Now I did not mind Al Gore winning the Oscar I only thought it was the wrong category - should have been best actor instead of best documentary feature -, but the Peace Nobel Prize? That seems to me like an assault on reason and I do not really know whether this should make me laugh or cry.
Cry because this means that so much attention is drawn to a merely hypothetical danger instead of concentrating on the real problems. In the documentary e. g., Al Gore calls on people to fight global warming because “humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb”. “Ticking time bomb”? That makes me think of Iran rather than of having a more Mediterranean climate in Germany.
On the other hand, it makes me laugh. Especially when I heard Al Gore saying on CNN the day he got the prize: “We had a strong ally – reality.” REALITY! Great. Especially in the light of a late British court ruling pointing out to at least nine inaccuracies in Al Gore`s Oscar winning movie:
(…) In the High Court on Wednesday, the judge ruled that schools must not show An Inconvenient Truth without using material to balance Mr Gore’s “one-sided views” on the issue. The film is political rather than scientific, he added, because it contains nine statements that are either untrue or are unsubstantiated. It mistakenly attributes the drying-up of Lake Chad to global warming and falsely claims that polar bears have drowned because they can’t find enough ice.
Most brazen of all, Gore claims that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” – vividly illustrated in the film with a simulation of Manhattan disappearing beneath the waves. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yesterday named as co-recipient of the peace prize with Mr Gore, believes that sea levels will rise by less than 18in over the next 100 years, and that it would take several millennia for sea levels to rise by 20ft. (…) 1
But the British court ruling apparently was no inconvenient news for the Nobel Prize Committee. Sometimes I think that it`s members should be awarded some kind of prize, too. A prize for reality blindness and complete fact resistance for instance.
Because even if Al Gore was right in his global warming hysteria, his proposals would not be likely to lead to more peace:
(…) But there is another serious issue raised by Mr Gore’s peace prize. Where, exactly, does his message fit in with promoting world peace? According to the Nobel committee, climate change “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.” Cut greenhouse emissions, in other words, and climate change will be averted and peace will be preserved.
There is a problem with this thesis, in that the process of cutting greenhouse emissions itself has the potential to burden the world’s most vulnerable countries and to induce violent conflicts and wars. Nothing would be so damaging for world peace than if developing nations were hindered in their efforts to industrialise, thereby reducing their ability to cope with natural disaster. (…)Not that peace much bothers the Nobel committee any more. For some years the peace prize has been overtly political, occasionally expressed in less-than-peaceful terms. Awarding the prize to Jimmy Carter in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel chairman, described it as a “kick in the leg” for George W. Bush. Perhaps this is how the world should view the award to Mr Gore: as yet another flying tackle on the Nobel committee’s bête noire. (…) 1
So in a way Al Gore could have been talking about himself when writing “The Assault on Reason”. You just have to replace “Bush White House” and “administration” by “Gobal Warming Lobby” and “troop levels” by “carbon emissions”:
Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies. 2
2 “Al Gore Speaks of a Nation in Danger” by MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times, May 22, 2007