Gore's Nobel Prize

In an apparent effort to discredit themselves, the Nobel committe just granted Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize. For his support of the latest fad to be used by socialists to justify continued support of failed poliitical and economic policies. (Hillary Clinton has the other one: the children. But that's another post for another time.)

I suppose if there had been an Al Gore in the 70's trying to warm up the earth when all the climatologists were claiming global cooling, he would have won a Nobel Peace Prize then.

And what does global climate change have to do with peace, anyway? I suppose that if he has his way and the internal combustion engine is banned (he said it was more dangerous than nuclear weapons, after all -- so the committee may be on to something if we consider all the prizes given out to those who have been against nuclear weapons), then we won't need the Middle East at all, the U.S. and other countries can withdraw any interest in the region, and we can let the whole place implode in upon itself.

All in all, I don't see how this has anything to do with peace. I don't see any Peace Prize going to someone like Don Beck, whose ideas and work led to the peaceful transition of South Africa after apartheid. No, that was so smooth and successful, a model for the entire world as to what needs to be done to have peace throughout the world, that nobody paid it any attention. So never mind actual success. Let's focus, instead, upon unproven claims by a washed-up politician who has made some pretty bizarre personal claims in the past wo thinks sending us back to the pre-industrial age is probably the only way to save us all (when it has been the industrial age that has made life better and healthier for people around the world). Let us support someone who supports failed social and economic policies simply because he supports them to "save the earth."

The atmosphere is a complex, dynamic system. It has butterfly effects, tipping points, emergent properties, etc. So when people say that they understand what is going on and can make accurate predictions of the future, they are at least wrong, and may even be lying to us. One could go into all the complex feedback loops that affect the atmosphere, including the hydrosphere, the geosphere, and the biosphere, as well as fluctuations in cosmic rays and in the sun's temperature, but I won't do that here. The bottom line, though, is that such systems are unpredictable. They do not work in a linear fashion. And it does not matter what a so-called consensus (I wish people cared enough to look into the actual members of the "consensus" -- they're not mostly atmospheric scientists) says. The pre-Copernican consensus was that the heavens revolved around the Earth. Consensus means nothing in science. Facts do. And there are not enough facts to make any sort of realistic prediction.

This is not to say that there is not warming. There is. And it is not to say that humans aren't contributing. We are. But we do not know that it will result in anything catastrophic long-term. The Gaia hypothesis shows us that the earth system is self-regulating, ensuring continued conditions for the continuation of life on earth. We won't change that. The earth will self-regulate, and temperatures will go down. It may result in a new ice age. But we have, as a species, survived those before. And we know that more ice ages were to come anyway.

I guess the Nobel committee also didn't pay much attention to the British court that said he exaggerated and misrepresented facts in his presentation-turned-movie. I guess if you're lying for the right reasons, that's good enough to get a Nobel Peace Prize. How embarrassing. How shameful.

Al Gore and his ilk, if we are to attribute good intentions to him and not just an attempt to gain demagogic power (or perhaps more than demagogic power), have the false assumption that the world was unchanging before humans came along to change it. This is obvious in their rhetoric, when they complain about "climate change" -- as though the climate had never changed before, and all change in the climate is, therefore, bad. Thus, Al Gore is anti-change, anti-progress. He is, in fact, extremely conservative in the true sense of the term. He's afraid of the passage of time. I do not think that someone who is afraid of change should receive the Nobel Peace Prize. People such as him, who have wanted to prevent change and to bring mankind back to some other age, have been the ones to start the wars in the 20th and 21st century.