Posted on 10/12/2007 3:00:22 PM PDT by knighthawk
Peace? A recipe for conflict, more like
Al Gore is not the least worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace – that title, perhaps, belongs to Yassir Arafat. Nor is his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, quite as riddled with questionable statements as the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan activist and 1992 peace laureate, which has since been exposed as a work of fiction. But for an independent assessment of the former US Vice-President’s contribution to world peace and understanding, I am inclined to favour Mr Justice Barton over the Nobel committee.
In the High Court on Wednesday, the judge ruled that schools must not show An Inconvenient Truth without using material to balance Mr Gore’s “one-sided views” on the issue. The film is political rather than scientific, he added, because it contains nine statements that are either untrue or are unsubstantiated. It mistakenly attributes the drying-up of Lake Chad to global warming and falsely claims that polar bears have drowned because they can’t find enough ice.
Most brazen of all, Gore claims that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” – vividly illustrated in the film with a simulation of Manhattan disappearing beneath the waves. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yesterday named as co-recipient of the peace prize with Mr Gore, believes that sea levels will rise by less than 18in over the next 100 years, and that it would take several millennia for sea levels to rise by 20ft.
Far from “disseminating greater knowledge about man-made climate change”, as the Nobel committee put it, what Mr Gore has done is tantamount to crying “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. He has taken a serious debate and twisted it to fit a Hollywood-style narrative: that mankind is facing destruction as a result of his own hubris, unless it listens to the environmental prophet warning of imminent doom – Al Gore – and mends its ways.
The narrative, of course, does not allow Mr Gore room to acknowledge that a significant minority of climate scientists do not accept the theory of global warming. But there is another serious issue raised by Mr Gore’s peace prize. Where, exactly, does his message fit in with promoting world peace? According to the Nobel committee, climate change “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.” Cut greenhouse emissions, in other words, and climate change will be averted and peace will be preserved.
There is a problem with this thesis, in that the process of cutting greenhouse emissions itself has the potential to burden the world’s most vulnerable countries and to induce violent conflicts and wars. Nothing would be so damaging for world peace than if developing nations were hindered in their efforts to industrialise, thereby reducing their ability to cope with natural disaster.
Sadly, this is the all-too-likely outcome of the Gore approach. When the Kyoto treaty was signed a decade ago it was accepted that the onus was on Western nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions as their per capita emissions were much greater than those of the developing world. Now, Gore is among those advocating that the developing world, too, be made part of a global carbon-trading scheme, whereby those exceeding agreed emissions targets would have to buy permits from those who undershoot their targets.
But the European carbon-trading system, introduced in 2005, has shown the problem with carbon trading: it quickly becomes a means by which companies good at negotiating generous carbon allowances can extract payments from those who are less good at playing the system.
One perverse effect was that NHS hospitals ended up buying carbon credits from oil companies. Expand it to a global scale and it is not hard to see what will happen. Shrinking industries in the West will negotiate generous emissions targets. Expanding industries in the developing world will then be forced to buy permits from them, with carbon traders in the West taking a handsome cut.
Mr Gore advocates that the world unite in its efforts towards “reducing deforestation in Amazonia”. But why shouldn’t heavily forested South American countries aspire to grow their agriculture and compete with subsidised Western farmers who cleared their forests for farming long ago? I don’t feel qualified to say for sure whether cutting greenhouse emissions will reduce global temperatures, but I am pretty sure that Mr Gore’s manifesto to suppress Third World development is no recipe for world peace.
Not that peace much bothers the Nobel committee any more. For some years the peace prize has been overtly political, occasionally expressed in less-than-peaceful terms. Awarding the prize to Jimmy Carter in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel chairman, described it as a “kick in the leg” for George W. Bush. Perhaps this is how the world should view the award to Mr Gore: as yet another flying tackle on the Nobel committee’s bête noire. My only hope is that serious debate on climate change, and what to do about it, has not been undermined in the process.
Ping
“For some years the peace prize has been overtly political, occasionally expressed in less-than-peaceful terms. Awarding the prize to Jimmy Carter in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel chairman, described it as a “kick in the leg” for George W. Bush.”
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The “kick in the leg” prize is how all conservatives and conservative media should make a point of referring to the former peace prize. Anything that makes Americans look bad is clearly where it’s at.
“A convenient Nobel prize for politics”
When was the last time a Nobel Prize was awarded for other than proper leftist thought?
But the European carbon-trading system, introduced in 2005, has shown the problem with carbon trading: it quickly becomes a means by which companies good at negotiating generous carbon allowances can extract payments from those who are less good at playing the system.Well, as children say, Duh.
Of course there are many other ways to game the system. Like, self-dealing to overseas "projects" for kickbacks. I think Maurice Strong was planning that with his chinese coal factories.
BTW, where Strong these days, still on the lam?
Algore`s book, An Inconvenient Truth is rife with either one sided, misleading,speculative,exaggerated or just plain wrong statements:
One-sided statements
• It neglects to mention that aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events declined dramatically during the 20 th century.
• It neglects to mention the circumstances that make it reasonable rather than blameworthy for America to be the biggest CO 2 emitter: the world’s largest economy, abundant fossil energy resources, markets integrated across continental distances, the world’s most mobile population.
• The book impugns the motives of so-called global warming skeptics but never acknowledges the special-interest motivations of those whose research grants, direct mail income, industrial policy privileges, regulatory power, prosecutorial plunder, or political careers depend on keeping the public in a state of fear about global warming.
• AIT never addresses the obvious criticism that the Kyoto Protocol is all economic pain for no environmental gain and that regulations stringent enough to measurably cool the planet would be a “cure” worse than the alleged disease.
Misleading statements
• AIT implies that, throughout the past 650,000 years, changes in CO 2 levels preceded and largely caused changes in global temperature, whereas the causality mostly runs the other way: CO 2 changes followed global temperature changes.
• It ignores the societal factors that typically overwhelm climatic factors in determining people’s risk of damage or death from hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires, and disease.
• It implies that a study, which found that none of 928 science articles (actually abstracts) denied a CO 2 -global warming link, shows that Gore’s apocalyptic view of global warming is the “consensus” view among scientists.
• It reports that 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused Bush of distorting science, without mentioning that the scientists acted as members of a 527 political group set up to promote the Kerry for President Campaign.
Exaggerated statements
• AIT hypes the importance and exaggerates the certainty of the alleged link between global warming and the frequency and severity of tropical storms.
• Claims polar bears “have been drowning in significant numbers,” based on a report that found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year, following an abrupt storm.
• Portrays the collapse in 2002 of the Larson-B ice shelf—a formation the “size of Rhode Island”—as harbinger of doom. For perspective, the Larson-B was 180 th the size of Texas and 1/246 th the size of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).
• AIT presents a graph suggesting that China’s new fuel economy standards are almost 30% more stringent than the current U.S. standards. In fact, the Chinese standards are only about 5% more stringent.
Speculative statements
• AIT blames global warming for the record-breaking 37-inch downpour in Mumbai, India, in July 2005, even there has been no trend in Mumbai rainfall for the month of July in 45 years.
• It blames global warming for recent floods in China’s Sichuan and Shandong provinces, even though more damaging floods struck those areas in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries.
• It blames global warming for the disappearance of Lake Chad, a disaster more likely stemming from a combination of regional climate variability and societal factors such as population increase and overgrazing.
• AIT warns that a doubling of pre-industrial CO 2 levels to 560 ppm will so acidify seawater that all optimal areas for coral reef construction will disappear by 2050—implausible because coral calcification rates have increased as ocean temperatures and CO 2 levels have risen, and today’s main reef builders evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO 2 levels hovered above 1,000 ppm for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 ppm for several million years.
• It warns of “significant and alarming structural changes” in the submarine base of the WAIS, but does not tell us what those changes are or why they are “significant and alarming.” The WAIS has been retreating since the early Holocene. At the rate of retreat observed in the 1990s, the WAIS should disappear in about 7,000 years.
• It warns that half the Greenland Ice Sheet could “slide” into the sea, even though the ice sheet sits in a bowl-like depression surrounded by mountains that restrict glacial outflow to the sea.
Wrong statements
• AIT claims glaciologist Lonnie Thompson’s reconstruction of climate history proves the Medieval Warm Period was “tiny” compared to the warming observed in recent decades. It doesn’t. Four of Thompson’s six ice cores indicate the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as or warmer than any recent decade.
• It claims the rate of global warming is accelerating, when it has been remarkably constant for the past 30 years—roughly 0.17°C/decade.
• It attributes Europe’s killer heat wave of 2003 to global warming; it was actually due to an atmospheric circulation anomaly.
• It claims that 2004 set an all-time record for the number of tornadoes in the United States. Tornado frequency has not increased; rather, the detection of smaller tornadoes has increased. If we consider the tornadoes that have been detectable for many decades (F-3 or greater), there is actually a downward trend since 1950.
• It blames global warming for a “mass extinction crisis” that is not, in fact, occurring
“Most brazen of all, Gore claims that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future”
Did he calculate the rise of the sea level during the time that he invented the Internet?
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize today is like “winning” a pro wrestling title belt...
” In January 1897 it was learned that he had left (Alfred Nobel) the bulk of his considerable estate to a fund, the interest on which was to be awarded annually to the persons whose work had been of the greatest benefit to mankind. The statutes of the foundation which administered the fund - the Nobel Foundation - were adopted on 29 June 1900.
http://nobelpeaceprize.org/eng_com_will1.html
I think the Norwegian committee has strayed from the founders intent. It has become the anti-American leftist prize
Gwhore only gets one ping out of me today...
“For some years the peace prize has been overtly political, occasionally expressed in less-than-peaceful terms. Awarding the prize to Jimmy Carter in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel chairman, described it as a “kick in the leg” for George W. Bush.”
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The “kick in the leg” prize is how all conservatives and conservative media should make a point of referring to the former peace prize. Anything that makes Americans look bad is clearly where it’s at.
When I read his reference to a "kick in the leg," I thought of a better image: a little dog yapping at the President's heels. (And the smaller the dog, the bigger the yap.)
The Nobel committee is a lapdog of the left--not that you'll find many leftists saying so.
Oh, and just to clarify, I meant a better image than a “kick in the leg,” not a better image than a “’kick in the leg’ prize.”
Gore's in his kind of company: Arafat and Carter
(snip)
Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management, purchases -- but isn’t a provider of -- carbon dioxide offsets,” said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews.
GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon-credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.
CCX owes its existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and diplomat who, since the 1970s, has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement. Strong has described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” His former job titles include “senior advisor” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “senior advisor” to World Bank President James Wolfensohn and board member of the United Nations Foundation, a creation of Ted Turner. The 78-year-old Strong is very close to Gore.
you should post that story as a thread
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