's instructive that you're still in denial about Gore's lies, Eddie.
Good to see that truth, evidence and science are no part of your support for warmist myths.
But Eddie finds his commands in the Boran...
PC: I react more strongly to the opinion in this piece. The guy who wrote it immediately stands out as one of those fringe kooks in characterising himself as an arbiter of the intelligence of the Nobel Committee, based on their decision to award the IPCC (and Al Gore) the Nobel Peace Prize.
His assessment of their intelligence: 'very, very low and clueless'. They are five eminent, well-educated folks from right across the political spectrum. He is a very minor novelist, guest-writing on a hard-right wing website.
I can 'objectively' say he is a very minor novelist, because I Googled his published works, and they are not popular, emanating from a small publishing company. He 'subjectively' states that the Nobel Committee are intellectual lightweights because...he disagrees with them.
This is not the horse to be backing, PC. And it has nothing to do with me being some kind of Gore fanboy - which I refuse to continue stating I am categorically not.
DenMT
DenMT - You don't get it. Climate denialists want to make Gore the symbol of the climate warming movement (which is why PC has said precious little about the IPCC sharing the Peace Prize). Once he's set up as the paragon of climate change activism, they can knock him down instead of dealing with the science or policy questions.
And no, cutting and pasting from the usual SEPP, TCS, AEI, and various free market think tanks doesn't count because it's not peer-reviewed science. Ditto the ever more robotic Bob Carter et al.
That's how the modern-day right works. Slime the messenger. The rush to slime Gore is partly because they realise the Nobel win means that they are losing ground, not just in the science, but also in public opinion.
Was it on this site that a few months ago, someone was crowing how 2007 was going to be a landmark year for the "sceptics"? So true, but not in the way they've deluded themselves into thinking.
Further to DenMT's point: isn't it sad that all PC has left to run to is right-wing crankery from fringe websites. Pathetic.
Eddie: Lumping all 'denialists' into the same sack and generalising their motives etc isn't much better than that LGM bloke who appears to be able to divine the motivations and principles of the entire 'Greenie' movement - ie the abolition of electricity.
Much better actually to comment on the rather ridiculous behaviour of this particular novelist guy than to stereotype and pigeonhole. That way one might hope to expect the same treatment for Gore.
My own position is that the guy is an unfortunate hypocrite, obviously somewhat excitable in his approach to communicating the science, and prone to some error as a result. But as the judge said, broadly representative of the current state of play within the science.
What would be great (but likely unrealistic) would be for the more excitable skeptics to attempt to grasp that those who stand behind the IPCC conception are not Al Gore's robot army. He's simply a convenient media figurehead.
DenMT
DenMT: I agree that Gore is open to criticism -- criticism, not insults and abuse. Many scientists support what he does, and don't forget that he has raised the profile of climate change in a way no other person has done. For that, he commands respect.
I also agree that not all self-described sceptics are denialists. I would add that it's counterproductive to tar true sceptics with the denialist brush.
But that's not what we're dealing with here. PC has never linked to a true sceptic that I can recall, but only to the Vaclav Havels and the Lubos Motls and the Bob Carters. None of his regulars, apart from you and me, are open to the climate change message. That leaves us only three paths:
1. Ignore them.
2. Try to engage with the denialists on their own terms. You're doing that, and you're finding that to keep the discourse "civil" you're having to make some concessions. That's helping them define the terms of the discourse by moving the Overton Window. It's all right for them to rant on about socialism and conspiracies in the IPCC, and heap abuse on Al Gore, but it's not OK for us to call them what they are: denialists. Lesson: play by their rules, and they'll get you every time.
3. Mock them. That's my strategy. I know these people are a lost cause, and I intend to be around to say I told you so. More than that, I'm letting them know that even at NotPC, they can't hide from reality.
It's been interesting talking with you, DenMT. Hope to continue this again sometime.
Eddie: I assume you know exactly how you come across...
"I agree that Gore is open to criticism -- criticism, not insults and abuse."
"Mock them. That's my strategy. I know these people are a lost cause, and I intend to be around to say I told you so."
DenMT
eddie: Was it on this site that a few months ago, someone was crowing how 2007 was going to be a landmark year for the "sceptics"?
Wasn't there some kind of judge that did a ruling on the Boran?
Or is it more convenient to ignore that?
I remember some kind of poll a while ago where 70% of the Brits were pretty sceptical about climate change.
Keep it up guys, science and opinion will swing your way.
DenMT - You still don't get it, do you. Do you really think you're going to change any minds here at NotPC? If Peter Cresswell and his lot were really interested in civil discourse, as he often pretends to be, he wouldn't mis-spell Al Gore's name or malign reputable scientists such as James Hansen.
For me, it's about exposing PC's lies and myth-making and letting regulars here know that they can no longer get away with postmodernist spinning of "truth" and "scientific evidence".
You want measured debate between good faith actors? Don't hang out here. Go to a place like the Google Group globalchange. I'm surprised you haven't figured this out by now. Have you never noticed that all your olive branches are either rejected or read as victories by PC and others?
Don't get diplomatic; get under their skin.
berend - Science & public opinion swung our way years ago.
An average of 79% of respondents to the BBC survey agreed that "human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7010522.stm
Only in the denialists' parallel universe is there even a question about whether humans are a significant cause of recent climate change.
As for the UK court case brought by the lorry driver Stewart Dimmock, the judge endorsed the defendant's argument that "the central scientific theme of Al Gore’s Film is now accepted by the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific community", and called the film "broadly accurate."
Even Dimmock's lawyer condeded that the IPCC's AR4 should be the measure of scientific accuracy. Mind you, PC forgot to mention that in his posts about the movie. Oops! I'm sure he just forgot.
Here's something else he didn't mention: Dimmock's lawyer suggested that AIT be shown alongside "The Great Global Warming Swindle" for "balance". The judge realised that TGGWS was a load of crap (which PC still spotlights on his front page; gosh, does that him a sceptic or a denialist?) and had some pretty harsh words on this bogus definition of "balance":
There is nothing to prevent (to take an extreme case) there being a strong preference for a theory – if it were a political one – that the moon is not made out of green cheese, and hence a minimal, but dispassionate, reference to the alternative theory. The balanced approach does not involve equality. In my judgment, the word "balanced" in s407 (in the relevant U.K. legislation) means nothing more than fair and dispassionate.
In other words, while teachers now have to mention the "scepticism" to global warming theory, they can do this in the context of how small this fringe really is. Hell, they could focus on the denialists as part of a study of pseudoscience, and it might well fit the terms of the ruling!
Meanwhile, I wait for PC to discover God and become a creationist. Oh wait. He's already got his religion: Ayn Rand.
If by 'definitive' you mean filled with insults, ad hominem ... More Gore Derangement Syndrome.
Eddie, that was one of the (unintentionally) funniest things I've read all day :-)
Eddie
Al Gore lied. That's fact. How ever you try to dissemble and justify it and gloss over it, the guy's show was false. Goebbles stuff. Yet you still believe. How odd you are.
Laughing at ya!
LGM
eddie: malign reputable scientists such as James Hansen.
You made my morning eddie. Great!!
Eddie, on the UK polls, I retract my statement for now. Just looking on the internet to see if I could find that survey, but the only thing I can find are polls I would be sceptical to bring up, so it might have heard about one of those (I thought it was from the BBC, but couldn't find it).
Here's an even better one for your side: Nearly 90% of Europeans think humans cause global warming.
From the article:
The Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, established in 1968 by the Swedish central bank and conferred by it, has invariably gone to economists who disparage or are ignorant of capitalism, or who are not consistent advocates of it, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek.
Great article, but I don't understand this sentence. Friedman won in 1976. I can't think of any other obviously pro-free market economists but given that economists are generally in favour of markets I doubt very much this is true. I have not once heard of a left wing bias in giving the Nobel prize in economics: I'm pretty sure I would have if it was generally believed.
What scares the crap out of me most is that I am on the same side as Berend de Boer in this debate. For completely different reasons, I suspect. Scary, nonetheless.
Thanks, Berend. The 70% figure you're thinking of could be referring to business leaders. I recall there was a NZ Herald Mood of the Boardroom survey that found that while 50%-60% of CEOs felt they had to adapt to a "carbon-constrained" business environment, about 70% doubted the science.
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