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October 17, 2007

Inconvenient honor

It used to be quite an honor to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In some quarters it still is. But the days of Poland's Lech Walesa (1983), America's Elie Wiesel (1986), and the 14th Dalai Lama (1989) are long gone. These were award recipients who stood up to Communist regimes, exposed governments hiding Nazi war criminals and preached peaceful rebellion through religious dialogue.

Today, one just has to stand up for a radical, if not questionable idea to win the liberal popularity contest run annually by Norway's Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

Al Gore's name is now etched in granite, along side that of Jew-hater Yasser Arafat and United Nations conniver Kofi Annan.

It's a stretch how Gore won. The Nobel committee selected Gore for his determined drive to educate the world on the dangers of global warning, saying those threats are creating tensions that could lead to violence and war. Gore is the green peacemaker, so to speak.

What the committee didn't say is that Gore's environmental platform, while raising vital awareness, is also full of scientific inaccuracies and political biases.
If anything, Gore deserves a medal for turning his documentary movie -- An Inconvenient Truth -- into an Academy Award winner and parlaying it into a Nobel Peace Prize.

But while Hollywood and Norway have gobbled up Gore's green gloss, not everyone is so infatuated with the former vice president's climatological credibility -- or lack thereof.

On Monday, a British judge ruled that nine assertions in Gore's documentary remain unsupported by scientific evidence. In particular, the judge said Gore's claim that sea level rises of 23 feet might occur in the next 25 years was made in the context of "alarmism and exaggeration." (If Gore is correct, Norway's prize committee will be making its decisions under water by 2030!)

In reality, the best scientific minds say, under present conditions, Gore's calculations are off by at least 1,000 years. (Norway is saved!)

Still we're all for peace. And if Gore can end world conflicts by coupling inconvenient untruths with global warming warnings, that's great.

It's just too bad Yasser Arafat isn't around to see polar bears in Palestine.

Posted by Admin at October 17, 2007 1:45 PM