Al Gore - Nobel Peace Prize

[onpoint]

It kills me that our environment has become a politcal football.

You don't mean a political football like gay marraige rights, the "war against terror" or stem cell research, do you?

[Ravaging Beast]

For those who missed it, this is not Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. It was a shared Nobel Peace Prize. It was also awarded to all the UN scientists that have put in tons of work towards global warming activism. The reason Gore's name gets put first is because he made the threat seem real. Now the threat might have been blown slightly out of proportion in the movie, but it sometimes takes something like that to bring an important issue to the publics' attention. Since the release of the movie, the Bush administration has been forced to acknowledge the effects of global warming. Car commercials have completely changed their messages. The old commercials were rough and tough off-road big cars. Now all commercials seem to focus on fuel efficiency. Even big oil companies are launching adds about alternative energy.
Now the woman who saved all the children form the Warsaw Ghetto definitely deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and her time will likely come in the future. But that doesn't mean Al Gore and the other scientists don't deserve it. Gore has donated his prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, and I am excited to see where he goes from here. Will he continue on his quest to stop global warming, or will he run for president?
And SLUDoubleDuece, 0.7 degrees makes a huge difference. Just ask the coral and anything else that uses calcification for survival.

[Brent Burns]

Stumbled on this lengthy editorial from the Tehran Times which was from yesterday, and in this article, the editorial explains its reason for the Nobel Peace Prize committee for selecting Al Gore and the UN committee:

http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=154819

[Dan Wishengrad]

Interesting article, Brent. It actually made some valid points.

But why go to Iran's leading newspaper for an analysis? The media there is run by the Iranian ruling coalition and everything that appears in it gets its blessing from the grand Ayatollah and his staff or it doesn't appear at all. LOL I guess this paper is more unbiased than, say, FOX News... but isn't there something printed in the free world that might have been a better source?

[Brent Burns]

Interesting article, Brent. It actually made some valid points.

But why go to Iran's leading newspaper for an analysis? The media there is run by the Iranian ruling coalition and everything that appears in it gets its blessing from the grand Ayatollah and his staff or it doesn't appear at all. LOL I guess this paper is more unbiased than, say, FOX News... but isn't there something printed in the free world that might have been a better source?

Good question, Dan. I agree with your statement about the Iranian newspaper, but it is just interesting to see what their "lens" is all about the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Actually, I saw this blog called Dry Bones Blog by Yaakov Kirschen. He has been doing the political cartoon strip called Dry Bones since 1973 and lives in Israel. His cartoon strip today is about Al Gore, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would use Oldies to pull out some of the strips he did more than 20 years ago and use some of them that may be relevant to what is happening today. His political comic strips may not be really understood by any average U.S. reader since most of them are strongly tied to Israel, the Middle East, and Judaism. That is how he had this link to the Tehran Times.

http://drybonesblog.blogspot.com

[Dan Wishengrad]

And nobody sells out Israel more than Jimmy Carter and his brother Billy. Just read his last book for "tireless human rights" work. What you meant is every nation's human rights except the US and Israel, as far as Carter is concerned.

I wanted to find to respond to the quote above earlier, but haven't had the time until today.

As a Jew and a strong supporter of Israel with family that resides there, I believe you are dead wrong, dgr. Jimmy Carter is no anti-semite or anti-Israeli either, for that matter. The VAST majority of Israel's populace (outside of the ultra-nationalists and strongest fundamentalist orthodoxy) truly longs to live in peace. Israel can't possibly hope to survive indefinitely while surrounded by nations and peoples committed to it's annihilation. Carter achieved an historic breakthrough during his Presidency by getting the Egyptians and Israelis to actually TALK to one another, face to face. This was the first time such a thing ever occurred, and it led to Sadat and Egypt's recognition of Israel and a peace (however uneasy) between the two nations which exists to this day. Sadat showed great bravery for doing so, and ultimately this led to his assassination.

Now I was no fan of Arafat or his Fatah party, but it WAS historic and significant that the PLO agreed to a peace deal in Oslo, which Carter certainly contributed to. Joe (Beta) sarcastically called Arafat's recognition of Israel "sweet", but it WAS a beginning, even if none of us trusted Arafat to actually live by his words. For the PLO to abandon it's call for the destruction of Israel and actually recognize Israel's right to exist was indeed historic and a necessary first step towards peace.

No matter how strongly you support Israel, you must recognize and admit that the problem of the Palestinian refugees is a real one that has not gone away. These people were sold out by their own Arab brothers in 1948, after the Zionists used the U.N.'s Balfour Declaration to create the state of Israel. Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the other Arab nations forced the Palestinians to leave their their homes and re-settle in refugee camps, insisting that if the people remained in their villages that the Zionists would rape all their women and children and slaughter everyone when they were done. The Jews pleaded for these Arabs, most of whom they had lived alongside in peace with, to remain. But they were promised the right to return after the Arab armies annihilated all the Jews and re-took Palestine as a conquering army, and forced to leave en masse. Thousands remain in these camps sixty years later, and the hopelessness of their lives has given rise to the influence of Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. The majority of Israelis remain committed to compromising on land seized after the '67 war and supporting self-rule for their Palestinian neighbors, in the hopes that this is necessary to establishing a lasting peace. The majority of Palestinians themselves clearly want to live in peace also, and are accepting of doing so alongside Israel, which can (and does) provide them with access to better jobs, better medical care and an overall improved quality of life.

Existing under terrorist attack and in a perpetual state of war doesn't make Israel a stronger nation, and ultimately it could lead to the fall of the only true democracy in the Middle East.

[Beta]

sweet

Yes, it was good that they made the steps towards peace and I am not ripping on the decision to do so...but IMHO there shouldn't have been a situation where it would ever have been OK in the first place.

See what I'm sayin'?

[Dan Wishengrad]

sweet

Yes, it was good that they made the steps towards peace and I am not ripping on the decision to do so...but IMHO there shouldn't have been a situation where it would ever have been OK in the first place.

See what I'm sayin'?

Sorry Joe, no I don't... please explain clearly and I will try my best to understand what you mean.

[laxfan25]

An interesting Op-Ed piece on this story...

Gore Derangement Syndrome

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 15, 2007

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening....

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

[Dan Wishengrad]

Excellent piece, thanks for printing it. This is EXACTLY the point I was trying to make earlier about Hillary -- why exactly is she hated and despised SO vehemently? Sonny, you asked what this had to do with the topic of Gore's Nobel Prize. My point, summed up above in the Krugman column, is that SOME (not all) Americans on both the right AND the left have become so polarized in their views that they truly HATE other Americans who don't share these opinions, and can not bring themselves to EVER admit that those they disagree with might sometimes make a vaild point, or that they might actually be patriotic Americans who simply take the other side of an issue or issues.

If you hate so strongly, it is easy to dismiss anything good or reasonable that comes from those that you hate. But if any of you readers of this thread are guilty of this, how is it possible that you so clearly hate Americans yet claim to love America?

[peterwho]

For those of us who live in a hurricane-rich environment, we pay close attention to Dr. William Gray who knows a thing or two about climatology.

On the same day that Gore was announced as the winner (or co-winner), Dr. Gray was lecturing to a packed hall at the University of North Carolina.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

He cites historical data to refute the claims that human-caused global warming is responsible for an increase in Atlantic hurrican activity:

He cited statistics showing there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared to 83 from 1957 to 2006 when the earth warmed.

As for why there appears to be consensus in the "scientific" community:

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/13/1191696238792.html

[Ravaging Beast]

The scientists speaking out against global warming are making far more money than the ones defending global warming. I'll search for the data, but they are making millions off of their counter studies funded by the big oil companies. As much as the book State of Fear might make you want to believe, this is not and environmentalist conspiracy. There is so much evidence supporting global warming that it makes it hard for me to take any of the other studies seriously. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of global warming. Until they have a major breakthrough, these other scientists will just be background noise.

[FLAK]

but they are making millions off of their counter studies funded by the big oil companies.

Which oil companies? You can't just lump them all together in the same category where they can be construed as the "Devil" to Californians and New Yorkers.

here is a link to British Petroleums website where they discuss their position on Global Warming

Im sure you guys will write it off as just them trying to cover their backsides, but I have a close relative that works in the Health, Safety, and Environment department at BP and he maintains that they have acknowledged the problem for a while now which is why they are taking this measures

They (BP) are also the leading producer of solar panels in the world (just a fun fact

http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9015582&contentId=7028604

[StrykerFSU]

Increasing hurricane activity is just one small component of anthroponegically induced climate change and there is no clear evidence linking the two.

There are a host of reasons to move away from a carbon based economy that do not involve climate change. The deleterious health effects of coal burning, reliance on unfriendly nations, and dwindling supply to name a few. In my opinion, and I have not met the man, Dr. Gray probably truly believes what he is saying but that doesn't make it right. And it sure keeps his name in the paper, which while he claims not to care about grants, isn't a bad thing for his career. The idea that there is some sort of conspiracy among scientists to hoodwink the world into changing its ways is ludicrous in the extreme. I work on the front lines of this little issue so I know a bit more than most.

As was clear from my previous post, I don't like Gore. I can't say it's for the reasons that Krugman puts out there but then there are some crazy reasons given for Bush Derangement Syndrome. Gore clearly exagerrated some of the evidence to assert his viewpoint but HE IS NOT A SCIENTIST! Al Gore is a politician and that is what politicians do, they exaggerate and whatever else to get you to believe their message. I don't think he should have won the Peace Prize for his grandstanding but I do respect what the IPCC does.

And I don't meant to ramble but it infuriates me that climate change has become a political issue. Carbon dioxide absorbs heat and we make more of it faster than there has ever been in the last million years. Carbon dioxide absorbs the thermal radiation emanating from the surface of the planet like a blanket, making it warmer. That's just physics and there is no room for politics in that discussion.

[sohotrightnow]

Al Gore is a politician and that is what politicians do, they exaggerate and whatever else to get you to believe their message.

Given who is the president right now, this statement is quite sardonic.