A REALLY Inconvenient Truth

Greetings from the Left Coast! There are days when it feels like I am trapped on the wrong side of the looking-glass, and today is one of those days. (Anyone who doesn't understand the reference I just made needs to spend some time reading Lewis Carroll.) The Nobel Prize committee in Oslo, Norway, today awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore. Oh, and also to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Peace Prize. Setting aside for a moment that there is still a fair amount of scientific controversy about climate change, regardless of what you may have heard elsewhere, how does this relate to peace?

I spent a fair amount of time on the official Nobel Prize Web site today trying to find some statement of what the guidelines for nomination might be. I was not successful. However, in reviewing the list of people and organizations who have won the Peace Prize over the years, nearly all of them had something to do with, well, peace. Or at least with humanitarian efforts that relieved human suffering, like Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, or the Red Cross. (The glaring exception being the award to Yasser Arafat in 1994, whose primary contribution to peace was killing innocent people.) Climate change? Peace Prize? I'm not getting the relationship.

Al won the prize, of course, largely because of his film An Inconvenient Truth. That film, if you recall, also won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. There were a few people who protested that the film shouldn't even have been considered in the Documentary category, because, according to the Academy's own rules, a documentary "may be photographed in actual occurrence, or may employ partial re-enactment, stock footage, stills, animation, stop-motion or other techniques, as long as the emphasis is on fact and not on fiction." (emphasis added) The protesters pointed out that several aspects of the film, including the scene of the poor drowning polar bears, failed this test. Of course, as most people expected, political correctness trumped factual accuracy, and Al got his Oscar.

Interestingly enough, the announcement of the Nobel award comes hard on the heels of an announcement that a British court has found that the film does indeed contain at least nine inaccuracies, is politically biased, and that teachers who want to show it to their students must warn them of the bias and inaccuracies first. James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environmental policy at The Heartland Institute, elaborated on the courts findings:

• The film claims global warming is responsible for the gradual retreat of the alpine glacier atop Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro. Scientists have conclusively demonstrated no such link exists.
• The film presents graphs indicating that fluctuating carbon dioxide levels have always preceded and caused global temperature fluctuations. In fact, temperature changes have always preceded carbon dioxide changes.
• The film suggests global warming caused Hurricane Katrina. Few hurricane experts believe this, and substantial scientific evidence indicates global warming is having no impact on hurricane frequency or intensity.
• The film asserts global warming is causing Central Africa's Lake Chad to dry up. In fact, land use practices are causing the drying up of Lake Chad, and Central Africa is in an unusual and prolonged wet period.
• The film asserts global warming is leading to polar bear deaths by drowning. Yet the only documented drowning deaths occurred due to a freak storm, and polar bear numbers are growing substantially.
• The film claims global warming threatens to halt the Gulf Stream and initiate a new ice age. The vast majority of scientists who have studied the issue have determined such a scenario is implausible.
• The film asserts global warming is causing the destruction of coral reefs through bleaching. Scientists have identified other causes for coral bleaching and have additionally noted bleaching is a natural process by which coral continually selects ideal symbiotic algae.
• The film asserts Greenland is in danger of rapid ice melt that will raise sea levels by 20 feet or more. The scientific consensus is that any foreseeable Greenland ice melt will be gradual and will take centuries to substantially raise sea levels.
• The film asserts the Antarctic ice shelf is melting. In fact, only a small portion of Antarctica is getting warmer and losing ice mass, while the vast majority of Antarctica is in a prolonged cold spell and is accumulating ice mass.

According to Taylor, the court also took into account Al Gore's statement in Grist Magazine that "I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it [global warming] is."

Um...Al...an over-representation of factual presentations? Is that anything like the over-representation of facts that went, "I did not have sex with that woman?" Guess you were paying attention during those 8 years you worked for Bill.

So the real inconvenient truth here is that the Academy Award, and now the Nobel Peace Prize, has been awarded largely on the basis of inaccuracies and "over-representations." Olympic athletes who are caught cheating have to give back their medals - how about it, Al? Gonna give back the Oscar? No, I didn't think so.

Every American soldier who has been wounded or killed in Iraq or Afghanistan is more deserving of this prize than Al Gore. Every family member of every American soldier who has been wounded or killed in Iraq or Afghanistan is more deserving of this prize than Al Gore. I find it absolutely outrageous. And don't even get me started on awarding a Peace Prize to anything associated with the United Nations.

If you want to get a more balanced view of the whole global warming industry - and make no mistake, it is an industry that's making a lot of money for a lot of people, including Al Gore - read this article by Sci Fi author Orson Scott Card, then do an Internet search on Stephen McIntyre. But in case you don't have time to do that, here's what we really know about global warming:

• The earth's climate is constantly changing.
• We are currently in a warming period, and have been since the end of the last Ice Age.
• There have been times in recent history (meaning over the last couple thousand years) when the overall climate was warmer than it is today. A warm period during the heyday of the Vikings allowed them to establish farming communities in Greenland.
• There is NOT consensus in the scientific community over what impact mankind may have on climate change, nor over whether we are even capable of doing anything about it.
• It's likely that the solar cycle has more effect on the global climate than anything we do or don't do.
• One good volcanic eruption will cause more climate change than anything we've done in the last thousand years. (Just do an Internet search on "Mount Mazama" - which is now known as Crater Lake.)
• Pollution is bad, and we should try to do less of it.

Thanks for listening - and stay warm out there!