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Al Gore Shares Nobel Peace Prize with UN Panel
eldavojohn writes "Former US Vice President Al Gore has been announced as a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on environmental awareness & climate change. He shares his award with the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 'Speaking in Washington, Mr Gore praised the IPCC, "whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years". "We face a true planetary emergency," Mr Gore warned. "It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." He said he would donate his half of the $1.5m prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, reported the news agency Reuters.'"
So the IPCC helped Al Gore invent the intarweb?
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Today is April 1st, right?
Congratulations to the recipients. They've earned it. As with all peace issues, there is much much more work to do.
Al Gore certainly deserves this award, but I think I speak for all geeks when I say that I wish he would be a little more accurate. I have a hard time recommending his film An Inconvenient Truth due to his factual errors and exaggerated claims. Nonetheless, he has performed an invaluable service in bringing climate change to the center stage.
It's half man, half bear, and have pig! I'm being super, duper serial about this.
1. Deny you're running for president. Nobel prize committee wouldn't want to be seen as endorsing a particular front runner.
2. Win Nobel Prize
3. Announce candidacy for US presidency.
4. Profit.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
You mean you had any confidence after they gave one to Arafat?
You'll be a good president
One more word: Congratulations
So instead of just hurling that out there, maybe you would like to explain why they do not deserve it? feel free to show us how the scientists on the IPCC are all wrong, and you have better information, and more experience on these issues.
What exactly is wrong with this decision? apart from the fact that you may not like al gore?
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He cheated.
Why? The work that Al Gore has done to raise awareness of our current planetary climate crisis is second to none. The Peace Prize goes out to individuals who raise global awareness of issues that affect the peace of the entire world, right? Wouldn't you say that climate change is in that category?
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Maybe if you keep attacking Al Gore global warming will go away!
If there's one person who made the entire world aware of the dangers posed to the environment; with his stubborn attitude - it's got to be Mr. Bush himself. By not ratifying the Kyoto protocol, by stonewalling global efforts to reduce emissions etc. ... the list is long of Mr. Bush's singular contributions to environmental awareness.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Al Gore know what is best for humanity and ALL MANKIND!!
I'm super...duper...cereal.
I thought GW Bush would be a shoe-in
"And then I visited Wikipedia
There are many people more deserving of the award who actually work towards peace, most at the risk of their lives. However I seriously doubt the Nobel committee would dare cross China or even some Islamic factions to award these types of people.
Couldn't this have been rewarded in a science category or were they afraid that that category would get mocked for what the award is about?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Jeez, funny no one ever mentioned Rush Limbaugh was up for the award also? He didn't profit from the running either unlike ALGore aka Egore..... Good Ole, Al, and the lemmings will follow..
-------- Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. --Ozzy
People that don't read (and digest) TFA will wonder what climate change has to do with peace.
The committee said it wanted to bring the "increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" posed by climate change into sharper focus.
If climate change happens as some expect there will be mass migrations, and territorial and resource wars. Like now, but only more so.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Ought not a Nobel Peace Prize winner practice what he preaches?
I know there are going to be a tonne of "He should run" posts but think about it. It was no secret what Clinton was going to do in 2008. That would of divided the Clinton campaign funds and democrats in general. Gore knows he has one more good run in him. Gather your accolades (Nobel Prize, Oscar, etc) and wait till you're really needed. Hell, he has more sway as a campaigner than a candidate right now.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
That would've required actual verifiable science...
Of course on Slashdot.. the Nobel Peace Prize *is* a science topic...
It is a rare event in this world that a good person doing a good thing is recognised. Except for the odd right-wingers who will respond to this (as an anonymous coward, no doubt), everyone on this planet owes Mr. Gore a debt of gratitude. Even if you don't believe in the human-influence on global warming (something I accept), you must admit that it's pretty obvious that all the pollution and greenhouse gases that we humans cause to be put into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing. Anything that causes us NOT to soil our nest is to be applauded. Mr. Gore is part of the force of good and I applaud him. Worked on his 2000 campaign in Council Bluffs too. Damn shame that he lost to the current asshat Bush by a vote of 4 to 5.
If Nobel giving one to Yassir Arafat didn't, giving one to Gore now has officially mad ehtem jump the shark.
What's a geek card?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A judge in the UK calls it political
British schools ordered to provide balance when showing the movie.
But the Nobel Peace price isn't political....
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
"The Peace Prize goes out to individuals who raise global awareness of issues that affect the peace of the entire world, right? Wouldn't you say that climate change is in that category?"
No. What is affecting the peace of the entire world at the moment is war. There are wars between nations, wars of nations against their citizens and wars between ideologies.
This is just silly. Pure PR and marketing. Even the group Gore is giving his share to is a PR firm. They're mission is to do nothing more than tell people about climate change. No research, no solutions, just PR.
funny, hes also the also the chairman of the board of the Alliance for Climate Protection. Man, he's so giving
1) Congress is responsible for ratifying treaties. President Clinton didn't even bother submitting Kyoto knowing it was dead on arrival.
2) The US has actually done much better in reducing green house gas emissions compared to most Kyoto signatories. Name me one country that will actually meet its obligations.
3) Russia only signed onto Kyoto because their CO2 levels were set before the huge decline in industrial output there so they had credits to spare that there were hoping to make a buck on selling.
And on a more personal note:
4) President Bush's home in Texas is actually a surprising green residence while Gore's pool house consumes more power than the average person's home.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Include Faux News in the minion category. I wanted to see if they would report Gore had won the Prize but at least for the hour I kept checking, they never did. Can't have some left-wing, tree-hugging liberal get recognition for their efforts, now can we?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Look here for a brief summary:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/11/gore_errors/
But nevermind.. this whole topic has gone into religion-mode - no further objective discussion possible.
Climate change, even that not created by man, has the potential to cause more strife than oil ever could. It would be hard, but people can live without oil. People can't live without water or food. Small changes in climate can cause dramatic and rapid changes in local climates.
i agree 100%. it is a joke. al gore is a relatively intelligent man but he is not the authority on atmospheric science and nobody knows what is driving the weather patterns we see around us. i am traveling and can't find my login information so this will be anonymous.
Awarding that prize to such a high profile PARTISAN poltician has pretty uch destroyed the reputation of the prize. This isn't the first time the decision has been a bad one. Irish biggots won it a few years ago too when they were the main people who caused the problems
"... a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
Humanity? Shouldn't he be including the right wing too?
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
Not being an American I am curious about one thing: what will the US public think about this award? Will it make them more likely to vote for Gore as their next president?
....different attitude about things which happen outside their country. Will the Nobel prize make Gore seem less like an American to the voting public? Will it push him closer to those freedom hating europeans in their eyes?
I know that he hasn't announced that he is running, but I assume there is a strategy behind this. But I know that US people have a
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The prize in medicine is also not restricted to those who actually cure disease -- it can also be awarded to those who find ways to prevent disease.
The logic here is that the destruction of resources caused by climate change would lead to global conflict, so preventing climate change would prevent war. And world leaders will never make the commitments necessary to resolve the problem unless the electorate is informed.
There might be reasons to disagree with this logic, but I don't think it should be dismissed out of hand.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
A little embarrassing that "An Inconvenient Truth" was banned in schools in Britain for its inaccuracies. The judge said it met the criteria for political indoctrination.
it's just alarmist nonsense your pushing there.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
Moral, sure, but spiritual? I don't see how that has anything to do with it. If there is a god, we have nothing to worry about. I can't help but think he said that particular comment only to make people note that Al is a spiritual person, and therefore, eligible for president.
That said, I think he'd make a better president than all of the people who actually had a chance to win the next election.
Are you familiar with my friend Al Gore? Funny if he really did end up on the back of a $500 note..
Seriously good for him - and I do hope he does run for WH 2008..
No the OP, but here are my thoughts:
... to stop global warming ... or global climate change ... or whatever."
-He's being awarded for raising environmental awareness. Now, if opinion polls reveal that people believe extremely exaggerated versions what the IPCC said, did that mean he really raised "awareness" by spreading falsities? Would they revoke the prize?
-If the claims in his movie turn out to be wrong, or the solutions to have caused worse problems, or other problems to get much more severe, or the need to reduce global CO2 leads to a war with China and India, would the prize be revoked?
-What event would prove the IPCC wrong? If the earth gradually got colder over the next 40 years, would that justify carbon subsidies? It's not very scientific to say, "Whether the earth gets warmer or colder, it's absolutely vital that you reduce use of high-yield energy sources
-Typically, prizes aren't awarded until enough time has passed to show the long-term effect of what someone did. That hasn't happened.
Flame away.
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...happened! The USA didn't sign it. Yeah, he did pretend he was in favor, but... He should have done more when he was Vice-President!
First: I am one of those "wingnuts."
That said, I agree with you on this. That was no Troll. Someone's Karma should be "adjusted."
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
The whole global warming issue is cyclic. It even follows the pattern of the sun. His data is flawed, his platform is based on media frenzy and hype.
I can't believe they'd give someone that high of an award based on lies.
And, no, this isn't political - this is a matter of truth vs propoganda. In 10-50 years, when the media is crying about the coming ice age, maybe then...nah - they'll "forget"...
If someone spends 10 minutes researching the issue, instead of eating the cornbread and drinking the kool-aid, we'd have a lot of people asking questions that need to be asked.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
I read "Earth in the Balance" in October before the 2000 presidential election just to get an idea of what Gore was like. Perhaps slashdotters might be better able than the average joe to appreciate what writing a book requires: thinking about something. Questions, hypotheses, research, thinking. The philosopher Ortega wrote that the act of thinking about things instantly puts you in the minority; most people don't do it. Well, Gore does it. Maybe his personality isn't suited to the job of presidency, although it's hard to imagine that he would have been worse than Bush. But just maybe this role suits him better. He deserves the recognition he is getting now. Bush vs Gore: I know whose legacy I'd rather claim.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'?
This man spends almost as much on electricity as the average American makes in a year. Al Gore receiving this award is a sign of how irrelivant it has become.
After Bush writes his memoirs, the guaranteed Nobel prize for literature will again humble Gore.
You can't be serial.
It isn't banned.
Oh dear.
"No research", "No solutions"?!?
Who the hell modded you up?
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so you think that everyone who believes that there is man made climate change also believes we all need to live in mud huts?
methinks you have been watching too much fox news. Its perfectly possible to live a modern lifestyle and not destroy the environment. It means you might not have air conditioning, but actually open a window, might not wear a t shirt in winter with the heat blasting full on, and means you might need to get used to the sight of the odd wind turbine and solar panel, but your assumption that green == mud huts is just farcical, and certainly not 'insightful'.
I love the way that, especially in the US, if people suggest even marginal regulatory improvements to the minimum fuel standards of vehicles (as happens every year in the US, and is hugely lobbied against), they get called "eco nazis who want to live in mud huts". Here in Europe, we have much more fuel efficient cars, yet amazingly do not live in mud huts.
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According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
What Al Gore is doing is important but based on those standards how does Al Gore win the peace prize?
Look at the list of former Nobel Peace Prize Winners many of these people risked their lives or personal fortunes in endeavors that made the world a more peaceful place. Al Gore made a film about Global warming and crusades for the cause. Talk about cheapening the award.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Then I see your Subject "Idiot with mod points" and think, "oh good, I'm not alone." Then I read your message and totally disagree with you!
OK, maybe it shouldn't have been marked as Troll. Maybe Off Topic or Overrated. But certainly not informative. Definitely Modded DOWN (in my humble opinion).
Agreed, with nuke technology floating around these days I'm more concerned about global incinerating than global warming.
I just don't understand what a propaganda file chock full of inaccuracies, misleading data, and outright falsehoods had to do with the promotion of peace?
How about the following court findings (thank you Great Britain)
* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.
* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.
* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
* The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
* The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.
there's always been change in climate and we have dealt with it, changes which have been far more then small.
No changes this fast, and not with this number of people in the world, and this percentage of planet area changed due to agriculture...
it's just alarmist nonsense your pushing there.
The science supports him, not you.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
to have elected him President.
it is in fact proof that anyone who opposes al gore has achieved rhetorical and intellectual bankruptcy
basically, rather than counter al gore on any facts or logic or rationale (because they can't), the last few blind idiots who don't agree with al gore (most of the world does now) have their backs to the wall and go for the final desperate charge against him: doubt the guy's integrity and conviction
so you're saying "if you think it's so important to stop polluting the atmosphere, why don't you stop using electricity"
heh
1. as if there were valid options besides modern electric grids for modern life
2. as if you need to be a complete saint to be critical of anyone or anything
3. as if you need to turn on a dime and radically change your life just so you can be able to say everyone needs to gradually and slowly and deliberately change course
in other words, some fools want al gore to lead by example, when that is not necessary to understand his observations, and not possible to do because of how the entire world's energy usage patterns are structured
they find al gore responsible for things like the emissions of the jets he flies. so what do you want him to do? not fly? oh yeah, that will shut him up really well, wouldn't that be nice? i understand your real point now in wanting him to live in a shack without running water or electricity before he can say anything (smiles)
or how about al gore design and build a no emissions airplane before he can go anywhere and talk about climate change. will that make you happy dear propagandized fools? (rolls eyes)
well, he did design and build the internet (joke)
look, propagandized fools: if al gore were in a position to be an important world figure AND use far less energy, he would
but he can't be both in today's CURRENT energy usage patterns... not AL GORE's energy usage patterns, but the WORLD's energy usage patterns. which is the WHOLE F***ING POINT: WE ALL USE TOO MUCH ELECTRICTY. THE ISSUE IS ALL OF US, NOT AL GORE. NICE ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT
again, al gore is NOT a hypocrite... but... let's run with the propagandized fools for a moment, for the sake of argument right here, and say al gore WAS a complete and utter hyprocrite. ok, where does that lead us now?
guess what: it doesn't nullify any of his observations and our need to move away from current energy usage patterns!
so: one last time: doubting someone's integrity and conviction is the last redoubt of the desperate loser who is rhetorically and intellectually bankrupt in their opinions
al gore is not the subject. CLIMATE CHANGE IS
nice propaganda bait and switch there, losers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Our mission is to persuade the American people -- and people elsewhere in the world - of the importance and urgency of adopting and implementing effective and comprehensive solutions for the climate crisis." www.climateprotect.org
No research, no solutions. Just PR - to tell us how urgent it is to find solutions.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"
The whole world will be destroyed through cataclysmic global warming, is certainly an extraordinary claim - so have the IPCC produced extraordinary proof . . . or even ordinary proof.
Their evidence for ANY global warming is very thin: they ignore antarctic temperature records which disagree with their theory. The temperature records they do accept fail to account for the urban heat island effect and they apparently feel they can dismiss the most exhaustive and accurate measurements available (NASA satellite temp readings) with a wave of the hand and a vague accusation of partiality.
If they can't even produce any substantial proof that the worlds temperature has risen do you think they can they produce proof that this is caused by CO2 or that increased CO2 is the result of human interference - don't make me laugh.
Anthropogenic global warming MAY be happening, just as there MAY be intelligent life on some other planet . . . who the f**k knows? There's no evidence for either.
And no I don't have better information of more experience than the IPCC scientists, but neither do I feel the need to abandon my critical faculties in the face of some "authority" with impressive credentials.
The caricature in your head has nothing to do with the US public. Most people will hardly notice. Lots of other people won't care. Most of the rest will strongly frame it within their political views, with liberal-leaning folks thinking it is great, and conservative-leaning folks wondering how the Nobel committee could get more useless. So maybe a few on-the-fence voters would change their mind due to the award, but, in my opinion, not enough to matter in a presidential election.
Besides, at this point, he would have a very difficult time defeating Hillary in the Democratic primary.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Or Kissenger? Or ask any Korean how they feel about Theodore Roosevelt winning the prize...you aren't likely to get a very positive response.
Monstar L
Dude, looking over my comment that you are responding to, I fail to see any mention or attribution in regard to the war. So, WTF are you talking about? Apparently, you were looking for an excuse to blame the left but I do not follow your logic. Oh, forgive me. If you're coming from the right you are absolved from introducing logic into your reasoning.
it is in fact proof that anyone who opposes al gore has achieved rhetorical and intellectual bankruptcy
basically, rather than counter al gore on any facts or logic or rationale (because they can't), the last few blind idiots who don't agree with al gore (most of the world does now) have their backs to the wall and go for the final desperate charge against him: doubt the guy's integrity and conviction
so you're saying "if you think it's so important to stop polluting the atmosphere, why don't you stop using electricity"
heh
1. as if there were valid options besides modern electric grids for modern life
2. as if you need to be a complete saint to be critical of anyone or anything
3. as if you need to turn on a dime and radically change your life just so you can be able to say everyone needs to gradually and slowly and deliberately change course
in other words, some fools want al gore to lead by example, when that is not necessary to understand his observations, and not possible to do because of how the entire world's energy usage patterns are structured
they find al gore responsible for things like the emissions of the jets he flies. so what do you want him to do? not fly? oh yeah, that will shut him up really well, wouldn't that be nice? i understand your real point now in wanting him to live in a shack without running water or electricity before he can say anything (smiles)
or how about al gore design and build a no emissions airplane before he can go anywhere and talk about climate change. will that make you happy dear propagandized fools? (rolls eyes)
well, he did design and build the internet (joke)
look, propagandized fools: if al gore were in a position to be an important world figure AND use far less energy, he would
but he can't be both in today's CURRENT energy usage patterns... not AL GORE's energy usage patterns, but the WORLD's energy usage patterns. which is the WHOLE F***ING POINT: WE ALL USE TOO MUCH ELECTRICTY. THE ISSUE IS ALL OF US, NOT AL GORE. NICE ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT
again, al gore is NOT a hypocrite... but... let's run with the propagandized fools for a moment, for the sake of argument right here, and say al gore WAS a complete and utter hyprocrite. ok, where does that lead us now?
guess what: it doesn't nullify any of his observations and our need to move away from current energy usage patterns!
so: one last time: doubting someone's integrity and conviction is the last redoubt of the desperate loser who is rhetorically and intellectually bankrupt in their opinions
al gore is not the subject. CLIMATE CHANGE IS
nice propaganda bait and switch there, losers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Whatever you think about the guy (and his energy hogging mansion), it's admirable that he's put so much time into a non-partisan cause at a point in his life when most politicians would probably resign to a cushy retirement.
Ok, so if you thought that it wasn't alarmist nonsense, you'd agree that this would be a good pick for the Nobel Peace prize, right? Are you arguing that he shouldn't win because he's a hypocrite, incorrect about climate change, or out for a profit? Or all three?
It would seem that if he was right about climate change, the fact that he was a hypocrite wouldn't matter that much. And it would seem that if he was actually out for a profit there would be better ways to do it, like you know, keeping the zinc mine. All in all, your argument sounds a bit like an embarassment of riches, like maybe you're listening to people with an interest in coming up with any possible way to discredit this guy.
I realize no one's going to change your mind about this, but you might want to start thinking about what it would feel like to be wrong on this one. Because I have a feeling you'll be doing a lot of backtracking in the next few years.
No. What is affecting the peace of the entire world at the moment is war. There are wars between nations, wars of nations against their citizens and wars between ideologies.
While not very common today, war over resources have been common in history, and that is what they are warning about. Not to mention the destabilizing effect vast numbers of migrants have on poor nations.
They're mission is to do nothing more than tell people about climate change.
IF you accept that climate change is a problem, then what we must have is public awareness, and public support, throughout the world. If only a few scientists know, and a few politicians believe, and they try to bring in laws to prevent this, the people will only see the drawbacks and throw the politicians out in the next election. So it is a very necessary thing (if you believe climate change is a problem).
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
The Norwegian Nobel Comittee should be modded flamebait -500. No. No. Not because of any opinion I have on their nomination. Simply because whichever side you take here, there will be molotovs headed in your direction. You can already see people getting modded troll for saying congratulations or questioning whether there were others that may have had a more concrete impact on global peace. 2000 comments by noon EST. Only those aiming for funny will be able to tread water above 4.
Notmysig
Congrats to the Nobel committee on reducing the honor of the NPP to that of a Grammy award.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. It is currently finalizing its Fourth Assessment Report "Climate Change 2007", also referred to as AR4. The reports by the three Working Groups provide a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the current state of knowledge on climate change. The Synthesis Report integrates the information around six topic areas.
The entire organization is nothing but a group that goes through vast quantities of research and makes conclusions based on that research, this includes discussions of potential solutions.
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Now don't get us wrong, but we love the freedoms you Euros have. Right now, we have shackled ourselves to the point where we might as well declare martial to make it a formality.
Before 911 hit the bricks, the only major issue we 'netters had to deal with was the ack-acks. Now we have to deal with illegal monitoring of our 'net traffic, wiretapping at-will, surveillance on all levels, et al.
Oh, and police breaking up (and using weapons, nonlethal or otherwise in doing so) peaceful, and with all the right permits, gatherings.
Makes one want to immigrate to Switzerland or Denmark.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Turn down that a/c thermostat in your mansion, Mr. Gore! It's a little too humid today to comfortably practice your pilates.
Al Gore has done good, tireless work on an important issue for a long time. However, I don't think his merits were sufficient for the Nobel prize.
Again, I think the Nobel prize committee wanted to send George Bush a message: "You are wreaking destruction and death; see how much better some other people are spending their energies." So this was as much an anti-war Nobel as it was a peace Nobel.
We Finns have been wondering why our Martti Ahtisaari has not been considered worthy by the Scandinavians in the Nobel prize committee. Ahtisaari has been instrumental in the independence of Namibia, negotiating an end to the NATO-Serbia war and bringing peace to Aceh. He has also participated in other efforts like bringing Kuwait on its feet after the first Gulf war and trying to find a settlement between Serbia and Kosovo.
If by dealt with it, you mean died in millions from famine, war and the collapse of civilisations then yea sure.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
People that have already decided the world would be a lot better place right now if one person on the Supreme Court had changed their vote will likewise look at this as further justification for their beliefs and support of Gore.
The other roughly 75% of the American population will likely end up with the opinion of the last opinionated person they heard of (or news report). The Nobel Prize is still very largely respected among the US Populace, and so if somebody who is otherwise relatively uninformed hears that Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Global Warming, they are more likely than not to form a positive opinion of him with regard to his work. So a reasonable chunk of those 75% will probably form positive opinions of Gore based on the award. He's further bolstered to some degree by those who have become frustrated with the current state of affairs and remember pre-2000 as a generally better time. Others have negative opinions of global warming 'alarmists' in general and will attribute those to Gore as well, although the percentage of Americans who accept global warming as fact is a lot higher than many Europeans tend to think, due to the current administration's policies.
So yes, overall this award (and the subsequent news reports) probably will have a positive impact on American's perception of Gore on the whole, although like anything else there is going to be a multitude of opinions.
There's really no connection in most people's minds between the differing politics of Europe/US and the Nobel Peace Prize. Acceptance of Global Warming is also growing rapidly in the US as well, and with even the Bush administration recently flatly stating it exists, there's less and less of a connection between Europe and global warming... Americans now generally accept it as an American issue (as well?).
With regard to Gore running for President or people voting for him... it won't happen, period. He will not enter the race, and I say that with pretty much as close to 100% certainty as possible. Despite his popularity, he couldn't win even the Democratic Primary at this point in time, simply because of how much is actually required to run an actual campaign today. While he won't run for president though, he will almost certainly be involved at a very high level with any Democratic administration, with regards to the issue of global warming. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize has now virtually guaranteed that. So if a democratic administration did take over the White House in 2009, you can expect America to have a vastly different position with regards to global warming than it does right now. Of course, there's no way to know if there will be a democratic administration in 2009.
On Thursday science fiction and sociology novelist Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature. I'm please the Nobel committee finally recognize this genre.
On Friday Al Gore received the Nobel Peace prize for his decades of advocacy on global climate change. For the most part I think hes been fairly factual; occasionally overboard alarmist. Its a serious topic that needs some theatrics to capture people's attention.
(The title is just a troll to get attention.)
"Insightful" my ass! Where's my mod points -1 troll.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
There's no question that the earth is going through some sort of warming trend. However, it's far from conclusive that that warming is man-made. In fact, there seems to be evidence that global warming is occurring on other planets in the solar system, too, suggesting that the cause is the Sun getting warmer:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/global-warming-on-jupiter.html
So, why are they giving Gore the Nobel Prize for giving out misinformation about a natural event that we can't do anything about?
Actually, I mostly admire and respect Al Gore, but you know what they say about the path to good intentions--it leads to spam. The problem is that Al did too good a job when he was helping to fund the development of the Internet. He kept telling them not to worry about the money, and he kept it flowing. When you think about it that way, you have to say the SMTP fantasy of free email is partly his fault.
Yeah, his intentions are still good, but that isn't always enough.
(Just for the record and risking the karma: If the will of the voters was the criterion (as it says in the law, even in Florida), then I'm sure Gore won Florida in 2000. On the other hand, no one really knows what differences that might have made... What we do know for sure is what happened: Dubya the miserable failure was not competent to prevent 9/11.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Actually, it was a sincere expression of sentiment. All the recipients have been critisized by me in the past but I do admire their effort and the insight of the Committee that this is a pressing peace issue. It was not an attempt to have the first post since I clicked preview before submitting. I've had the first three posts on a story before because I was in a hurry to get to church and I had some information to share that did not fit well into the summary. Mods don't have a lot to choose from early on so it is best to discount mods of early posts. For that reason, I apreciate the mods who take the time to read through later and pick out nuggets in a larger field.
--
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Actually I'm an Australian. But I just want to say that I am grateful for the show which the USA is putting on for the world in this presidential campaign. US presidential elections are a four yearly highlight in international news. Given how much the Republicans appear to be on the nose, and that their opposition is choosing between two mould breaking candidates, something really different seems to be about to happen and I can't wait to watch it, from a distance.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why? The work that Al Gore has done to raise awareness of our current planetary climate crisis is second to none. The Peace Prize goes out to individuals who raise global awareness of issues that affect the peace of the entire world, right? Wouldn't you say that climate change is in that category?
No, I wouldn't. If there were a Nobel Prize in climatology, then I could see giving him that, but peace? Ridiculous.
A movie gets an Oscar when it was clearly inferior to its peers.
A website that nobody ever went to gets an award for "transforming television."
And now this travesty to the Nobel name.
I might just have to start believing those Foxistas about the limousine liberals and their Hollywood circle jerk.
I hope the science Nobels are selected better.
My original post referred to Gore's statement that he will donate HIS portion of the $1.5 million dollar prize to The Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit group of which a person named Al Gore is the Chairman, and whose mission is as stated above.
PR and politics.
Frankly, I'm rather surprised. Usually a peace prize is given after you do something. Gore has certainly spoken a lot about this issue, but he has yet to make a real difference. This strikes most as a big 'Fuck You Bush' from the world community.
That being said, it is fun watching all the wingers heads explode over this. They're already out on the intertubes wining and ranting and spewing cheetohs on the keyboard. I sort of feel sorry for them. All I can say is get your blood pressure checked regularly.
So I do feel sorry. The Republicans have invested so much into their Dear Leader, and at every opportunity he just turns up looking like a chump. It must be so hard, defending a loser like that. Wingers everywhere, you have my pity.
What the Republicans today need to validate their world views is for Nobel to offer a War Prize.
Although sadly even if they did offer a Nobel War Prize, President Bush still wouldn't win it.
Nevermind my post, this replied to a troll who has been removed.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
And it's comments like these that show you don't even understand what the Peace Prize is all about.
It's not about who the most peaceful person on earth is... if that were true, my grandmother should have won it years ago. The Peace Prize is awarded to people who put forth an effort towards peace in the face of adversity and bias.
These "Irish biggots (sic)" and Palestinian leaders made an effort towards peace despite the strife that has lead to so many of their people to violence. The Prize recognizes that they put aside the hatred, violence, and hostility that everyone expects from them and tried to find peaceful ways to express their beliefs.
As far as Mr. Gore, the prize is recognizing a man who has devoted his life to raising awareness to an issue that has either been ignored by so many or met with hostility (see the trolls above).
November 2nd is the filing deadline in New Hampshire.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Sorry, Slashdot's manbearpig fad ended as soon as the majority of posters started agreeing with Gore. You might still be able to use it in the context of welcoming our new Manbearpig overlords, but that's about it.
It's a shame that so much focus is placed on a rise in temperature of a few tenths of a degree along with a whole bunch of unsubstantiated scare stories about consequences, to the exclusion of all of the other problems there are in the world. Deforestation, over-population and over-fishing are probably an order of magnitude worse for the biosphere than a small temperature increase (which may well have more positive benefits than negative in terms of bio-diversity). Perhaps it would be better for Gore to spend his time promoting the spending of an annual 1/4 trillion dollars on those things (even half that amount would fix a whole lot). If you really want to see how sound are the calculations and peer-review processes involved in all of this climate hand-wringing, check out climateaudit.org. You'll be very surprised at what you find.
The Nobel prize was for Al Gore and the IPCC, what Al Gore chooses to do with his share is his prerogative, and personally I think his choice was an excellent one. There's plenty of research out there already, what is lacking is the connection between that research and the commoner's ear.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
People joke about Al Gore creating the Internet. But it was his sponsorhip of the 1988(?) Information Superhighway Bill that changed computer networks from an academic toy into a world wide force. It encouraged several existing subnets to adopt national standards and financed a high speed backbone that universities, companies, and government could all share. Six years later the NSF Supercomputer Center freeware release of Mosaic jump-started the application software side of the Net. And the internet pretty much became self-financing and important economic engine.
I think the Internet has had a more profound effect on human affairs than climatic change so far. And Al was an important contributer to the former. But there arent Nobel prizes for legislation.
They also believe our society and culture is going to collapse in the face of islamofascist killer robots.
I am saddened that Voltron has not come to defend us.
I'm super serial.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
But there is no Nobel War Prize.
Sounds like a good reason to start a war.
"you must be new here" ...
Read radical news here
I'm sorry, but this just proves to me that the Nobel Peace Prize is a big crock of politically correct shit. Fat boy gets a Nobel Peace Prize. What an embarrasment!
I have a hurricane insurerer as a client and all of these global warming induced hurricanes that were supposed to happen haven't happened at all. There just hasn't been. So I wonder, what other predictions of our doom aren't going to come true.
I'm not saying that there isn't some kind of climate change taking place, or that man isn't somehow partly to blame, but, hey, one would think that the supposedly prestigious nobel prize committee would come out of its liberal ideology for a second, do some math (for a change). They would see that the likes of Kyoto won't reduce carbon levels in the earth atmosphere, that its just a transfer tax designed to bring about some form of global socialism backed by the fear mongering lie of planetary catastrophe, and that, domestically, the big companies like GE, pushing for CO2 laws are doing so soley because they have CO2 laws to sell.
If Global Warming were the big threat to mankind that Al Gore hypes it to be, then we should be building hundreds of nuclear plants and millions of electric cars, starting yesterday. Clearly the longer term problem of nuclear waste is not so severe as the ice caps melting tomorrow. But if the far most environmental crazies can be content to wait for some sort of a breakthrough in solar power or windmill to replace the 80% of the US electrical capacity that comes from fossil fuels, then perhaps all of the hype about global warming is just that, hype.
If there is no time, then build nukes, and if there is time, then I'm getting a V8 engine, and Al Gore and his likes bitch about it, they can take that nobel prize and shove it up his ass while he flies around on his personal carbon belching jet.
This is my sig.
Because W. came in and encouraged Americans to buy big SUVs, he made us more dependant on foreign oil than ever before (When Carter sounded the alarm in 1978, it was 2% foreign; now it is 66). Now, EVERY American is aware that this is disasterous. We are paying attention to the costs of gas, oil, and pollution. As such, we have a renewed interest in hybrid AND electric cars. All in all, I think that W's actions will certainly slow terrorist oil, and may kill off oil for use of transportation (note that oil will never stop; we use it in so many more useful areas; plastics, fertilizers, perfume, chemical feed stock, etc).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thank you.
You've brought up some serious questions about whether or not this award is appropriate. Given what I know about the issue and the current political situation, as well as the points you make, I can't believe that this choice for the prize is anything but a political statement by the committee.
It should be noted that most of the science Al Gore uses is junk science or poorly interpreted science. His case, though, is not based on science its based on emotion. Some would say "fear mongering". But, this is the highly politicized "Peace Prize" not one of the Science prizes, where showing your proofs is required.
By now, anyone who claims that there is a scientific concensus on man-caused global warming is either a "kool-aid drinker" or being highly disingenuous.
Yes, global warming is occuring. The cause is far from certain but a lot of evidence is piling up that it's an on-cycle occurance with little to do with man. Yes, polluting is bad, but science shows we've survived numerous heating and cooling cycles ("numerous" as long as you don't believe that we've only been on earth for 6 thousand years).
I'm beginning to believe that the faithful of Holy Church of Global Warming are much like our ancestors. In an effort to stave off the disappearance of the sun in the winter, to keep the dragon/snake/lizzard from eating the sun, to keep floods from the village, we are making blood sacrifices. They had a poor understanding of the underlying science. Those that did understand the science used it to their own advantage. "Priests" showed their power by "blessing" the congregants through the events, and surprise, everyone survived the eclipse, except for a few unfortunate virgins.
With people like Al Gore, and our eco-frauds selling "carbon offsets", acting as the temple priests, they warn us of this great coming catastrophe. Meanwhile, the sacrifice we make is to their pocket books. Money, effort, energy, and electorate good will that could be better spent on feeding the poor, healing the sick, and educating the masses is instead spent on halting a natural process that the world has survived many times before.
Can we live greener? Yes. Should we clean up our backyards? Yes. Can we help emerging nations build clean? Yes, and that will improve their living standards. But, to spend the money and electorate goodwill on halting development will lead to the improvement of the most poor.
People like Al Gore will eventually distract us from our real work, caring for the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the less fortunate. Why? Because we will be too busy "Saving the World", so that we can't save the world.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Well, as long as it ain't all about nucUlear.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you think creating an inaccurate politicized & overly hyped documentary and merely being it's spokesman (ie: the Ronald McDonald clown for Globally Warmed Burgers) is more prize worthy than a woman who risked her life to save 2,500 lives during WWII.
Then something is seriously wrong with you...
And DON'T say his movie has helped raise awareness and thus saved lives in danger of global warming. Because his over-hyping, and questionable statements merely clouded the arena and debate; creating more controversy and less positive action.
I actually believe we need to reduce pollution, clean-up our act, become resource efficient. But every time I hear someone being an alarmist and quoting questionable figures I get upset. Because that hurts environmentalism by putting off a large portion of the populace rather than working toward a common ground.
A good example of such a working were the actions Jean-Michel Cousteau who's appealed to President's own nature and found common ground - the result the nation's largest national park and first marine national park was created.
This is a much better method than Al Gore's...
doesn't matter if Mr. Bush lives in a thatched shed and uses biogas to light up his dwelling. He is responsible for the energy consumption of the entire USA, not just his hut.
spoken like a true nazi. Bush is only responsible for the government, of which there is too much. You are responsible for your own energy usage.
India and China are home to over 35% of the World's population; but it appears they do not have much of a scope to reduce consumption. The US consumes more than 15 times the energy per person consumed in India; and there is a huge scope for reduction. Inaction by the US govt. is dangerous for the entire planet, including India and China.
Guess what, those people in India and China are FUCKING POOR AND HAVE NOTHING. What you are advocating is that the people of the USA go back to living in the same kind of crappy lives that people live in the third world. How much more proof do you need to see that you are advocating the injection of a massive level into the USA in order to make the world more equal. Faced with such stark choices, and stark facism by the enviro-left wing, how can any sane person not think that g.w. is a massive left wing lie designed to bring about socialism.
This is my sig.
I wouldn't like to test whether the methane deposits deep in the ocean will get released once our temperature reaches a tipping point. Once that happens, we are royally screwed. See the Permian Extinction for the results of the last time that happened.
The problem is that we're conducting an experiment on our climate, and if the results go poorly, we're toast.
So you're worried about the poor, eh? Okay. How about Bangladesh. You should know that any rise in sea levels would innundate this country. Does that qualify as affecting the poor? You're for DDT. Have you not heard that the primary problem with DDT was its chemical resemblance to sex-selection hormones? I find it amazing to have to again convince people it's a dumb idea polluting the environement on which you depend.
You mention that others have said pollution is bad. So you think that's the sum total of what Mr. Gore has done? Mentioned pollution?
As for your insistence on hypothesis that can be tested--I totally agree. But speaking anecdotally, haven't you noticed a change in the weather over your lifetime? I have lived all over the United States and locals everywhere comment on the virtual disappearance of winter. Agreed, though, this is merely anecdotal evidence.
I agree that it sucks how this is going to affect poorer countries. But anything negative always affects the poor the worst. However, if the effects that are threatened by global warming happen, the poor will get the worst of that. I think this is the lesser of evils. Granted, we do not have a smoking gun on this issue, owing to the complexity of the science. Using that uncertainly as a reason to assume there is no problem is foolish. Shouldn't we err on the side of caution? If we reduce greenhouse gases, can't you see that as an opportunity for business to step in and sell products that fit that model? By the way, corporations are already taking global warming seriously.
I just find it despicable how Republicans and right-leaning Americans use this temporary scientific uncertainty as a justification that the problem is fictional. Funny how the GOP always spins anything that happens in a way that they can get even richer than they are. Funny how the Republicans always push the view that allows the business community that supports them to pollute without controls or abandon. Funny how that works.
I love the way that, especially in the US, if people suggest even marginal regulatory improvements to the minimum fuel standards of vehicles (as happens every year in the US, and is hugely lobbied against), they get called "eco nazis who want to live in mud huts". Here in Europe, we have much more fuel efficient cars, yet amazingly do not live in mud huts.
Here in San Francisco I don't even need a car. I have a 10-minute commute to work on natural gas and electric powered buses. Because the climate is mild, I don't need an air conditioner and I rarely need to heat my home. I grew up in a suburb where me, my sister, and my parents each had a car and needed it. Compared to that, riding the bus isn't so bad. I wouldn't go back to the suburbs for anything. My carbon footprint is about a tenth of the average American's, but I don't feel like I've sacrificed a thing. So yeah, it pisses me off that for the past 60 years government policy has heavily tilted toward suburbs. It's an article of religious fait: Suburbs are just morally superior. Cities are a dumping ground for single people, the poor, ethnic minorities, and other undesirables that respectable families don't want messing up their neighborhoods. It becomes a vicious circle: Middle class voters flee the cities because government lets the infrastructure go to hell; government lets the infrastructure go to hell because middle class voters live in the suburbs. If we spent anywhere near as much per capita on cities as we do on suburbs, it would be more environmentally sustainable and most people would be much happier.
Extremeism in any form is bad. I have a bad feeling that If Gore were president, he'd have laws enstated that would be so draconian that it would keep those who are the best allies for conservation out. Like what has happened with trail access in Pennsylvania at the hands of the state game commission. What ultimately ends up happening is you alienate those who were helping, and the highest-bidder then comes in and wipes out everything you were supposedly 'protecting.'
If you enjoy the outdoors, and getting away from cities, an environmental extremeist likely isn't who you want running your country.
I've noticed an extremely alarming trend that I think may eventually lead to world wide war. Last week there were no crows in my back yard. Then one morning there were 5, the next morning 10, then 20, then 40, now 80. 80 crows. And they call it a "murder" of crows.
I sat down and calculated this out, and at the rate the crows are multiplying we're going to be living with Alfred Hickcock's The Birds in no time. This is going to result in mass migration of humans, food shortages, and contention over limited resources. This will *clearly* and inevitably lead to war.
I plan on publishing my Murder of Crow manifesto in early November, to make it clear to all about this impending and unavoidable danger to humanity. If things go well, I hope to be able to save the world, win the Peace Prize, and maybe even become US president if I play my cards right. Wish me luck!
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize doesn't change my opinion of Gore one way or the other, which is somewhat skeptical but largely ambivalent, but it does confuse me.
According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize is supposed to be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
While it's clear that Gore and the IPCC are willing to continue in the face of great controversy, and that climate change may become a major factor in human existence, I'm not seeing anything in their work that improves international relations, reduces armies, or promotes peace. What has happened is that people have become much, much more nervous about certain critical resources, which may have led to more tension over those resources without doing much to alleviate the issues, and this includes almost every Western power. We won't know for another 50 years, IIRC, who the other nominees were, but I'm fairly certain that others might have been more to the point on Nobel's intentions.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Chicken Little, who has been saying for decades that the sky is falling. Since it's become popular, if not fashionable, to make such statements, the Noble committee felt that Little was due for recognition. Little was quoted as saying, "Remember, the ice caps on Mars are melting too. We must have polluted the planet with robots! When will the madness end?"
Seriously, you have to wonder how someone like Thomas Schelling feels about this. Granted, his prize was in Economics rather than Peace, but just much will Gore's 'achievements' tarnish the overall reputation of the Nobel?
l On October 21, 1999, gearing up his campaign, Al made a flat-out, scouts-honor, 100%-guaranteed, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die pledge to end oil drilling off the California coast: "I will take the most sweeping steps in our history to protect our oceans and coastal waters from offshore oil drilling. I will make sure that there is no new oil leasing off the coasts of California and Florida."
The very next month, the Clinton-Gore administration granted oil company requests to extend 36 drilling leases in California coastal waters. Oil companies were $2 million donors to Gore and the Democratic Party for the 2000 election.
l In 1992, candidate Gore pledged that the new administration would be a ferocious defender of America's vanishing wetlands. Yet with direct subsidies and lax EPA enforcement, the administration has encouraged the sugar industry to continue destroying the Everglades. Among the sugar daddies, Alfonso Fanjul and his Flo-Sun sugar empire in the Everglades have sweetened Clinton and Gore's various money pockets with more than $300,000 in contributions.
Also, despite Al's pledge, another 500 acres of sensitive New Jersey wetlands are set to be destroyed by an upscale shopping center and entertainment complex being built by the Mills Corporation. Various federal agencies opposed the construction, but the Council on Environmental Quality, which was closely affiliateded with Vice President Gore, brokered the dirty deal for Mills Corp. Less than a week later, contributions totalling $43,000 came to the Gore 2000 campaign fund from the grateful folks at Mills.
l In 1996, as part of his "reinventing government" flim-flam, Gore achieved what Nixon and Reagan could not get Congress to sit still for: privatizing the Navy's strategic oil reserve, known as Elk Hills. This huge oil field near Bakersfield, California, is big-time black gold, and the industry has drooled over it for decades, just as environmentalists had fought to prevent its development. It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history.
The winning bidder in the sell-off was Occidental Petroleum Corp. Just coincidentally, Al and Occidental go waaaay back. Indeed, the major source of the wealth amassed by Gore's father came from his long relationship with Occidental and its legendary chairman, Armand Hammer. Gore has extended the familial ties to the company; he currently owns about a million dollars worth of Occidental stock, and also enjoys a unique neighborly relationship to the corporation.
Adjacent to the Gores' bucolic, old family farm back home in Tennessee, right along the Caney Fork River that Al talks of so wistfully, he owns another farm--less bucolic but far more profitable--that he prefers not to talk of at all. This chunk of farmland is rich in zinc, and it was sold to Al in 1973 in a sweetheart transaction by Armand Hammer. "Mr. Green" turns out to be a zinc miner! As a by- product, he also turns out to be a polluter--some environmentalists say that run-off from the mine is getting into his beloved Caney Fork.
Gore draws annual zinc royalties that have totalled some $500,000 since he acquired the land from Occidental, and he has also mined more than half a million dollars in campaign funds from Occidental since he became vice president--including $50,000 that came after one of Al's infamous telephone solicitations from the White House, and another $100,000 wad that rolled in after Occidental's CEO had enjoyed two nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
These cozy connections caused industry eyes to roll when it was announced that Occidental had won the bidding on Elk Hills. Writing in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn reports that the company was viewed as a bankruptcy waiting to happen until it got its hands on this sensationally profitable oil reserve.
Normally, the Department of Energy would decide whether a national asset like Elk Hills, the military's largest strategic fuel reserve, should be sold off. Instead, Gore arranged for a private consulting firm named ICF
Here in Europe, we have much more fuel efficient cars
I have no idea about US emission laws, but Lotus had to modify an engine recently to pass US emission laws, so your statement cant be entirely correct? www.grouplotus.com
Section 9... How does the U.S. version differ to the U.K. variant
"* That sea levels could rise seven metres 'in the immediate future'
* That atolls in the Pacific had already been evacuated
* That CO2 levels and temperatures are 'an exact fit' - this, said the judge, overstated the case
* That the drying of Lake Chad, the disappearance of snows on Kilimanjaro, and Hurricane Katrina can be directly attributed to global warming
* That polar bears are known to be drowning as a result of melting ice
* That coral bleaching is due to climate change"
So what do you think you've refuted by posting inaccuracies that the judge used to determine made the movie unreliable?
Apart from proving that the judge and OP were correct, what did you think you'd accomplished?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Well, first, let me say I'm thrilled Gore has been recognized for his very fine work.
But a thought did occur to me, and it's partly underscored by your choice of words in this question. Strictly speaking, any of the world's historically prominent totalitarian dictator types (I'll decline to mention them by name, since they tend to be conversation stoppers, but you know the usual suspects) have raised awareness (usually through attack) about issues affecting the world peace (like their attacks). And yet we'd presumably not want the prize to go to them. So this caused me to wonder what the criteria were for the prize.
Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Commitee (1991-1999) wrote in an article, The Nobel Peace Prize: From Peace Negotiations to Human RightsI took the remark about the difficulty of the preceding year to mean that you can't know for sure how history will regard the actions, and whether, in fact, they were a contribution to peace. For example, in theory, Gore's contributions could lead next year to a sudden realization of imminent resource scarcity that might otherwise have waited some number of years, and could actually precipitate a war. Good intentions are not always enough to ensure good outcomes. It's so hard to know, when the timeline between the doing and the analysis of the result is short. So while I'm comfortable with the award, I have considerable tolerance of those who doubt the propriety of giving this award at this time. Probably they're just saying the timeline of the award should, in general, be longer. And yet, the good effect of the short timeline might be to affect an ongoing situation in a pro-active way, not merely to comment on history (as are so many of the other Nobel awards).
For myself, I regard the climate crisis with the highest priority the world faces, and something that the world must confront together. I hope that doing so will reduce the set of issues faced, and that a reduced number of issues will lead to greatest peace. So I'm willing to see this award as appropriate even in a theoretical sense.
But even if it's only has the practical effect of helping to underscore that there really is global concern, I'm willing to live with a world that has given out an award that some think is undeserved, if it still has the good effect of raising consciousness about this serious issue. If the only effect is to incentivize others to do greedy, selfish, mercenary work on how to raise climate awareness and/or fix the problem, not for the good of humanity but just so they can win an award like Al's, I'm afraid I just don't see that as a remarkably bad outcome.
Besides, with Bush at the helm, anything that raises world consciousness that not everyone in the US is out to start a war is also good, and perhaps protects the peace as well.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The single biggest... counterargument... I see against Gore's work is that he himself has a large carbon footprint. But there's nothing about this argument that invalidates what he's trying to do. But I've long since stopped expecting the majority of people I meet to understand logic.
IAALS.
My thoughts are it is half scam so far. I'm pretty pro environment and keeping things efficient and clean, but I think these offsets and trading them on the market are just another way for the trader parasites to make money without working for it, and as a stick for governments to beat their subject's heads with. You aren't gong to see rich guys drop driving around in convoys with armored limousines, or giving up multiple mansions, etc. You won't see governments stop wasting money and creating vast megatons of pollution with their tanks and jetplanes and warships and fleets of bureaucrats who drive around doing..something. And etc. You won't see big corporations just stop building those big architectural and mostly unneeded office-penis towers even though the vast bulk of office work can now be done via telecommuting. Like, the biggest problem with commuting to work in the big city isn't the cars, it's the companies forcing people to get in those cars needlessly to go someplace when they could do the same work at home with much more efficiency and savings of energy and raw resources. Homes are a given, office towers nowadays with electron bits being so easy to move are highly dubious for the most part.
Global warming has nothing to do with peace. Global warming activists were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize specifically for their global warming activism. This is like giving Bret Favre the Olympic Gold Medal for the decathalon, and saying that he deserves it because he's a really good quarterback. Being a quarterback has nothing to do with the decathalon. Bret Favre might well be incidentally really good at decathalon, but his abilities as a quarterback are utterly orthogonal to winning the Olympic Gold Medal for the decathalon. Global warming activism is utterly orthogonal to winning a prize for Peace.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
It was already cheapened. Just look at the 1994 winners: Terrorists and war criminals.
Best Slashdot Co
Al Gore has been campaigning for awareness of climate change for a long time.
He didn't win the award for An Inconvenient Truth.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
You're strawmanning. No one is saying that the world is going to "end" from warming/climate change. We're just saying that human settlement and living patterns have been set in place with regard to the current climate situation. A huge climate shift is going to force entire populations to move because of the way the world is going to change (it's too late to stop it now... the only question is whether we can delay it or lessen the negative effects). That's a HUGE logistical problem for a world like ours that is already overpopulated. It's not a doomsday scenario, but it's not exactly bunnies and rainbows either.
IAALS.
repeat after me, propagandized fool: you don't have to be a saint to point out a sin
i don't think al gore could adapt as mightily as he could to less emissions to the degree required for you to take him seriously, but that's a side issue. to shut you up effectively, let us suppose that your observation is 100%, and then let's pack on a few thousand more sins. let us suppose for argument here that al gore ran his own personal coal plant, that he is, for the sake of argument right here, the giant hypocrite you see him to be
EVEN THEN, his words on climate change are sound
do you understand that?
if al gore were a pedophile, a murderer, listened to cold play, or any other number of heinous crimes, real and imagined, that you could fling at him, guess what?: his argument on climate change remains untouched, remains true. you don't defeat an argument by attacking the arguer, by doubting his integrity and his conviction. all you do is wind up changing the subject
CLIMATE CHANGE is the issue, not AL GORE
do you get that?
but in some people's minds, changing the subject form climate change to al gore means they have reaosn (in their deluded minds) TO IGNORE CLIMATE CHANGE
that's the problem with attacking al gore
the whole point is, assassinating al gore's character isn't the point. do you follow that? the point is climate change. and those who oppose al gore want to make al gore the subject matter INSTEAD OF climate change
but when you make al gore the subject matter, people forget all about climate change, and it becomes a giant retardfest of al gore did this and al gore did that. who cares about al gore?
al gore: "climate change is real"
porpagandized critic: "yeah but you pollute, therefore, i can ignore everything you say about climate change"
it is in fact a classic form of propaganda: rather than debate a speaker on his points, his argument, the issues, merely attack the speaker. as if that somehow nullifies the points he is making!
if al gore lived in a shack in minnesota, or if al gore ran exxon mobile, it doesn't matter; THE WORDS HE SPEAKS ON CLIMATE CHANGE ARE THE TRUTH. AND THAT IS THE REAL ISSUE
except to propagandizers like yourself, who want to make al gore the subject, rather than climate change
repeat after me, propagandized fool: you don't have to be a saint to point out a sin
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not really surprising. The Nobel Peace Prize really should be renamed the Nobel Anti-American President Prize, since the primary motive of giving it out the last few years has been to try and embarrass whoever happens to be leading the country at the time. I mean, Jimmy Carter? Al Gore? And what about Yasser Arafat? Yeah, 3 guys that have really contributed to world peace. The teacher that breaks up the schoolyard fight is more deserving than those three.
there's always been change in climate and we have dealt with it, changes which have been far more then small.
it's just alarmist nonsense your pushing there.
You got your degree in climate science where? You've been studying this topic for how long?
I actually have friends doing research on the topic, both in the lab here in the US on the global climate model an in the field in the Antarctic. They are more alarmed about current trends than is filtering through to the media. The rate at which permafrost and glaciers have begun melting recently is sending shock waves through the scientific community. We are now only beginning to discover environmental feedback mechanisms that likely mean the scientists have UNDERESTIMATED the rate and impact of global warming, not overestimated it.
We used to talk about the climate problems our children and grandchildren will be dealing with. Guess what, the bill came early. Now YOU will likely be suffering the consequences. We are seeing the leading edge of it now with shifting weather patterns and encroachment of invasive species... just as the models predicted, only sooner. Because of climate deniers like you, it is probably now too late to stop it, but we still must do everything we can to slow the change and give our society and economy time to adapt.
Alarmist? Hardly. If anything the message from the scientist has been overly softened and toned down.
BTW, the friends I mentioned work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and on the global climate model at Argonne National Laboratories, in case anyone is curious.
The Bolachek Journals
Just because you don't recognize it doesn't mean it's off-topic.
LOL.
I love the way that, especially in Europe, people who live in moderate climates suggest that nobody should be using air conditioning. I would love to see you move to a hot, humid climate, and watch you in pathetic misery as you drown in your own sweat.
Anti-AC crusaders have blood on their hands for all the elderly who die during Europe's infrequent heat-waves.
I'm all for green technology, but if you think I'm going to watch my grandma die of heat stroke so that you can end the "evils" of climate control, you are dead fucking wrong.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I think Doris Lessing, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature put it best... "pure political correctness".
I'm totally serial!
The thing is that Al Gore has not raised awareness about the climate change issue, rather he has raised awareness about anthropogenic global warming using rethoric to support his arguments. Whenever science shows uncertainties, he either ignores them or make them play towards the catastrophic global warming side of the argument. He is therefore an activist not interested in whether the issue has scientific merit or not. He is very far from "build(ing) up and disseminat(ing) greater knowledge about man-made climate change" as the official explanation for the Nobel peace prize goes. On the other hand, the IPCC role at least on paper is to assess the scientific merit of the risk of man induced climate change and make this accessible to the general public and to the policy makers. However, the matter is far from settled and there is active scientific discussion in many different aspects of the issue. Even in those as important as the climate sensitivity to CO2. This Nobel prize is a shameless political move to blackmail the scientific community towards more extreme positions on the issue.
He used the word creating, as in to bring about the internet as we know it now, by pushing for funding. He did NOT use the word inventing.
This space available.
when faced with more of the same slobbering typical stupidity, it is not beholden on me to be novel and creative in my replies each time. same stupidity deserves the same answer
ps: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=326215&cid=20952515
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Before NCSA Mosaic, there was Pei-Yuan Wei's ViolaWWW (released in 1991), which he developed as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, as part of Berkeley's XCF undergraduate research center. ViolaWWW (which ran exclusively on X Windows) had a number of innovations that inspired Marc Andreessen. For example http://dale.oreillynet.com/stories/storyReader$31:
Mosaic took off because it was ported to...gasp, Microsoft Windows. (Here's the irony: the first web browsers were created by Tim Berners-Lee for the Next Computer, which was Steve Jobs' old company; but the Web would explode in popularity due to Windows.) However, given the typical porting of software from Unix to the PC, it was only a matter of time that somebody would have had a browser for the Internet on the PC. Did Al Gore create Windows? I guess that's why Gore sits on the board of directors of Apple Inc.
to not even bother to read politically sensitive articles so I can keep my blood pressure down. It's just not healthy.
It doesn't matter which side of the argument you're on, it just doesn't seem to me there's enough data (considering the age of the earth) to say we are / aren't significantly impacting the global temperature. We have maybe one or two millennia of recorded data on climate. That's not a significant sample size.
Oh, and what exactly does climate have to do with world peace?
I don't recall that memo...
And has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Opera Recording and an Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Is it scientifically valid to anthropomorphize science? Further, you may argue there is a consensus on one side or the other but there will be nothing conclusive until there are multiple disasters - as predicted - clearly attributable to man-made climate change. So you need two things before earning that smug, shit-eating grin: 1) man-made climate-induced disasters - lots of them; 2) strong evidence the disasters are attibutable to mankind.
Your position is even more precarious. If those disasters do not happen this century, then the scientific consensus was wrong. For years the prediction has been bad shit will happen AND SOON. Don't forget the soon part. I know won't. Bad shit will happen - that's a given.
Yes, the United States consumes more per capita. But we also produce more per capita also. Simple Economics 101.
Apparently the people in China who aren't poor are leading a huge increase in demand for American SUV's and stretched hummers. (Details: http://www.rfa.org/english/features/lelyveld/2007/01/22/china_wealthgap/)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Because it's missing. Might besomewhere on his desk.
Why is this posted in science and not in politics?
you believe climate change is important, al gore merely an imperfect messenger. ok, good for you
but you have to admit a lot of assclowns ou there think that by assassinating al gore's character, they can safely put climate change out of their minds. and in fact, they do
you're not the problem. but you don't admit to what the real problem is with the propagandistic ploy of making al gore the issue instead of climate change: the important issue of climate change gets swept under the rug, and the retarded political partisan knife fight of the assassination of people's character takes center stage
partisans and their propaganda are at work here by making al gore the issue instead of climate change. they are far worse than an al gore who drinks oil and farts smog
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, this is true... but they can't give out the peace prize to anyone for anything involving the Iraq war, can they? The war is far from solved, and anyone with any power to do anything about it not only isn't trying to stop it, they LIKE it and want a sequel in Iran. Now, if they had a Nobel WAR prize, there would be plenty of candidates.
This space available.
Then why don't you act like it, Mr. Gore? If there were a huge asteroid headed this way, I can guarantee you'd be out building a bunker to protect your family. Why not in this case? Is it, perhaps, because it really is NOT that scary to you after all?
There is loads of evidence for global warming. To say there is no consensus is like saying that there is no consensus that smoking causes cancer. There may be a few maverick scientists who go against the consensus, plus the scores of industry sponsored mouthpieces but there certainly is a consensus.
1.Bush elected.
2.Gore -- however ordinary like us he may be, at least truth-speaking -- not elected.
3.Can you imagine this happening in Japan, or India, or Germany (ok, these did screw up almost 70 years ago...)?
4.I guess the US is nowadays, well, un-American.
I also fail to understand how Al Gore could completely ignore some very obvious facts in his movie, namely:
1. It's a geological/climatological "given" that the Earth has gone through several Ice Ages (i.e. climate changes) even before man ever came on the scene. Therefore not all climate changes are man-made.
2. There is a so far totally unproven "chicken and egg" situation with regard to CO2 emissions - namely that it's possible that more CO2 is emitted by the oceans because of a (natural?) temperature change.
3. Whilst Mr Gore picked on regions of the poles where ice is melting, he failed to mention that in certain regions, the ice is getting thicker also.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
With recent winners of the Nobel Peace Prize going to clearly left-wing liberals and anti-capitalists such as Jimmy Carter and Yassir Arafat, the Prize has lost all credibility in my book. What happened to the days of Mother Teresa and others who actually worked for peace? How about one of the other contenders Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved more than 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust? How does Owl Gore compare to her? Until the Prize committee starts recognizing some real activists for peace instead of the most anti-capitalist liberal they can find, I won't be paying any attention to it. It might as well be the Grammys.
The Indian middle class is almost the same size as the entire US population: about 250 million middle class Indians vs. about 300 million US residents total.
Granted, the nature of that wealth is somewhat different given their overall proportion of the country's population. That indeed would be a valid point. It would also be a good point to say that we should disaggregate the per capita figures to compare apples to apples.
On the other hand, you can't expect a country like India to make the same kinds of gross per capita energy use reductions that Americans could. There is much more opportunity for us to reduce our energy use because we use so much of it in ways that are just mindless habit left over from the days of cheap and abundant oil. For example, most households have multiple cars. My next door neighbor has a household of four, which is served by four large SUVs. If households with multiple SUVs replaced one of them with a fuel efficient sedan, they'd save more energy than a poor Indian family uses.
The problem isn't that we refuse to live in huts. It's our stubborn refusal to make even changes that pose no hardship at all -- even changes that would benefit us individually and collectively.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bit higher than India's national average, isn't it?
There will never be an end to the number of people who will fight any mention that humans are causing climate change. No one is saying we are the ONLY factor. But we are a big part of it, and we can control our actions, compared to trying to control other natural factors. Shouldn't we do so... just in case?
I always notice that in my local paper, when they publish articles from global warming skeptics... these individuals are often the heads of various organizations and groups, professors, history buffs, basically anything but actual climatologists or environmental scientists. Not always, but often. I find that interesting.
The MAJORITY of climate scientists agree that humans are contributing to warming. I'm going to go with that conclusion because it's better to be safe than sorry, and because I can see the proof with my own eyes.
Climate Myths Examined: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462
As for Mr. Gore and the IPCC winning the peace prize... good for them. Someone is standing up and shouting about this. Yes, I feel Mr. Gore is a bit of a phony in his personal life, but his message isn't. If I had the choice I would have recognized Canada's Dr. David Suzuki ( http://www.davidsuzuki.org/ ) for his work educating the public about all kinds of environmental issues... and he does so in a more science based rather than hollywood-dazzle kind of way. He recently toured across Canada giving talks and raising awareness in a very locally focused down to earth way and he's been doing this for DECADES. He deserves this prize as much if not more than Gore.
Either way, I'm glad environmental issues get a nod of recognition here.
Did the Nobel Prize comittee actually use this reasoning, or is this your post-hoc rationalization? Because not even environmentalists endorse the "resources are running out" argument. (Holdren said this in the Scientific American "experts respond to Lomborg")
What about the possibility that "making people believe that China/Indias emissions will destroy all low-lying areas, will provoke an extremely destructive war with them when they refuse to reduce emissions"?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Besides all technical inaccuracies on the movie, besides watching him drive by in his limousine and fly over Katrina in his private jet while he tells you to use a bicycle and public transportation (I hated that), besides he was vice president when the US was at war and besides the political bias that wraps it, his work is why we are all[*1] here talking about climate change. It rose awareness about a topic that concerns us all. It made the topic mainstream. So, although the "peace" word doesn't fit that exactly, I think it's the right thing. It doesn't matter WHO wont it (don't forget the IPCC), but what are the news talking about today.
/. crowd, I refer to everyone, from taxi drivers and the guy at the grocery store to politicians.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/
"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"
*1 - By all I refer not to the
Are you aware that you are replying to someone from India? WE don't HAVE NOTHING.
Yes, there is a middle class, but there is a huge impoverished class that constitutes the majority of Indians. Don't forget them! Maybe they are not in your caste, so let me remind you of what wealth is and isn't.
The per capita income in India is $800 a year. That's not even enough for a playstation 3 and a couple of games. By contrast, the official poverty line in the USA is around $10,000 a year for a single person, increasingly gradually with the size of the family. Most liberals would argue that this line is too low, and I'd be hard pressed to argue with them.
The average upper middle class family in the USA has of a few thousand square feet, two cars that are less than 7 years old, sometimes their own private swimming pool (35,000 gallons of fresh water), a few tv sets, digital cable, clothing that is usually not more than one or two years old, and usually eats some sort of dish consisting of either a variety of meats and imported vegetables often twice per day. For the most part, it is possible for an American to spend the vast majority of their time in an air conditioned building, either at home, or, at work. So, unless you are pulling down more than, I'd say, 30-40k as a minimum, have a big house, a couple of new cars, a few ipods (including a couple the kids broke), some video games, a few computers, in addition to all the stuff that I mentioned before, then you really don't have that much.
And, again, you ought to take a drive and visit the vast majority of your countrymen that do not even have barely enough food, let alone an air conditioned house.
This is my sig.
It's hardly a mansion. I've seen it. It's a house. It's also the headquarters for his entire organization. He uses it for entertaining and fundraising. He has $1000 a plate dinners to support democratic congressional candidates and that kind of thing.
Seriously, what is he supposed to do when he has private dinners for visiting world leaders? Rent the banquet room at the Holiday Inn?
He is what he is: a leader on the world stage. There is a degree of pageantry that comes with that job that can't be ignored.
To make things realy go, you need to make carbon penalties very large. New Jersey has decided to do away with its solar rebates and now plans to set penalties for utilities not having the required amount of solar power in their system at more than double the current $0.30 per kWh sold. People who buy solar power systems will be issued Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) according to their generation which they may sell to New Jersey utlities at a market price (around $0.20/kwh presently http://markets.flettexchange.com/njsrec units are $/MWh). Utilities are planning on making loans to help people install solar power which would be repaid in these SRECs. Because the penalty is so high, and the opportunity for those with solar power capability to profit is so large, it seems likely that New Jersey's Renewable Energy Standards for solar will be met with ease. Offsets can be traded voluntarily and such, but mandated fractions of renewable energy with effective enforcement penalties will be more sucessful I think.
--
Rent solar power for you home and save (unless you want NJSRECs): http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html
to them and STILL increased your pollution.
How fucked up is that?
This is not even correct. As you may have seen, Gore may have been more correct than you think. I've seen reports that if Greenland melts (which is happening much faster than expected), we really could have 7 meters of sea-level rise; about 22 feet.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20070908-21002600-bc-greenland-glacier.xml
(this one doesn't have those numbers, but you can see that this is apparently happening much more rapidly than thought)
His acceptance speech should be: "I'd like to thank George Bush for making me look like a total genius"
"And ofcourse the Starbucks coffee sipping, internet browsing macbook using hippies".
he'd have laws enstated that would be so draconian that it would keep those who are the best allies for conservation out.
How? The President doesn't enact laws.
I wish I had mod points.
This is a salient point. Here in Dallas, we have summers that top 115 degrees F (46C), with relative humidity of over 60%. For about five months from late April to mid September (sometimes October) simply standing outside for a length of time will kill you. That's why Texas state law requires any and all business establishments to provide water free of charge to any person requesting it.
Something else to remember about those carbon credits. When Rwanda sells you theirs, they can no longer use them to put up any electrical generation tech beyond solar, which is staggeringly expensive and very low output. As a result of this policy, the vast bulk of Africa is trapped in a pre-industrial state, with no way to climb out. Also remember that this money goes directly into the pockets of the dictatorial governments there, and not into the hands of the people.
You really don't get what's coming next do you?
Wars over water, for one thing.
Chaotic conditions provide perfect opportunities for extremists of both the left and right to seize power. The biggest danger we face is not from the direct effects of global warming but the political upheaval that will follow.
...since he invented global warming. ;)
laugh people...it's not the end of the world...ok, maybe it is...but laugh anyways
Perhaps you missed the last few sentences: During the last 1000 years, snow cover on Lake Baikal has been inferred from past diatom assemblages, and is closely linked to weakening of the North Atlantic Oscillation, allowing increasing intensity of the Siberian High to develop and during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the last 150 years, diatom species have been shown to be sensitive indicators of recent warming. However, impacts from future global warming will be complex, and are likely to impact not only on the balance between endemic and cosmopolitan diatoms throughout the lake, but on the balance between siliceous and non-siliceous algae, and sources of primary productivity. What I did not see is any reference to or debunking of human-generated carbon dioxide as a current forcing. That angle was helpfully added by the DailyTech writer you link from your journal entry.
The existense of a number of naturally-driven cycles is well known and well supported. But their existence does not supplant anthropogenic carbon as a forcing--rather, they interact with it. Natural cycles and carbon dioxide impacts are operating simultaneously, and understanding their interactions is one of the goals of computer modelling.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The truth is whether or not global warming is natural or man-made is a side topic. The fact is that we should be doing everything to reduce pollution that we can. We made great strides in reducing pollution from cars, and this same approach needs to be vigorously applied to industry. Do that and we will also reduce our green house gas emissions. The debate on the cause of global warming distracts from our need for cleaner air and water. The Indians and Chinese don't want to cut down their levels of pollution, and look at their rates of environmentally caused diseases.
_ Myth: The prize is awarded to recognize efforts for peace, human rights and democracy only after they have proven successful.
More often, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments in a process.
Read the rest of this very interesting article here.
And when I think about all the recent Nobel peace prize laureates, I can see that the above holds true. No one knew the 2005 winner, the Iranian Women and Children rights activist, Shirin Ebadi, before the Nobel prize was handed out to her (and I am saying this as an Iranian), but the prize did bring months of media attention and world focus to the issue (the issue of human rights in Iran).
--
Again, I think the Nobel prize committee wanted to send George Bush a message: "You are wreaking destruction and death; see how much better some other people are spending their energies." So this was as much an anti-war Nobel as it was a peace Nobel.
Much like the Dixie Chicks winning all those Grammies, this was a statement against Bush than for Gore.
Shouldn't he have been nominated for the prize in physics? Why did he win a prize in a political category? How does putting out a pseudo-scientific Hollywood blockbuster film help the situation in Darfur, or the tensions between Kurdish Iraq and Turkey, or the violence in the Gaza Strip? Oops, I'm sure that last one was taken care of by Yasser Arafat, when he won in 1994!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Neil Stephenson's book The Diamond Age had a great passage about hypocrisy, which unfortunately I don't have at hand. The one-sentence summary is that the Victorians should be admired because knew they were hypocritical but they tried to better themselves and their society anyway.
:-)
People fixate on the hypocrisy of Gore because it is an easy attack. But while you can tear a man down, if his message is right then it will survive and grow. People used to kill the messenger all the time if they didn't like the message. The cliched admonition against it reflects its ultimate impact--close to none. It's satisfying but a waste of time.
Or let's look at his co-recipient this way--each IPCC report is thousands of pages long. Just printing the new version every couple years fixes quite a bit of atmospheric carbon.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Has someone developed a photovoltaic solar panel that produces natural gas?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The only time I needed a car living there was when I was heading far from home, or when I got calls from friends at 2:30 in the morning asking me to come pick them up from a bar in the suburbs (yeah, I could bitch about that, but it got me laid so....) So yeah, it pisses me off that for the past 60 years government policy has heavily tilted toward suburbs. It's an article of religious fait: Suburbs are just morally superior. Far too many people believe that. Give me the choice to live in a $500,000 house in the suburbs, or a studio apartment in the city, and I'll pick the studio - no questions asked. The only way I would change my mind is if I could take the $500,000 house, sell it, and then move back to the city
No one is saying that the world is going to "end"
Really? .
http://www.iema.net/news/envnews?aid=4056
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn443.html
And so on . .
we like it here. you'll see if you make a MAJOR mistake there will be comments that says "please leave your geek membership card to reception on your way out".
high school is dead. this is internet.
Read radical news here
That just totally dodges the point, which was about more efficient cars. I suppose you have no reply to that, or you wouldn't have fled to a strawman argument.
If you contribute to carbon fixing then that offsets from the carbon you release, reducing the net product. By your argument maybe we should judge companies just by their revenue and ignore their expenses and investments?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
All the "research" I've seen on this has been nothing more than a poll. It's like using a "slashdot poll" to determine which is heavier, a cup of water or a cup of tomato juice. Nothing is proved by a poll, and you won't have the truth without actually weighing them. It's been mostly "bad science", and until they operate on this using actual science instead of religious panderings, I'm not going to be impressed by any of it. A lot of this "consensus" is from people who have been threatened with a loss of funds if they don't agree.
A "consenses" without any research behind it is nothing more than a poll. If you evangelize enough, you can get a consensus from a group of school girls that Pee-Wee Herman is really hot, especially if you promise them money for saying so. It still doesn't make it true.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Apparently you really can win even if you don't buy the magazines!
I bet he was really surprised when that Prize Patrol van pulled up
in front and they came to the door with all the balloons. Man,
that is exciting.
I'm gonna make sure I send in my entry next year. You gotta
enter to win!
Er, no, that doesn't follow from any argument I made.
My point is that instead of e.g. listing everything some committee decided is wasteful and banning it or otherwise ridiculing people who don't stop it; and instead of trying to discern which offset company is really deducting from my footprint, we should just, assuming the claims of carbon harms are too be taken seriously:
- Place a tax on carbon fuels at $X per ton of emission and let people decide how to adapt.
- Place a bounty of $Y per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere (i.e. that you can prove you removed, through some auditable transparent process), and let the most effecient organizations get these bounties.
But then, that's minimal inconvenience and maximum robustness so obviously it's no good.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
So you can say what you want about the current award participant, but you are dead wrong about the peace prize being in any way inferior to the other Nobel prizes.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Nomads & herders are ALWAYS in conflict with farmers. It's called 'civilization'.
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phunctor
Let's see: your first point is about Mr Gore allegedly redefining words. Funny I read several daily newspapers and closely follow this issue and I have not been struck by Mr Gore attempting to redefine words. Is it really that important? More important that the underlying issue of Global Climate Change? Seems to me you're quibbling. Your second point is merely about Bush and is showing your Republican leanings. So, you're an apologist for the Republicans? That's what's really important to you about this issue, that I may have defamed George Bush by implying that he did not win the presidency? Is that really your take away point from this? I am so bored with Republicans...
Why give a prize for something someone DID when you could give him a prize for something he MIGHT do?
In fact, let's just award the next Peace Prize to someone for something she WOULD HAVE done!
At that time, he was preaching that we would have cheap gas for a decade or more, while Gore was saying that Gas prices HAD to go up. At the time, the gas was something like 1.40/gal. By trying to paint a false picture, he was actively encouraging large gas guzzlers, and said so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A cup of CowboyNeal
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
So you think the Vikings are going to make a comeback because of warmer weather don't you? Well, let me just say this; the greatest anti-global warming force in the history of the world is assembling as we speak for the final showdown. Hail the Pirates!
...but there's this great section in Wikipedia on this:
"On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98),[65][66] which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.[67] The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
Maybe you should get facts straight before accusing him of anything. Looks like Gore was the only one in all of government who supported it.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Condemning hypocrisy over all other sins neatly optimizes the power of the media. I find media fondness for this meme unsurprising -- and correspondingly easier to discount.
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phunctor
7 meters of sea level rise? Have you ever poured a liquid in to a container? Notice how that liquid evens out throughout the whole container. The same will happen with the water from Greenland and Antarctica. The water from all that ice will spread out across all the oceans. There is a lot of water trapped in that ice now. However there is a lot more water in all the oceans already. And the article you linked to says the glaciers are moving faster. Nothing about a 7 meter rise in sea levels. And don't forget that the ice already floating in the water will not make the sea level rise anymore since it already displaces it's own weight.
If all the ice melts will the sea levels rise? Yes they will. Will they rise 7 meters? No way. 1-2 meters maybe. This is still bad news for all of the coastal cities and people whose homes are alone the coast. Most of the coastal cities are less then 3 meters above sea level.
1985: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War - "for spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare." Because that was so unclear, before? The Nobel committee clearly just wanted to jump in with a big "F-you Ronald Reagan" like everyone else in Europe.
1988: United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces - sure, because we can count all the places where they've been employed, that are now firmly at peace....
1990: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev - "for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community"...unbelieveable. This was the second of the "F.U.-USA" nobel prizes.
1994: Yasser Arafat? Har de har har.
2001: United Nations & Kofi Annan - "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world" bwahahahahaaha
2002: Jimmy Carter - for being the last US president impotent enough to satisfy the world community.
2005: International Atomic Energy Agency & Mohamed ElBaradei : Another direct "FU USA (Bush)" nobel prize. Nice job in India, Pakistan, NKorea, and Iran!
They've made some good choices over the decades, but in the last 20 years their penchant for political 'statement' and theatricality has made them mostly irrelevant.
-Styopa
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sorry, but I can't give Gore any kind of pass on technology when he was such a great proponent of the Clipper Chip, which would have been government controlled key escrow with the government literally holding the keys to communication!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Again showing the Prize goes to the loudest liberal decrying the largest liberal cause.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I'll ask my dentist. She's Korean.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I can't believe that this choice for the prize is anything but a political statement by the committee.
Hate to break it to you, but politics are exactly what the Nobel Peace Prize is all about.
According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
What's wrong with it is his folks basically campaigned for it. He's done good work but it's not Nobel Peach Prize work. I mean I've shown PowerPoint slides as well. In addition I've actually show global warming PowerPoint slides. I'm just not part of a politico machine that's campaigning for recognition from one of the historically most prestigious awards in the world.
In the end all it shows that the Nobel committee, despite protests to the contrary, is very much swayed but pop culture and public opinion. But we knew that based on Jimmy Carter and Arafat so why is everyone so surprised? It also shows that of the Nobel prizes the peace prize despite it's name is the one I'd least like to have as it means much less than the field specific awards. But again why the surprise, it's not like Gore is worse then Arafat, in fact I'm going out on a limb but I'd say he's a shade closer to what the peace prize is supposed to be about given the who blowing people up issue.
I don't know why China and India shouldn't bear so much of the burden of the Kyoto Protocol. Oh, hang on, perhaps because they are poor, third world countries perhaps.
WTF? China, perhaps you've heard of them? Spending countless billions hosting the Olympics next year?
Even India has a huge GDP, I don't think you can really get away with calling the nation a "third world" country.
By your standards what is Russia?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Scientists are whores, aye? Spread the doom-n-gloom (never mind if it's all made up) and you can make a bundle.
I'm tellin' ya guys, this is just another hoax. See also:
Killer Bees that will attack people on the streets as early as 1979
The coming Ice Age that will engulf NYC before the year 2000
The invisible Ozone Hole that'll burn off our skin
Killer Earthquakes, cats sleeping with dogs, it's all over.
There *is* a climate change going on. But CO2 (now called a 'pollutant' by the EPA) doesn't cause it, it corrects it.
There is no 'perfect' climate...how do we know the change won't be better?
These are the people who can't predict the weather past 3-5 days; how can they tell us in 20 years we'll be under sea water?
The media is sure in control of those who can't be bothered with the facts.
And in balance, recall the recpient of the first Nobel Peace Prize: Orville and Wilbur for the aeroplane. With it, wars would be impossible.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
It's disgraceful that your post was modded flamebait. It is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I haven't seen it from the "sky-is-falling" global warming camp. You're right about that.
To me, the Nobel committee does lose all credibility for this award to Al Gore, Arafat, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the Nobel committee and the UN are shams -- shells of organizations that were once prestigious.
It is very interesting to compare legacies and post-office work done by the past few presidents and VP's.
On the Democrat side we have Clinton, Gore, and Carter. Two Nobel Prizes there, and Clinton has been globablly recognized for his foundation work and even been suggested for high-ranking positions at the UN.
On the Republican side you have Reagen, Bush Sr, Bush Jr. Most Republicans just fade into obscurity after their terms are over. Okay, so Bush Sr did do some travel after the tsunami a few years ago, but he did that with Clinton as well.
So... where's the "cup of Cowboy Neal" option?
Seriously, how does cranking out a video about carbon emissions and yakking about global warming have anything to do with that? He shouldn't have gotten the award.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
He should have won for the best (only?) implementation of Apple's fine Keynote software. (keeping it in the tone of slashdot)
He needed the other half to buy carbon offsets for his private jet.
Environmentalism has become like a religion and carbon credits are the modern form of "indulgences". So keep a look out for the "Martin Luther" of environmentalism to come along soon.
You you approve of the above listed winners? Jackass.
Those are bad but not apocalyptic.
IAALS.
I will gladly agree with you that Clinton did lie about Monica Lewinsky. However, I find it absurd that you do not mention GW Bush's lies that ended up getting us into this train wreck of a war? [The peace prize went to Gore and so you bringing Clinton into this has as much relevance as me bringing in Bush/] Sir, your outrage is misguided. In the eyes of history--which will be written long after we are all dead--which lie do you think will seem more egregious?
A lie that caused embarrassment to everyone? [Clinton]
Or
A lie that caused the deaths of thousands of humans, both American and Iraqi?
I speak as someone who lives in Manhattan and travels by the World Trade Center site daily. Despite the deaths there, I find Bush's lies tremendously evil and counter productive. Notice I don't have a problem with Bush's war in Afganistan--that was justified. But Iraq? That was Bush finishing his Daddy's business. GW Bush will live in infamy for the rest of his life and beyond.
Actually, his work with his wife in saving my children from harmful song lyrics is by far his best work yet!
From the Nobel Peace Prize press release, I quote:
"Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They 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."
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/press.html
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
2005
MOHAMED ELBARADEI (Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency). He done such a good job covering for Iran.
2004
WANGARI MAATHAI. The Kenyan ecologist teaches that the AIDS virus is a biological agent deliberately created by the White Man.
2002
JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America.
Was given prize for undermining the foreign policy of his own country. Has vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world, and can be counted on to whitewash fake elections everywhere.
2001
UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA, and KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General.
Among other things, they respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest frauds in history -- Saddam's Oil for Palaces scam.
1994
YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority.
A cold-blooded murderer before and after receiving the award.
1992
RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. "Author" I, Rigoberta Menchu, which fraudulently claimed to be her auto-biography, but was actually communist propaganda fabricated by the wife of a noted French Communist.
1988
THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A.
Failed to prevent genocide in Rawanda. Committed rapes and sex abuse in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo. Has not brought peace anywhere.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Oh, okay, so they were claiming qualification based on poorly researched, confirmation-biased speculation. Thanks for verifying that.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Improving fraternity between nations, reducing military forces and promoting peace are ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Modern politics is nothing but idiots slinging mud at each other and has nothing to do with real solutions to problems. In the past, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to recognize people and groups who have made progress. By giving the prize to Gore and the IPCC, they are hoping that the committee's action IS the progress, in an area unrelated to the purported purpose of the prize to boot. Nothing but an attempt to give a black eye to those they disagree with. They want some action taken on global warming and are abusing their positions to attempt to force it.
Al Gore and the IPCC haven't done jackshit for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies or for the holding and promotion of peace congresses, and the Nobel Prize committee should be fucking ashamed of themselves for veering away from the achievement based prize selections of the past.
It's 2007, by the way - we know what would have happened if the Florida Supreme Court had prevailed in requiring another recount under 'disparate rules'. From Wikipedia:
(emphasis added) Worse yet, Bush won the 2004 election with the first popular majority since Ronald Reagan, and with a historically high number of votes as well.
I understand that you hate the guy - I'm not his biggest fan by any means either, though perhaps for different reasons - but you should at least respect the truth enough to avoid making such obviously incorrect and inflammatory claims.
. . .of meaningfulness of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maybe next year it'll go to Ahmedinejad or Kim Jong Il.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
5,000 tons of polution is 5,000 tons of polution, regardless of if it comes from 500 people or 5 people. It still does the same damage.
Per Capita is totally irrelvant, only absolute levels matter.
You obviously missed the part where global warming will lead to major international conflicts and wars if we don't do something about it. His work does have a major effect on future peace.
Sorry, but BS.
Yes, it's true that Al Gore wrote and sponsored the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 (aka "Information Superhighway Bill"), and I'll agree that it should be considered one of, perhaps the most important, highlights of his congressional career, but anything more is giving him too much credit.
First of all, the internet was inevitably growing with or without congressional funding. Tim Berniers Lee created HTML and the first web browser two years earlier. Email had been around and growing steadily in usage since 1966. TCP/IP, which is perhaps the most important element in the universality of the internet, was created in the 70's. All the information superhighway bill did was speed things up a little bit.
Speaking of which, what did the bill do? It set goals for federal use of the internet and provided funding for educational use and several development projects, most notably the Mosaic web browser. Applaudable, but in the grand scheme of things a footnote in internet history.
Lastly, this was hardly some revolutionary concept Gore came up with. It was based on a 1988 report to congress by a technology group chaired by one of the creators of ARPAnet.
However, if you want to argue that his contributions to the internet were more profound than his hypocritical fact-twisting on global warming, I whole-heartedly agree.
"However, I'd guess if you look around hard enough, you could find five, or maybe even six billion people around the world who live out Al Gore's message better than he does."
Given that at the end of "An Inconvenient Truth", they put up on the screen that you can reduce your carbon output to 0, I would guess that there are not any people who live by Al Gores message. Although, I do look forward to Al Gore demonstrating his technique for this.
This just proves that he would have been a great president, to bad that slimy, good for nothing got away with literally stealing it 7 years ago.
It seems that it is you who doesn't know what the Nobel Peace Prize stands for. So please read this link about the misconceptions people have. The price is there to award, and especially: raise awareness of a person (and his cause/message) who devoted time and energy into promoting a more peaceful world. They are not awarded for actually attaining peace - just have a look at the Israel-Palestinian conflict: Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin got the price in part for their efforts but in particular as an encouragement by the (neutral) panel to signify they were going in the right direction and people should follow that spirit. Unfortunately certain people didn't and the 1994 price, as of now, failed its true purpose.
So, after seeing what the price really stands for (granted, the name might be a bit misleading), it isn't really that strange that Al Gore got it this time around.
What exactly is wrong with this decision?
Really there was no contest. He was up against Irena Sendler who saved 2500 Jewish children from being killed in the holocaust. What's saving 2500 children when you can Save the World!
www.joshferguson.org
You have me convinced regarding the need for air conditioning in some climates. However, can someone explain to me why-oh-why so many people and businesses run their air conditioning as cold as they do? I routinely go to work or restaurants that are freezing me out to the point where it's more comfortable to be a little warm outside without the aritificial freezing temps.
Anything below 75 degrees Fahrenheit is flippin' overkill.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Oh, but it is highly relevant if you want to do something more practical than argue about who is to blame.
The reason we look at per capita pollution is because we are not so unrealistic as to believe that people can avoid polluting altogether. Therefore it is safe to say that if you have a case of 5 people generating 5000 pounds of pollution on one hand, and 500 hundred people generating the same net pollution on the other, your greatest opportunity for reductions are with the five people. It may not be possible to achieve any reduction from the 10 lb per capita in the latter case, but it is at least physically possible to reduce the pollution in the former case by as much as 4,550 lb.
The question is whether you can do so without reducing the five people to the state of misery currently experienced by the 500. On the other hand, the 500 people might not be able to survive at all, so if those were your only choices, sure, I'd send five people to huts rather than 500 to their grave.
The unreality of this discussion is it ignores the power of wealth. Where there is wealth, ingenuity goes to serve it. This means that wealthy people have choices, and their choices matter. If the five people want to reduce their pollution, they either have or soon will have alternatives that are nearly good (or maybe better) than what they are using now, but generate less waste.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sorry, not quite seeing how the presence of nine mistakes suddenly means man-made global warming isn't true or Al Gore doesn't deserve a prize for bringing it into mainstream policy debate.
That article in The Register is the bunk. The country-bumpkin judge who allowed a truck driver to prevent his kid's school from showing An Inconvenient Truth found NINE (9) inaccuracies in a mass-market movie that contained literally thousands of assertions of scientific fact. How many inaccuracies do you think you'd find in any given National Geographic special or any other educational film shown in a school?
The desperation of the right-wing to "debunk" the fact that a century of industrial and transportation pollution is seriously fucking up our environment is sort of sad.
It's all of a piece with the need to "debunk" evolution, and attack science generally. I guess, when you have a world-view that pretty much denies reality, you can't let things like facts take hold in the minds of your "base". So, you pretend that everything in the news is phony, all science is suspect, government is bad, etc, etc. It's like the Right is trying to home school the entire nation so we don't get our minds all corrupted by reality. It also explains why religious fundamentalists tend to lean to the Right. The more we learn about our universe, the harder it is to swallow fairy tales.
So, when the news from the War in Iraq is bad, it's easier to say "the news is all wrong" instead of admitting a fuck-up. When soldiers start coming home saying that things are going badly in Iraq, it's easier to say they are "phony soldiers" than to say maybe things really aren't going well. When polls say most Americans want some form of Socialized Medicine, it's easier to say "the polls are lying" than to try to fix a complicated problem. When scientists say that the pollution human society has been dumping into the world is messing things up, it's easier to say "the scientists are lying" than for a president to tell his corporate bosses they're going to have to stop dumping sulfur in the atmosphere and mercury in the water.
The good news is that the bullshit doesn't seem to be holding up as well as it did a few years ago. Even the regular folks in flyover America who work for a living are starting to realize that the stuff we're being sold is starting to smell really really bad. And more and more, the pinheads who peddle nonsense are hollering into an echo chamber. Notice how even the most dependable right-wing trolls are starting to run out of gas, and their little sniffing comments just don't have the zing they used to? Hell, you go over to little green footballs or free republic and you'd think there was ambien in their cheetohs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That same page you link to has an interesting graph. Seems to correlate to global warming nicely. You should look up some solar radiation studies, you'd be surprised how well the data correlates.
Look at the prize winners in other fields. There is no question as to their contribution to that specific discipline. Here, however, there is a very tenuous connection. They say that global warming will cause wars, and thus by preventing it will prevent wars. That relies off of a whole bunch of assumptions:
1) That global warming is human caused. I'm not interested in debating this, but realise that it is an assumption.
2) That Gore/the IPCC's proposals will cause it to be stopped. Just because they are proposing things limiting CO2 doesn't mean it'll be enough to affect global warming. There are a good number of alarmist types out there who say we are way past the critical point and we'd have to shut down like 90% of human industry to stop it, something that Gore fell well short of advocating.
3) That anything can be done. May be that no matter what we do we just aren't capable of preventing it.
4) That global warming will lead to bad things. Again this is an assumption, there are plenty of arguments to how a warmer globe will lead to more abundance, nor more scarcity.
5) That wars wouldn't break out anyhow in the same regions for different reasons. Sadly enough, the "issues" behind a war often aren't, they are simply an excuse for the behaviour, not the actual reason behind it.
So only if that's all true, if humans are causing global warming, if we can stop it with change, if what Gore is proposing is the required change, if that change will prevent scarcity and preventing scarcity will prevent wars, is his work actually peace related. Even if that's all true, it's still pretty tenuous. I mean someone might make an amazing discovery in physics that gives us nearly limitless energy, that allows for the improving lives everywhere. Still, that's be a prize for Physics, not Peace, even if we thought the ultimate result would be less war because of more abundance.
As such I'd say it is real tenuous to say he's helping peace. Sounds like your man is a much better candidate. It is entirely possible that Gore/IPCC's work is more important in the scheme of humanity, but that doesn't matter. This is an award for the work in peace, and Martti Ahtisaari seems to have done that, whereas Gore's work lies along another path.
a cup of ... Breasts!
My blog
A lot of people in Europe do have AC you know. Myself included. That probably comes as a shock to you because being a typical American you think we are a bunch of ass backwards imbeciles who lack modern facilities like indoor toilets. We even have real AC in our cars and not just windows that open when you turn the handle
You pompous American arsehole.
Freedom of speech at it's finest. Idiots taking advantage of a Nobel Peace Prize announcement to knock Clinton and Bush. Not sure I see the connection, but such is Slashdot's finest.
As the climate changes, somewhere upwards of a billion coastal dwellers will be displaced. If melting arctic ice shuts down the gulf stream, the temperature decrease could reduce the productivity of farmland in Europe and North America by 75% or more.
Changes in the balance of resources can trigger the biggest wars of them all. How many wars has the world already fought over oil, food, water, or salt? (yes, salt, look it up).
Add to that the fact that the world will know in advance who is primarily responsible for the CO2 emissions that f*cked up their countries (1st world nations, most notably the US), and will be looking for someone to blame. If you think the world hates the US now, just wait until many great cities are underwater and half a billion have died, and they can point to a single nation for having emitted 40% of world's historical output of greenhouse gasses and having refused every treaty to try to reduce them. Al Qaeda will have a lot of friends.
Climate change may not be causing wars *now*, but many people believe it will likely lead to the worst worldwide wars in history. The biggest difference one can make to any war is to prevent it in the first place, and Gore is working as hard on that front as anyone is. He absolutely deserves the peace prize.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
"it" being the problem.
Developing countries like China and India haven't had an enormous bonfire of fossil fuels over the last two centuries. It's the developed world that did that. So the current increase in CO2 is not the fault of china or india, it's the 'fault' of the west.
And please, can we stop pretending that what we do with our individual homes is the problem? The problem is transportation and industry, especially manufacturing. Talking about Gore's home is like standing in a burning building and blowing out a candle.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
1-2 meter? where do you have those numbers from? Did ya just pull em out of your arse? IF things go so badly that the ice on Greenland and Antarctica melts, see level vill rice about 68 meters, 61 from Antarctica and 7 from Greenland.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385475/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4720536.stm
Mind you, this is what you would have found had you bothered to ask google
I doubt any scientist will say the question is what happens to the sea lvl if the ice on Greenland and Antarctica melts, but rather IF it will melt and if the rice we now see in temperature is man made.
www.aleo.no
hmm run for president.
fail.
make a sensationalist scaremongering documentary full of inaccuracies
fail.
win oscar and nobel peace prize!
I thought the nobel peace prize was for people that help eliminate human suffering. All Al Gore did was make a bullshit politicamentary and lose an election.
-AC
Actually, I don't mind being mod'd down considering some of the high quality responses. My discouragement about the Nobel committee comes from their opinion of the low-level/low-quality analysis and thought behind the claims of global warming. It is a bandwagon prize, and these recipients aren't worthy of the award, mostly because the evidence isn't sufficient to support the claims. If enoough time had pased to prove or disprove these claims of global warming, including the cause-effect relationships, I wouldn't be so discouraged.
/. posters of diminished intellectual ability, and, as one post states, the "true believers" avoid actual discussion and are not worth the bandwidth. You can't discuss horsepower ideas with flypower minds. On the other hand, some of the posts are insightful and contain real gems of wisdom. It's a pity we have to wade through so much crap to find them. This is the type of discussion Protege-OWL was designed for.
I think intellecual and scientific integrity requires that we hold conclusions in abeyance until there is sufficient proof to support the claims. I don't need to have an opinion if there is not enough information to draw a conclusion, and I reserve the right to change my opinions in the light of further evidence.
As for being labled flamebait: The original post was controversial and lacked substance. Obviously, there are a large number of
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
In Soviet Russia, the cars make you more fuel efficient.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
It's even worse than that, he actually find 9 inaccuracies, he found 9 instances where there wasn't explicit proof that the comment was true. If you look at the issues it's a case of "there's not enough evidence to prove this yet", "while the sea level will rise to that level, it will probably take longer than indicated", and other such comments. I think that puts an Inconvenient Truth as a substancially higher credibility rate than an Encyclopedia, which we should all remember from the Wikipedi vs Britanica articles.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The melting of the Laurentide ice sheet over North America at the end of the last ice age produced a 20 meter rise in sea level over roughly 500 years. Granted, it was larger than Greenland, but definitely it's on par with Antarctica. The volume of ice contained in Antarctica is 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. Spread that out over the ocean surface area of the world (362 million sq km) and you get about 80 meters before you account for the fact that ocean surface area increases as sea level goes up. Greenland's ice sheet is roughly 1/10th that of Antarctica (and is firmly on land), I'll let you do that math.
Actually, not quite true. The floating ice has a lower salinity than the ocean, meaning even in liquid form it's less dense. So it does contribute, just not as much as melting a block of ice that's firmly on land.
(1) Gore has been campaigning for decades on the subject. He didn't win the Nobel for An Inconvenient Truth.
(2) There is a direct and (one would think, but perhaps not) obvious connection here: global climate change --> scarce resources --> wars.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
"Al Gore's one message is that CO2 drives climate change. ALL scientific evidence points to this being false -- in fact, not even plausible."
are you like the climate change version of a creationist or ufo cultist?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Who would have thought that not being president in 2000 would lead him to get an Academy Award, an Oscar and now the Nobel Prize. I think I would rather win all of these awards than be president anyways with all of the stuff that is going on now. I think Al Gore is correct about global warming and I hate to scratch biblical or poetic, what if we win the war on terrorist but destroy the entire world to environmental disaster what would we have gain? Again, congratulations to Al Gore and his colleagues for promoting peace in the world.
"The pillar supports the roof." Am I anthropomorphizing the pillar?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
There's two seasons in Dallas, Summer and August.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Only goons like you will be living in mud huts.
The rest of us will be living it up in our new (or retrofitted) environmentally friendly, off-the-grid homes. We'll be driving electric cars, and loving every minute of it. Technology is a wonderful thing, eh?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
No you don't. You have cars that use diesel, a higher BTU form of fuel that gives off laughing gas as a by product. We reserve that type of gas for trucks. If my car used diesel it'd get more miles per gallon as well and waste more heat-energy per second as yours does sitting at a stop-light or in a traffic jam.
And why do volkswagens have so many "common" problems that are so god damn expensive to fix?
Interesting things happen with the scores on this very topic. While parts of Gore's film are definitely lacking scientific background, and emotional manipulations are used extensively and intentionally, there is still a core truth inside. Watching the conversation here I see a tendency to forgetting that while we are picking the questionable parts of Gore's work. Is this the thing we call "critical intelligence"? As a true elite we should give an example here on how to discuss controversal theories properly - for the sake of everybody. So many other Slashdot discussions have been great pieces of information and inspiration, even for people actually working on the stuff discussed. Let's make this one the same quality. Greetings, Chris
"An operating system must operate."
Yes, if only these knuckleheads were as willing to debunk the claims of government leaders like Bush and Cheney as they were to challenge the claims of Al Gore or Michael Moore. It's pretty obvious who's got the better track record, but it doesn't stop them from swallowing the most blatant lies and challenging the clearest truths.
Well, they don't call them the conservative "base" for nothing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, I couchsurfed through Europe recently, and exactly zero of the houses/apartments/hotels I stayed in had AC. Bordeaux can be a bitch in the summer because open windows == mosquitoes, closed windows == too hot to sleep well. Not even the Louve had AC (as far as I could tell).
The general excuse for this lack of what Americas view as a common necessity was that it is "a waste of energy." I'm guessing that it has more to do with a lack of money than environmentalism, since Europeans make half as much money as Americans and pay more in taxes.
It is good to know that some places in Europe have AC. I don't know where you live but I hope you put it in your nursing homes, too.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
- not science.
There's no doubt the climate is changing, is it man made change? That debate is NOT settled.
Retreating glaciers in Europe have uncovered mines used by Romans 2000 years ago.
The Nobel prize now has about as much meaning to me as UN Security Council resolutions.
Enjoy your kool-aid.
All the complaining at /. reminds of a funny story:
Last semester there was a debate at my school between a resident climatologist and some national "Global-Warming-doesn't-exist" guy. The climatologist cited lots of numbers; studies; and published, peer-reviewed articles. The anti-climate-change guy just attacked Al Gore over and over again.
Finally, the climatologist said, "Al Gore isn't here, isn't coming, and isn't relevant. Do you have any argument that doesn't include him?" He didn't.
There are legitimate reasons not to support the carbon emission standards and other environmental initiatives. Unfortunately, the best that side can muster is, "Al Gore is a loser!" And that argument's not going to change anyone's mind.
As someone with poor circulation, I've ended up having to immediately walk back out of places after I walk into them in August and they'd running the temperature at what I swear has to be 62 degrees. I cannot handle a 30 degree change in temperature like that in shorts. My system appears to have a hot mode and a cold mode, but does not switch quickly between them, so after about two minutes in such a place I'd be turning blue. (I am not joking. My fingers would actually change color.)
And, no, I can't wear pants and long sleeves, I'd overheat walking around outside.
It's not as bad in the winter going the other way around. The lack of humidity inside helps, plus clothing insulates from the sudden change more. (Remember, insulation works both ways.) And it's often possible to take jackets off inside (I only wear short-sleeves, even in winter.), whereas walking around outside with a jacket draped over your arm while wearing shorts in August tends to strike people a little odd, and it's even odder when you walk inside and put it on.
Granted, I'm an anomaly, but I wonder how many old people have exactly the same problem?
Oh, and incidentally, all climates, except maybe Greenland, need air conditioning. Sure, they don't need it 99.99% of the time. And then one day out of every four years they do need it, and a non-insignificant amount of the population dies from the heat.
I was just talking to someone in New York about this a while ago. They were making fun of someone who had a window air conditioner, and I asserted that people in New York should at least have one, even if they didn't bother to set it up, and they laughed at me. Two week later? Heat wave, a dozen people died.
Having it!=using it. Anyone somewhere the temperature has ever reached over 80 degrees for more than a day needs the ability to run AC, even if it's a window AC unit sitting in the box in the closet. (No, you can't buy one when the heat wave happens, it doesn't work that way.)
The same thing applies to heaters, but almost everyone in the US has some means of generating heat in their house. Like their oven. The people who die in cold snaps are people who've had their gas or electricity cut off.
However, even here in Georgia, something like 90% of the air-conditioning use could be cut in half with some basic sanity in the process. A movie theater has people sitting in close proximity to each other for hours, and is running hot projectors. (Which is why they were the first place an entire generation first saw AC.) Blockbuster, OTOH, does not, and could keep the temperature at 80, as long as they kept it circulating and dehumidified, without anyone complaining.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
What the fuck? Theodore Roosevelt? That was 100 years ago.
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
What the hell. What WOULD make you happy. The man has basically devoted his life for the past seven years to this problem. If he has introduced some inaccuracies in his movie--so what. The basic science and overall point is not in dispute. The vast majority of what he said in that movie was accurate and meaningful. And, if you read a daily newspaper you might have noticed that climate scientists have been surprised at the speed of the disintegration of the arctic, Greenland [as of 13 days ago, in fact] and antarctica.
What would you expect him to do? The point is not that he's a scientist doing original research--he's not and never claimed to be. The point is not the state and condition of climate science. The point is that Gore used his celebrity and powers of persuasion to raise the visiblity of this issue. You said:
"He also trades in certain mistruths (eg water levels rising) that lose all respect."
He's not teaching a graduate-level class in climate science, dude. He's trying to explain to Joe Sixpack why it's the concensus of the climate science community that we have a problem and that humans are a cause of it. I just find it amazing how people spend their energy whining about niggling issues that are not relevant. Where is your sense of proportion? Do you think that the generally insignificant inaccuracies in the movie proportionally outweigh the benefits of his message? If you say we lose respect--in whose eyes? The GOP? Who the fuck cares what they think? They never cared a damn about the environment--not ever. They just care about staying rich. If you think Gore is the problem--you're a fool.
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
Are we at war with our climate? We seem to get what we want for the most part. Green house gases? Not our problem burn that s***. It is the classic sheep hearder problem. You win by having the most sheep you can, you lose because everyone tries to do that and there isn't enough food.
No one serious is saying rip out your grandma's air conditioner. They are saying: "Lets keep our houses at 80F instead of 72F during that 115F heat wave in the summer." Or more importantly, lets have our local BigBoxMart run their air conditioner at 80F. The whole "making the other side out to be the extremists" red herring is really counter-productive to intelligent discussion about a problem.
I hope he lives long enough to see them take it back.
He's full of shit, and he jumped on the bandwagon just to keep his name in lights. He hasn't raised awareness of the issue, rather he has injected fallacious arguments into the feeble minds of the general population. Now the hard part is to change their minds to reflect the real truth. ie. Are they really suggesting that we try to halt climate change ?
Think about it before you flame.
Most of the cars you guys send over here don't get very impressive gas mileage and they break all the time. Anyone who is interested in good gas mileage is freely able to buy a Japanese econo-car here.
Well, there are probably a few reasons.
Bugs. They tend to like warm, humid areas. Keeping the temperature down lowers both of those values. It's probably not a conscious decision to avoid bugs, but rather a general feeling of greater comfort when they're not around.
Personal temperature. Everyone does not enjoy the same temperature, so you have to pick a temperature that's good for as many people as possible. The preferred temperature depends on many things. For instance, your restaurant contains you, a person who is sitting down, relaxing, and generally not very active as well as the server, a person who is active carrying things around, and must travel between the dining room and the possibly quite hot kitchen. They're going to prefer lower temperatures than their customers.
Fast food "restaurants" don't actually want you to stick around, so they'll make it just a little bit uncomfortable to stay after you're done eating.
There are also physical reasons for the temperature: the cooling system may have a thermostat located in an inappropriate location, it may be inappropriately sized, it may have a poor temperature control model which varies wildly.
And the most important factor in choosing a temperature for a location in which a lot of people of disparate heating (Personally, I'm most comfortable at 69-71F unless I'm really sedentary, in which case I'll go as high as 74-76F):
There is no physical limit to the number of sweaters you can put on. You cannot take off more clothes than all of them. In some social situations, you can't even take off as much as that.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The judge did not say all those assertions were "unfounded."
His ruling referred to items that were in dispute as "errors" (notice the quotes).
...He was talking about "errors" that were alleged by the plaintiff, and thus, in dispute in his courtroom.
For example, look at this sentence, which I just made-up:
In the interest of a fair and informed debate in the classroom, these "errors" may require a contradictory argument in the classroom.
An 'error' is not the same thing as an error
...The Nobel Prize for alchemy has also been awarded to Al Gore, for transmuting bullshit into gold.
The skeptics are the "doom and gloom" crowd. The optimists are the ones saying it isn't actually so bad.
You don't like the optimists.
What sort of hotels were you staying in that didn't have AC? It's largely standard across most of Europe (hell, I've stayed in Travel Inns in the north of England which have had it, despite it probably never, ever being necessary). Considering your example of Bordeaux, a quick Expedia search yields about 60 hotels, more than two thirds of which have air conditioning. If you're staying in the cheapest hotels, maybe you should move your own budget up a notch and give those poor poverty-stricken Europeans some of your big American tourist capital.
Al Gore has done as much to Climate Change awareness as much as Richard Gere has to AIDS awareness in India! Al Gore's message is practically for idiots who have no idea about global warming. Even in that category, I think Discovery Channel, National Geographic etc seem to have done much more. Even the IPCC is a joke. You get Nobel for publishing reports which every scientist already agrees? I thought IPCC was a farce put on by governments to keep on talking and not doing anything that actually matters.
You have absolutely no idea who he was up against, as the Nobel Committee doesn't make deliberations or nominations public.
Yes, sometimes people nominate people and tell everyone, and the Committees actually ask for nominations, but there is actually no official set of people that can 'nominate' people...any fool can do it. All you have to do is write them and suggest a person. They run the thousand or so names through a filtering to get only a few dozen.
The idea that the contest this year was between Irena Sendler and Al Gore is just idiotic. Nobel Prizes do not work that way. It's not an Emmy. All we know is that possibly the Polish legislature nominated her. We have no idea if she even made the short list.
And I will note that Nobel Peace Prices are supposed to be awarded for 'work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses'. Nobel Peace Prizes are not awarded for saving children, no matter how unfair that seems. You want a Nobel Prize for saving children's lives, try for the one in Medicine.
In addition, Nobel Peace Prizes are usually immediate. You don't get one 60 years after your actions. That's not a rule, that's just generally how they work. Literature tends to go for lifetime awards, the science awards waits until things have settled down and everyone knows they're right, but peace prizes tend to happen within five years at most, and normally within 18 months. They don't happen 60 years later.
And even if she was qualified, and prizes were being awarded now for actions during WWII, the Nobel Committee has had 60 years to reward her, so pretending that this year it's horrible she got denied it is idiotic. You want to get upset about a specific person getting it instead of her, get upset they awarded the 1973 one to that war criminal Kissinger instead of her. (A good reason Peace Prizes shouldn't be immediate.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm so confused.
While not very common today, war over resources have been common in history, and that is what they are warning about. Not to mention the destabilizing effect vast numbers of migrants have on poor nations.
Hehe. Not very common today. Oh, man you should do standup. :)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It not only was an excellent choice, it's what he's supposed to do with it. Winners are supposed to take the prize money and use it to further their work. That is the point of the prize money.
It's not to give 'to' charity, as some of the people trying to imply the money is for and that this isn't a 'real' charity. The money is charity, for their work.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This is a salient point. Here in Dallas, we have summers that top 115 degrees F (46C), with relative humidity of over 60%. For about five months from late April to mid September (sometimes October) simply standing outside for a length of time will kill you. Yep I guess until 25 years ago no one lived in Dallas because everyone in Dallas dies during the summer!
I took his comment to mean that he did understand the whole thing, but still can't thinking of the statement and making the parody of a joke. I.e., he's laughing at those who think that Al Gore said he invented the internet and is not actually one of them himself. At least, that's how I interpret his statement.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Please don't lump those two together. Michael Moore's movies do tend to have a fair bit of misrepresentation in them. Perhaps not as much as a typical Bush/Cheney speech, but still...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Setting aside the question of whether humans cause Global Climate Change [which I accept], we cannot fall for the delusion that this would be good for us.
Why? Okay, around the world plants and animals have evolved to match their environment. Plants are located in the spots where they are because--overall--the climate at that location is appropriate for that plant or that animal. So, if we alter the climate on any timescale beyond a few millenia, all those plants and animals are suddenly not suited for the climate where they live. They die then. Have you ever heard of a thing called a Tree lie on a mountain? Well, that means the point at which trees are suited to their environemtn. The tree line is that place where suddenly the prevailing environment crosses a line where it no longer allows the trees. If we change the climate quickly--all those animals and plants and their evolutionary adaptations are screwed--dead.
Now, if you're someone who doesn't give a damn about the animals or the plants--fine. You of course won't mind the awakened tropical diseases and the insects that will flourish. That means mosquitos. Sound like a lot of fun?
In short, global warming will not be a benefit to anybody. The introduction of greater amounts of energy into the system is expected to make for more severe weather. Now, we were fortunate that hurricanes did not hit the US last year. Well, maybe the prevailing hurricanes would--for the sake of argument--no longer strike Florida, Louisiana or Texas. What, then, if they move North? Say to South Carolina. I'm just using that as a hypothetical example.
The overall point is that nobody should be foolish enough to think that global climate change somehow has an upside. It does not.
Everything you mentioned regarding the low AC temperatures are plausible explanations. However, I think you're missing one the biggest reasons why so many people in the US prefer the temperatures as low as they do.. the obesity epidemic. Just as I can always put on more layers of clothing, there's more than a few people out there who can just lose some weight. And probably should for various reasons.
No offense, but I can't stand the whole, "just put on more clothing if you're cold" thing. I live in upstate New York. So until the time I grow a brain and move to a more temperate climate I have to deal with bundling up way longer than I'd like to throughout the year. Psychologically, it's a bummer. In the deepest parts of winter you start getting fantasies of being able to just walk outside without worrying about offsetting the cold by hiding from the outside world with many layers of clothes. Just walking out wearing shorts and a T-shirt and feeling comfortable. Ahhhhhhhh... Then when it finally comes around to the time, I have to shiver in a restaurant, supermarket, whatever because some blobboids around me can't conceive of a life without daily consumption of soda/pop. (And that diet shit does *not* count). And now *I* have to bundle up again because of their deficiencies? I don't think so.
Sorry to vent. Oh, and no comment on how high I have the heat during the winter.
Happy people make bad consumers.
So I shouldn't bother with the florescent lights or turning down the thermostat if I can afford it? Or does that personal exemption only apply to Al?
I thought the point was we all have to do our part.
878659 - yep its prime.
That's the rub exactly. And my new position as well on my future Nobel Prize.
Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize.
Supreme Court to seize it and award it to George W. Bush.
You know, when I first read about this I thought it was a joke.
I still cannot believe it.
It is ridiculous, really.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If we want to restrict the emissions of carbon, we need to put a price on it. Period. The price need not be onerous. Say that we went the route of taxing carbon emissions. The tax could be small in the beginning, but there would be a clear promise that the tax would rise in the future (along with a corresponding decrease in income tax). It is the expectation of a higher future price that will cause individuals to buy more efficient cars and houses. If they invest in an efficient car, and in devices to make household heating more efficient, then they will not pay the higher tax rate in the future, because their emissions will have fallen.
If you knew that gasoline prices would rise significantly in the future, would you buy a 10mpg suv? Would you buy a huge suburban house 50 miles from your workplace if you knew that the price of daily commuting would double in 10 years? If you knew heating costs would rise significantly in the future, wouldn't you want to put forth the effort to build an efficient home? Ground-source geothermal heating systems cost $10000 to $20000, and can save 30% or more in heating/cooling costs. Having a tightly sealed/well insulated home with an outside air heat exchanger can also save huge amounts too. In the grand scheme of things, the investments needed to reduce individual carbon emissions are not huge. All we need are the economic incentives to cause such products to become mainstream.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
What a farce! I haven't been paying attention in the past, so someone please tell me when the Nobel Peace Prize plummeted to the status of being worth __less__ than a bucket of s(h|p)it. This is an outright embarrassment!
Sorry, sir, but the Khasi people of India put two and two together about what global warming has to do with peace, and gave Al Gore an award earlier this year.
I love the way that, especially in Europe, people who live in moderate climates suggest that nobody should be using air conditioning. I would love to see you move to a hot, humid climate, and watch you in pathetic misery as you drown in your own sweat.
You dumb bastard, you've got it the wrong way round. The only reason you do live there is because of AC. Florida was a shitty swamp populated by nothing more than alligators, mosquitoes and a few crazy fishermen before AC became easy and cheap.
And you got modded insightful?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Perhaps we could use a new "Not fucking up the world" Nobel Prize, because personally, as much as I do respect Al's work, it doesn't really fall into the peace catagory.
Actually, the reverse is kind of true. A more inhospitible world = a world that is unable to carry as large a population as our world today does = less people to bicker and fuck shit up with each other = less wars = more peace.
Unless, of course, there was some overarching and immediate threat that applied equally to every human being to pull us all together such as....oh I dunno, the environment getting well fucked?
Oh nevermind...that didn't work...
that on one hand, we have Al Gore, elected president by the people of the USA but didn't become it somehow whom which is consumed in his free time to fight climate change, is now a Nobel Peace Prize winner and another on the other, we have Dubya, who was not elected president but somehow became president anyway, whom which is consumed in his free time to fight brush at his Texas ranch, now probably a war criminal.
bleah.
"So I shouldn't bother with the florescent lights or turning down the thermostat if I can afford it? Or does that personal exemption only apply to Al?
I thought the point was we all have to do our part."
Well, as much as that makes for a "bon mot", it doesn't make for much of an argument.
No, it's not that you shouldn't bother, or that Gore gets an exemption, (although I've read some allegations that Gore has since cleaned up his act by installing solar panels and buying from more-expensive-but-cleaner sources of electricity, like wind power. No idea if that's true, just food for thought...) it's that even if Gore lives in a 20,000 square foot mansion, and commutes to work by helicopter, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to things like coal fired power plants. The actions of one person compared to the actions of millions are just not that significant.
So given those of us who would like to agitate for change have finite time and other resources, should we concern ourselves with Al Gore's house or are there bigger fish to fry?
The only reason Al Gore's house is worth mentioning is if you accept the premise (very common these days, even though it's grade A bullshit) that one can only speak out on a particular issue if your own personal life is in some sort of 'state of grace' regarding the issue in question.
Which, incidentally, is a great way to silence debate and preserve the status quo.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Amusing to see the ranting against Al Gore. We all know he won in 2000, not just nationally, but even in Florida. At least we know it if we believe "the will of the voters" is supposed to count.
In a sense it doesn't matter. Reality ultimately prevails. The reality delivered by Dubya Bush is miserable failure.
By the way, I don't hate Dubya. I just love America and hate to see it harmed. Dubya is just grist for the historians' mills now--and his record of miserable failures will hopefully never be surpassed.
Regarding the actual ruler of America, the Dick Cheney just wants to die with the most toys. I hope he gets his wish--and as soon as possible.
Oh yeah. A joke. There should be a "poor joke" icon for this kind of post. Spam is Al Gore's fault. As a Senator, he was too good at getting money for them while they were developing the Internet. He kept telling them not to worry about the money, and he kept it flowing--and that's why SMTP has the built-in fantasy that email is "free". No such thing as free in a real economy. (Free is only for such things as ideas, but that's too tangential here.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Quote article: The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it wanted to bring into sharper focus the "increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" posed by climate change. What the hell is so difficult to understand here? If climate changes cause Earth to only support 4 billion humans, - then 2 billion people are going to die old-fashioned blood and violence WAR.
You can argue wether climate change is real or caused by humans. But climate change has everything to do with war. Any significant decrease in this planet's ability to sustain the current population is: 100% guarenteed war. People do not roll over and die to make room for others.
I lost my sig.
I'm all for air conditioning in these areas -- but do you really have to turn them down to 18 C (whatever that is in Fahrenheit)? This insistance on freezing, non-moderate temperatures made my stays in the US sometimes a pain in the back and caused a horrible cold.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
"Environmentalism has become like a religion and carbon credits are the modern form of "indulgences"."
/. Seeing that the "secular" western Europe is the stronghold for environmentalism, it shows that we keep on inventing new religions if we didn't have one (or gave up old ones).
I think many begun to see this, but I don't see it expressed it as plainly here in
Al Gore is responsible for the biggest flame war on the internet (which he invented!)
I'm not really comparing Moore to other documentaries, I'm really comparing recent Moore to Moore-classic (and An Inconvenient Truth). Each of Moore's documentaries seems to play a little looser with the facts than the previous one (although I haven't watched Sicko). I really liked Roger & Me and have nothing but praise for it. Bowling for Columbine took a few liberties but might not be worse than the "average documentary". Fahrenheit 9/11 bothered me with the liberties it took. I don't frequent Michael Moore "fact-check" sites, so I don't know what they're saying—I just know the things that struck me as wrong, which I then compared to what I found out through research to be, in fact, wrong. (It's been a while since I've watched it, so I could only give you a limited list if you're really interested.)
As for the seriousness of his mistakes as compared to Bush's mistakes, I agree completely. Moore's responsibility to truth is not as grave as Bush's. That said, his mistakes do undermine the cause he's trying to support, and, as such, he should try to remain ever vigilant.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Don't pretend that your armchair analysis is balanced or reasonable. "to me it's clear there's NOT scientific consensus on the _cause_ of global warming or what's going to happen 50 years from now" The IPCC report is the consensus:
"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."
Footnotes on page 4 of the summary indicate very likely and likely mean "the assessed likelihood, using expert judgment", are over 90% and 66% respectively.
(IPCC Report #4)
=S
Here is the mod history so far for my post:
:-(
Troll (-1) (as you noted)
Interesting (+1)
Overrated (-1)
Insightful (+1)
Informative (+1)
Insightful (+1)
Overrated (-1)
Flamebait (-1)
Overrated (-1)
Underrated (+1)
Funny (+1)
Insightful (+1)
Insightful (+1)
Flamebait (-1)
I've nerver had 14 mods before and the message was a simple congratulations. I think the mod history does show there is much more work to be done. Thanks for your defense of my post and I'm sorry you got modded to troll
The CIA disagree with your analysis. 'Drinking water, in fact, is shaping up to be the single most contested resource on the planet... it notes that almost half of the world's population will live in "water-stressed" societies. And that's going to drive a number of regional conflicts in the coming years.'
I can only assume we have some impact. Is it 100% our fault? I find that difficult to believe given that we have not been collecting data for very long and we occupy such an insignificant amount of the surface of this planet it is ridiculous.
Who is moderating your "assuming" and "believing" unreferenced no-citation mindgames as Insightful? The activities of 6 billion people emit vast quantities of CO2 (5,410 million metric tons per year from the USA alone), enough to account for the large, unprecedented, accelerating increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. You would expect by the simple well-understood physics of the greenhouse gas effect that this might have a warming effect. Which of those do you find difficult to believe? Why should anyone care?
From those observed phenomena and scientific principles, it's all up to climate scientists to model the effects on the atmosphere, NOT base it on what people feel.
=S
http://www.iceagenow.com/
When we're all snowed in and have ice up to our asses, you'll be praying for "global warming".
Where are you getting that information? Last time I checked the committee had a strict policy about not releasing the list of nominees...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Read radical news here
Florida can stay populated and air conditioned. We just need clean power sources (nuke, hydro, tidal, wind, solar). The solution is power sources, not abandoning half of the planet.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Bit higher than India's national average, isn't it?
Yes, it is, and when you try to make me lower my energy consumption, you are ultimately trying to make me poorer. But of course, like all Orwellian double thinkers, Enviros will argue that if you have to have smaller houses, smaller cars, less water, less washing, that you will somehow have more. I bet finding that more will be harder than finding Jesus, for sure.
This is my sig.
Al Gore's 'nine Inconvenient Untruths'
Sally Peck
London Telegraph
Thursday October 11, 2007
Al Gore's environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth contains nine key scientific errors, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
The judge declined to ban the Academy Award-winning film from British schools, but ruled that it can only be shown with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.
In the documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim, the former US vice president and environmental activist calls on people to fight global warming because "humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb".
But Judge Michael Burton ruled yesterday that errors had arisen "in the context of alarmism and exaggeration" in order to support Mr Gore's thesis on global warming.
His criticism followed an unsuccessful attempt by Stewart Dimmock, a Kent school governor, to block the Government's plan to screen the documentary in more than 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales.
(Article continues below)
The father of two claimed An Inconvenient Truth included "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush".
The film's distributor, Paramount, warns in its synopsis of the film: "If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."
But the judge ruled that the "apocalyptic vision" presented in the film was politically partisan and thus not an impartial scientific analysis of climate change.
It is, he ruled, a "political film".
The nine alleged errors in the film
Mr Gore claims that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future". The judge said: "This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore's "wake-up call". He agreed that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia"."The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus."
The film claims that low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls "are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming" but the judge ruled there was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.
The documentary speaks of global warming "shutting down the Ocean Conveyor" - the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the judge said that it was "very unlikely" that the Ocean Conveyor, also known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation, would shut down in the future, though it might slow down.
Mr Gore claims that two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed "an exact fit". The judge said that, although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, "the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts".
Mr Gore says the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was directly attributable to global warming, but the judge ruled that it scientists have not established that the recession of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is primarily attributable to human-induced climate change.
The film contends that the drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming but the judge said there was insufficient evidence, and that "it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability."
Mr Gore blames Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans on global warming, but the judge ruled there was "insufficient evidence to show that".
Mr Gore cit
This means that any Tom, Dick (sorry mr. vice pres.), or Harry can get a noble peasce prize just by producing a DVD. I think the current president should go out and make a DVD on how he killed all those unarmed women and childen in the middle east so his military industrial complex friends could siphon off billions and rob the American people. He could get a great "peace prize" for that. All he needs to do is make a DVD. Cool thing is; Make a DVD, Put millions in you pocket and get the peace prize. Very nice process. I love the new world order. This is a very good thing.
Gore did not invent MTBE. He even did not initiate using MTBE in US. But surely he helped to introduce legislations supporting the MTBE. The list of his contributions is long. So let me just remind the year 1997. Around that time Gore had nominated Carol Browner to be a head of EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency). And EPA continues its governmental role issuing a series of rules related to the Clean Air Act.
There were many reports about increasing presence of MTBE in drinking water (famous at the time the Santa Monica affair), but EPA and the presidential "National Science and Technology Council" (NSTC) did everything to hash the problem ... interpreting the
data as "below level of danger", "anecdotal evidence", etc.
Maybe someone would like to read one of the documents, available at
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/regs/fuels/ostpfin.pdf (the "Interagency Assessment of Oxygenated Fuels").
As is the rule, the NSTC is chaired by president (Clinton, at the time) and the v-president (as a member of this council) plays the executive prime role. ...
So, this way Al Gore had played a very important role into popularizing use of the MTBE.
Clearly, everybody can may mistakes.
But use of MTBE by 1997 was much more than just a mistake. There were already many signals from the academia about the dangers coming from MTBE. What a responsible leader should do in such a case? Should issue an executive order to stop using the chemical (at least temporarily) and request more studies on the subject.
Gore did not do it!
But now he is getting the Noble price for his role in the environment protection
The world is strange, indeed.
-zenon
"I think the Internet has had a more profound effect on human affairs than climatic change so far."
You said it : "so far".
And the nobel comittee it telling us to look into the future...
So you prefer to do it per country? Allow Luxembourg to produce as much pollution as the US? Or bring US down to the Andorra level? If you're considering limits (and actually, I don't think you are: free for all and who cares about next generations), you have to do it per something. So what would be your preferred way of quantifying the impact? Per country, per acre, per unit of economic output, or per capita? What would be the fairest way to make distinctions between various polluting entities?
what a pile of poo.
Consider that just as humans aren't made for Antarctic conditions, they aren't made for some stupidly hot climates either. Perhaps they shouldn't be living in Dallas and should migrate to someplace more reasonable? The rest of the world doesn't owe them the right to mess up the rest of the planet based on their selfish want to live somewhere incompatible with human physiology.
-1: Overrated
As for the Africa part of your statement, well that's too full of logical holes and falicies to even know where get started. -1: Troll
Not according to this British Court:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1670882,00.html
The "errors" this judge points out are some BIG ONES. Such as the alleged causal link between CO2 and temperature. Does anybody ever point out the ridiculous amounts of money Gore and other corporations stand to make if this hysteria goes any further and forces more legislative and trade policy changes?
Al Gore's lies have even be been disputed by his own environmental allies from the IPCC. John T. Houghton, co-chair IPCC Scientific Assessment working group 1988-2002, acknowledges that ice core samples show CO2 driven by temperature, not the reverse, as stated by Al Gore.
No, the Little Ice Age didn't begin until the 16th century. The Vikings were killed off centuries earlier, by the Black Death.
- Tom Lehrer
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Which is why a carbon tax would do the job without any complicated, draconian state.
I started to lose any respect for the Prize in the late 80s, and a known terrorist receiving it just ended any respect the Prize could have possibly had left.
If (as mentioned by a previous poster) it is true that this group Gore donated to only does PR and does not work on making any solutions, then it was a perfectly appropriate choice because Gore has done only PR and has no real accomplishments that justify the prize.
Most of India and Africa have climates at least as hot as Texas. Most people there can't afford AC. Could it be that they know how to build houses you can live in, instead of copying the architecture of moderate climate regions and fixing its faults by brute force?
Stephan
There are not Nobel Prizes for legislation, but the Peace prize is as close as it gets.
HOWEVER, there are Nobel prizes in SCIENCE. Note that neither the panel, nor Mr. Gore got one of them. There is a very good reason for that. Neither of them do science.
Then again, neither of them do Peace work either. But at least we still expect quantifiable results in the Peace prize scientific category. IIRC the Peace prize is the sole non-quantifiable, non-objective one.
It could be argued that the attempts by the politicians on the UN IPCC to create a world government, to control the economies of other countries and to generally lower the availability of energy, health care, and increasing standards of living amount to furthering the cause of war.
After all, the more well off a country, the less likely it is to go to war. When your country has no jobs because it doesn't have the energy to run an economy, and people are rioting or starving, peace accords are often among the first to go. When people flee natural disasters en-masse because they are not equipped to handle them because the governments have mandated the ability to do so away in the name of AGWH, and those people flee to neighboring countries, hostilities are likely to ensue.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Almost Nobel Peace Prizes are for 'PR', or, instead of 'public relations', 'international relations'.
You can reduce standing armies to get one. This is what many people think of when they hear 'Peace Prize', but in reality most prizes aren't for this, simply because no one does it.
Alternately, you can get nations to work together, or you can hold and promote peace conferences. The last one is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is, and it's doing the first thing. Along with Al Gore in the US via Alliance for Climate Protection.
Complaining a Peace Prize money is used for 'PR' is idiotic. It's a 'PR' Peace Prize, which calling it that is about the most inane method of diminishing the importance of his work ever. By that logic Nelson Mandela shouldn't have one...all he did was run around promoting the downfall of apartheid. What a PR flack. (I bet if I actually knew what he did with his money, I'd find he gave it to an organization to 'promote' something or other too.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Although skeptical, I decided to do a little Google search to see if your information was accurate. I was surprised to find out that it is. (Surprised not because of you, personally, but because most unsourced claims on Slashdot turn out to be garbage.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Although that's arguably true, when you get your facts wrong, it tends to make it harder to convey that Truth...
Personally, I'm a big fan of unassailable facts—which, of course, have a well-known liberal bias!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I have read the reports also, and your statements leave me with a choice. Either you have spotted an obvious mistake that 2500 Nobel prize winning scientists somehow missed over the last 20 yrs...or...your comprehension is not so good.
Since I firmly belive in the scientific method I am bound to accept the second premise until you produce something other than a dead horse.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I can't disagree with that. When I said "unassailable", I meant unassailable through the use of logic and observation. Once you throw those out the window, all bets are off.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Even if you factor in Gore running a business from his house (I suppose a check of zoning laws might be in order :-D) he still was consuming vast amounts of power. A large portion of that being the bill for his swimming pool and pool house.
He also has a habit of zooming around the world on private jets while shouting "the sky is falling!".
So, Gore is paying a premium for his wastrel life style. Goody for him. You realize of course that since he's buying that "green power" then someone else has to use the non-green power for their consumption.
Whatever happened to "conservation begins at home"? If things are really so darn bad then why isn't Al acting like it by changing his life style?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Were calling CO2 a bad gas despite the fact water vapor is a far more contributory factor to the 'greenhouse effect'. Were pushing CF bulbs because they are more energy efficient despite the fact that they contain mercury. As a father of two young kids Im uncomfortable having bulbs in my house which require I carefully air out the room, keep them away, and be sure to clean in a prescribed manner. This says nothing of the effects of *millions* of CFB and the mercury in them making their way to the dumps. Were pushing Ethonal which (1) raises the price of food in the US an Mexico (food which is of course a bigger part of the budget for the poor than the rich and (2) Actully produces more C02 per unit of energy than Gasoline. Were pushing Kyoto which holds no account over the two fastest CO2 producing nations in the worlds (China and India) Now All Gore gets the Nobel prize for his docudrama so riddled with 'small inaccuracies' and 'deceptive tactics' that in the UK its been labeled as political propaganda (and rightly so). Still the Nobel prize has lost allot of luster after they decided to give one to the founder of an organization that promoted suicide bombings against civilians, Gore is in good company...
I lived in Malaysia for a couple of years (check the weather: hot and humid).
Since a corporation was paying my bills they commented on them. They were quite happy because I was using 75% less electricity than the previous occupant of the flat in question. Venture a guess where this guy came from. I can almost bet you can figure out from which US state he was. This wasn't atypical, USians were the one using more energy and driving more miles. I walked regularly to the office, European colleagues used to bike (in spit of the horrendous traffic in Kuala Lumpur on those days, worsened by the construction of the Petronas Twin Towers) and our bills (non USians) were consistently substantially lower.
I also mandated that temperature in the office was raised to 22 degrees (Celsius, what the civilized world uses) from the insane, idiotic 17 that the previous person in charge (guess his country) has mandated.
To round my anecdotal experiences, I visited several times offices in the US, and very often people had to wear jumpers because it was too cold inside.
My conclusion, based entirely in anecdotal evidence, is that USians do not know how to use energy responsible.
Even Bush recognized the addictive relationship the US populace has with energy usage.
So keep finding excuses, nobody serious believes them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In all civilized countries you are given water when you request it in restaurants and shopping centers, independently of the climate.
Now check my very previous comment, I talk precisely about why this is all nonsense. You USians (but may the bunny help us when it comes to Texans) are not willing to do anything at all and frankly as dispendious beyond what is rationally acceptable.
You clearly don't understand how carbon credits work. Rwanda (or any other poor country) pollutes comparatively little (guys, screw this on your fucking head somewhere, you are 3% of the population, but contribute 25% of global pollution). Thus you buy credits from them so you can keep polluting (but it becomes an expense, so you will have to take measures against polluting to remain competitive) and they will use that money to finance those green technologies that you deride as expensive (go and for bunnies sakes visit Africa. Great people and you will stop the idiotic assumptions).
In Africa, with little or no infrastructure whatsoever, it is immensely cheaper to put solar panels in each house than to line expensive electric power lines for small villages scattered in big areas. The population of Africa is about the one in the US but the area is much bigger (check this for an idea: http://www.bu.edu/africa/outreach/materials/handouts/howbig.html). Local solar energy in a sunny continent becomes the only logic way forward, dispendious expensive mammoth projects are only economical for big towns, of which Africa hasn't got many.
As for Africa being where it is, it certainly does not help that both the EU and US keep subsidizing their agricultural industries (where the Africans could have a competitive advantage) and that they support the dictators your mention when it is convenient to their interests.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In the US you just experienced the quasi destruction of a major city (New Orleans) due to a severe climate event.
According to most models, events like this will become more common in the future if nothing is done about green gas emissions. The US more less managed to cope. In the case of countries like Bangladesh you would have millions or refugees looking for resources far from the current coastlines. If you think that is not going to create any issues, well, is nice to know that some people can live detached from all reality and practical considerations.
There are many examples like how climate change would strain severely geopolitics, but frankly I don't feel like throwing my pearls of wisdom to the pigsty.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Oh yes, and 4000 years old.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Now that some perspective has been achieved the right wingers are left with a an ignorant political pygmy that gives conservatism a worst name than it deserves.
In the other hand everybody around the world, except the most rabid US ayatollahs, recognize Al Gore's efforts to use his high profile to highlight the issue that may define politics for the next century.
The difference between the stature of both individuals could not be greater.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
By large most Indians have little or nothing...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
SO should we wait that millions of people die to raise the alarm?
You can work for peace by preventing the causes that give rise to conflict.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes buddy, the world is also 4000 years old and the fossils are all fake.
Whatever you want buddy, whatever.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lying through your teeth and enjoying it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
US.
Population: 3% of total.
Pollution in green house gases: 25% of total.
Commitment to control this: pretty much zero.
What a fucking great hero the US is playing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Holly shit Batman? Really?
You need to source better your statistics....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science".
So he is in the minority.
Great, wake us up when the colling he mentions happens (next 15 years according to him).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.