Predictably, conservatives and others who challenge the doctrines of man-made climate change are apoplectic at the award...
Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for 2007. According to the Nobel Foundation, the award was given “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”. Predictably, conservatives and others who challenge the doctrines of man-made climate change are apoplectic at the award and claim it shows bias in the committee that makes such awards. They, however, miss the larger point.…
Article comments
— go to most recent comments76 - gonzo marx
more bullshit from Vox...
do please cite an instance where i have ever said such a thing
are you completely incapable of rational discussion..or do you just like mudslinging an attempted character assassination rather than problem solving?
your own words explain quite a bit, i am not as delusional as your belief in your mind reading abilities
so..when you wan to toss out such accusation...show yer fucking Proof...because your assertions don't mean shit, due to your own words...which i cite and Quote when needed
diaf, Vox
Excelsior?
77 - Dave Nalle
do please cite an instance where i have ever said such a thing
I was responding to #74, Gonzo. Scroll up.
I said "I'm concerned about the people who think that the wrong thing IS the right thing"
You said: "stay away from mirrors then"
Since I believe in individual liberty and limited government and you said that I believe in the wrong thing, then I can only conclude that you think that individual liberty and limited government are the wrong thing.
How hard is that for you to follow?
are you completely incapable of rational discussion..or do you just like mudslinging an attempted character assassination rather than problem solving?
I'm not the one here calling every honest statement 'bullshit'.
so..when you wan to toss out such accusation...show yer fucking Proof...
Proof shown, in your own words. Maybe you should pick them more carefully.
Dave
78 - gonzo marx
it appears you didn't get it
my snark about staying away from mirrors came form the thought that YOU are one of those who think the Wrong things are correct in some instances
your "proof" is refuted, and you fail basic Humor 101
don't you ever get tired of being the yard bitch?
Excelsior?
79 - Clavos
That whole exchange, gentlemen, sounded like neither one of you got what the other was saying.
Which is funny, because I got both of you no problem.
Chill, guys....
It's just pixels.
80 - gonzo marx
well do i know it's just pixels...
i give a high probability that it's all about being deliberately obtuse in an attempt to provoke
or there could be some delusional behavior involved (i leave it up to the Readers to decide where that resides)
for #79
Excelsior?
81 - Dave Nalle
I'm not even sure I know what the 'yard bitch' is, Gonzo. Is it something you learn about in prison?
BTW, you're really not very good at impersonating Don Rickles.
Dave
82 - gonzo marx
no impersonations required...i'm my own kind of Freak
this says it all...
nuff said
Excelsior?
83 - Baronius
Handy, you and I must have hung out in different circles in the 70's. I heard Kissinger called a leftist more than once.
84 - Dave Nalle
That video says mostly that you have terrible taste in music. I offer you this alternative.
dave
85 - gonzo marx
showing your lack of Knowledge in some areas....
there are somethings you just don't do in Music...like Americans faking British accents
or attempting to cover Black Sabbath, as well as some other bands...or wear your own band t-shirt on stage...
but i digress
Excelsior?
86 - Mark Saleski
for the record: love Kaki King, love The Dickies, can't stand Tool.
87 - Alex
Interesting discussion. I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I have to mention that it is improbable that Vaclav Klaus is the president of Czechoslovakia, given that this country has ceased to exist about 15 years ago. Mr. Klaus is thus the president of the Czech Republic.
88 - Dave Nalle
Whatever happened to Vaclav Havel, anyway? And why didn't they split Czechoslovakia back into Bohemia and Moravia to avoid confusion?
Dave
89 - Mr. Bigglesworth
A lot of the early climate figures aren't exactly spot-on accurate either. The temperature differences from way back then and now could be accounted by a sampling error of plus one. A sampling error of plus two or more would reverse the "scientific" dooms-day scenario completely.
And is it just them, or is new iceberg formation not even a part of the discussion here?
Anyway, to Al Gore I say you go girl. We can change the world if we try!
90 - Clavos
"And is it just them, or is new iceberg formation not even a part of the discussion here?"
Actually, I did, albeit briefly, in comment #4:
"Last week, those same scientists invited a group of journalists and others to Greenland to observe a glacier melting and falling into the sea at a fairly rapid clip. Everyone oohed and aahed, and rushed to file their stories about the pernicious effects of GW, which flooded (pun intended) the media for several days.
However, the scientists did NOT show the journalists the similar glacier not far away that is actually adding ice, and growing."
91 - gonzo marx
for #90 - it seems you might have missed these verifiable Facts about the Issue
just sharing...
for Consideration - not even saying Man is the sole cause of the apparent problem...however, if the foibles of Man are indeed even partially responsible, and we can do something positive to respond to the possible bad effects...
why not put forward effort to decrease whatever ill effects we are contributing to?
Excelsior?
92 - RJ
#76 - LOL! I don't know whether to laugh or to cry, so I'll just shake my head...
#77 - Thanks for clearing up gm's "confusion" so I didn't have to...
93 - Anthony
Congratulations to Al Gore for the prize and all his contributions to peace - the Internet, Current TV, Global Warming, etc.
But hey, where is the Supreme Court when you need them? Certainly the darkness brought to the world by George Bush deserves a lot of credit for the mobilization against global warming.
94 - Clavos
@#91:
Don't misunderstand me, gonzo. I'm not trying to say that there's no melting going on, much less that GW isn't happening; I'm addressing the obvious lack of any news that is not in line with the gospel of the Church of Global Warming and the pontifications of its Pope.
"why not put forward effort to decrease whatever ill effects we are contributing to?"
I'm all for that, but not if it's not cost effective. Our first question of each proposal to reduce carbon footprints should be:
At how much cost?
At this point, most schemes to reduce carbon in the atmosphere involve some form of cap-and-trade program. Some authors are leery of the effectiveness, and in particular of the cost benefits to be obtained thereby.
Here is an interesting article, published by the Manhattan Institute in New York's City Journal. The article is too long to post here, but it concludes:
"If America’s politicians and corporate leaders truly believe that much of the world will suffer irrevocable damage from climate change within the next century, then obviously we should try to stop it. But the first step shouldn’t be a feel-good cap-and-trade regime. Federal, state, and local government should instead work together to remove all obstacles that prevent private companies from building new nuclear power plants, since it’s foolish not to take immediate advantage of a proven, cost-competitive alternative to dirty coal.
After taking that obvious step, pols and business leaders should do a gut check. Are they so certain of the catastrophic effects of climate change that they would support a straightforward emissions tax, rather than a carbon cap-and-trade program that (deceptively) seems so easy? After all, strip away the rhetoric about cap and trade, and it would have the same effect as a tonnage tax on carbon emissions: making such emissions more expensive; discouraging carbon-intensive power generation; and allowing the market to decide which environmentally friendlier technologies"solar, wind, what have you"would be competitive enough to take its place.
The pols and business leaders could suggest that America gradually impose such a tax, one that’s high enough within a decade to encourage industries and consumers to switch permanently to cleaner technology. A tax would mean higher power prices, too, but at least it wouldn’t mean directly subsidizing competitors abroad. And the feds could use the tax’s revenue to reduce taxes elsewhere in the economy"perhaps cutting dividend and capital-gains taxes further, to encourage the massive private investment needed to build the next generation of power generators. Nor would a tax create a new multibillion-dollar global commodity whose value could depend on political manipulation in dark corners of the world.
If it’s true that a consensus about global warming really exists, not just in press releases and on op-ed pages but in the back rooms of power, too, the politicians and the business leaders wouldn’t be afraid to suggest such a tax. They would insist on it."
As long as it makes economic sense, I agree that we should be pursuing such goals as alternative, renewable fuels if for no other reason than for the benefit of eliminating our dependence on the sheiks.
Thanks to the popularity of the Pope of GW's movie, the whole world is convinced that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the prime cause of global warming. Yet, there is substantial scientific evidence that the world has undergone cycles of warming that can last upwards of 1500 years every several millenia.
The evidence (from ice cores) also indicates that these cycles have been occurring for a minimum tens of thousands of years. Further, the evidence indicates that the increase in greenhouse gases tends to trail the warming periods, leading to the conclusion that greenhouse gases are the result, not the cause of GW.
From Science Daily:
"Russian scientists have analyzed changes occurred within the past 5, 20, and 100 thousand years and established that each warming is associated with the same behaviour of greenhouse gases: temperature rises firstly, and the concentration of greenhouse gases begins to increase later, with a lag of several thousand years. The growth of gases concentration is faster than that of temperature and soon outruns the latter. With a turn from warming to the next phase of cooling, the concentration of greenhouse gases inertially grows for a while. Then their concentration begins to decrease, which soon gets faster than the temperature decrease. This tendency progresses until glaciation phase that closes each climatic cycle."
I have an instinctive aversion to concepts that everybody adopts and endorses.
95 - moonraven
As long as it makes economic sense, writes ole clavos.
Yet his expertise in economic sense means he can't even get a credit card?
Give me a break.
In fact, give the world a break.
96 - Clavos
Heh.
97 - moonraven
I just saw the ultimate in revisionist history that some jackass wrote: Kissinger is a leftist.
Right.
He was right up there giving a blow job to Salvador Allende in 1973--not financing the coup that overthrew his government.
How soon we forget about his boss, that bigtime Maoist, head of the Sendero Luminoso and the Republican Party: Richard Nixon--you know, the guy who insisted that a Vietnamese flag be sraped across his coffin.
Wow, you folks have been doing a TON of crystal meth on this site.
Kissinger, even as I type, is whistling the Internationale!
98 - moonraven
Just for all you irrational, envious GUILT AS SIN rightwing shills, an EXCERPT from today's New York Times--article by Paul Krugman:
"On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.
And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change - therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job - to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for - the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved."
So, swamp rats and company, pick your poison: Envy, Guilt, Just plain cussedness....
99 - Baronius
Moonraven quotes Krugman about Gore. That's a trio of clear thinkers right there.
100 - Dr Dreadful
Rudimentary...
I don't know about you, but I don't return to sites I deem 'pathetic'* day after day after day after day after...
So who's pathetic, exactly?
* And they're out there in spades, believe you me.
101 - Clavos
I knew that, Doc. It WAS a typo. Really
102 - bliffle
"But hey, where is the Supreme Court when you need them?"
I heard that the Supreme Court ruled that the Nobel Prize must be awarded to George Bush rather than Al Gore.
Good to know that they're on the job!
Rendering Originalist decisions rebutting those Actvist Judges in Stockholm.
103 - Dr Dreadful
It must be a recently passed amedment to Murphy's Law that the incidents of typos increazes in direct propportion to the writer's angxiety to smasck down someone else's poor wirting?
Why haven't we heard about it? Does it have the reqiusite aproval from three-foruths of the steaks?
104 - Clavos
ROFL, Doc!
105 - Clavos
Oh damn! I missed a great oppportunityy thayr....
106 - handyguy
Paul Krugman's article is right on, no matter what overwrought Latin American bird is doing the quoting.
107 - handyguy
Global warming is yet another issue that shouldn't by logic divide so neatly into Left and Right positions. The fact that it does ought to cast suspicion on many of the opinions being expressed on both sides.
That being said, however...
Assuming Al Gore is not running for office again, I'm not sure what hidden, nefarious political purpose his advocacy is supposed to demonstrate. The man seems sincerely to believe this is an urgent issue. You may not agree. But it doesn't logically and automatically follow that political attacks on him are valid.
Those attacks are just spilling over from the Right's general contempt for Gore. He's Al Gore; therefore anything he says or does must be bogus. That's the point of Krugman's op-ed today. And he's right: this kind of ad hominem silliness will never get anyone anywhere.
108 - Baronius
OK, Handy, on your recommendation I read Krugman's article, and I wasn't impressed. Krugman is as bitter a partisan as I've ever read, never moreso when he denounces partisanship. But he clumsily plagarizes an interesting point. Why is Gore so hated by the Right?
For me, there are three reasons. One, I remember Gore practically offering his apologies for serving in Vietnam. Two, I know two people who had personal encounters with Gore, in which he was obnoxious and ill-informed. Three, he tried to steal the presidency. Darn it, I have to mention his speech praising Clinton the day he was impeached.
It's that attempted coup that bothers most of us. He pushed his claim as far as he could through the relevent courts, then to the Florida legislature (which had no authority in the matter), then to the Supreme Court twice. He lost in every count in Florida, but kept pushing. Even if you believe he had a good claim to the presidency, he's continued to encourage the idea that he should have won, and that's irresponsible. He puts himself before the country.
109 - Lumpy
Exactly dead wrong HG. Environmentalism is a non-partisan issue because it arises out of real concern for people and the planet, but global warming is political in origin and used mainly to advance a political agenda. It lacks any kind of common sense application. So people react to it politically.
110 - handyguy
What political agenda? Enlighten us, please. Be specific. Whom does it benefit? Whom does it harm? Is there no middle ground at all?
111 - handyguy
Paul Krugman, eloquent and impassioned as he is, certainly is also ideological and partisan. He does not pretend otherwise. But he could be described as 'bitter' only by someone who is the same, from the opposite perspective: a bitter partisan of the right.
Baronius's description of Gore's supposed perfidy in the 2000 election aftermath is probably the most 'bitterly partisan' I've ever read. That election will remain a sore point for both sides, of course. But most of the many millions of Gore voters wanted the matter pursued at the time. It wasn't just the VP's own wishes that were being considered, and to imply that does a disservice to those 50 million Americans [500,000 more than there were Bush voters, also not an irrelevant fact]. And the hardball tactics and rhetoric used by Bush's legal team at the time will not go down as the classiest in history, either.
112 - bliffle
"...Those attacks are just spilling over from the Right's general contempt for Gore. He's Al Gore; therefore anything he says or does must be bogus. That's the point of Krugman's op-ed today. And he's right: this kind of ad hominem silliness will never get anyone anywhere."
But it does get short-term success for them, which is why they keep doing it. What's funny is that they just can't seem to stop. It's been a long time since they successfully defamed Clinton, Gore and Kerry, but it wasn't cathartic: they still keep on doing it. Maybe they're addicted to verbal violence.
113 - Phillip Winn
John, the word "first" in the title is probably misplaced.
114 - Baronius
Handy, yes, I'm bitterly partisan. That doesn't make Krugman any less of a hack.
The total popular vote is completely irrelevant. You know better than to say otherwise. It isn't like Bush found a loophole in the Constitution. He beat Gore, and Gore's people kept coming up with new recount methods, and Bush won all of them.
Gore supporters seem to think they have a monopoly on indignation. I'm still angry that Gore kept trying to "win" the election after it was clear he lost. Look at it from our side: Gore tried to do what many Democrats accuse Bush of having done.
I'm just lazy enough to not cut and paste the chronology of the election from Wikipedia. If anyone wants to look it up, it's there. It seems like memories are fading of how Gore lost and lost and lost.
115 - RJ
Al Gore's Nine Lies - An Inconvenient Truth:
-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 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.
116 - REMF
How could Gore miss the biggest cause of all for Global Warming?
All that hot gas Rush Limbaugh's giving off...
117 - justoneman
How could Gwhore miss the biggest cause of all for Global Warming?
Because its hard for Gwhore to see or think clearly when he is in the back of an SUV limo (getting 6 miles per gallon) stuffing his face with burgers and nachos while masturbating on the Nobel Peace Prize!
It really is quite simple...
JOM
118 - Maurice
Actions speak louder than words.
119 - Dr Dreadful
Nine points out of how many in the whole film?
PERSPECTIVE, people.
Stop clutching at straws. They won't keep you from drowning.
120 - Clavos
Yes, Doc, perspective.
Nine points which underpin much of the hyperbolic predictions of the supposed effects of GW, which effects have even been refuted by IPCC members.
And one of the nine is literally the central underpinning of the whole GW controversy regarding how much of GW is anthropogenic:
"-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."
And these are important flaws in terms of defining probable future effects of GW:
"-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 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."
Perspective, indeed.
121 - Dr Dreadful
What I meant by 'perspective' is that the New Party challenged certain factual claims in An Inconvenient Truth in court. Perhaps I should have thrown 'motivation' in there.
The court's motivation was to consider the challenged claims, and only those claims, on their merits - not to pronounce on the existence or not of global warming*.
The New Party's motivation was clearly to 'cherry-pick' the film - to get a 'gotcha!' As if, by pointing out a few factual errors, they could somehow disprove the entire thesis of global warming.
It's not clear from the piece cited by RJ if those were the only ones considered by the court, or if there were others that did pass legal muster. What is certain is that the movie makes far more than nine points. That's the perspective I'm talking about.
* Sorry, I can't bring myself to adopt the shorthand 'GW' for global warming. It's just too unsettling - can't quite put my finger on why, though... ;-)
122 - bliffle
Who says that those 9 points are wrong?
Where can I read about it. Other than the unceasing neocon noise machine, I mean. Any scientific journals?
123 - Dr Dreadful
bliffle, thanks. You reminded me of another point I meant to make in my last comment, viz.:
Trial evidence is not scientific evidence. Judges and jurors are not scientists. Legal truth is not empirical truth. While the two do sometimes intersect, they are not the same.
So a court ruling that a film contains factual inaccuracies does not make it so.
124 - handyguy
It just makes the Gore-haters soooo mad to be on the losing side of this argument. Here in the unreal echo chamber of the blogosphere they can convince themselves they're right and that they have successfully discredited Al Gore. But the inconvenient truth is that in the real world he's now more widely admired than ever.
It would be poetic justice if he were elected president next year, unlikely as that now seems. It does make me smile to think of the expressions on the faces of all the formerly smirking, wisecracking dittoheads if that were to happen.
125 - Clavos
"It just makes the Gore-haters soooo mad to be on the losing side of this argument."
1. I'm not a gore hater. I'm a conservative/libertarian and he's a liberal, so I disagree with him on most political issues, including GW, but not on most social issues.
2. I won't, however, reduce my "carbon footprint" just because he says I should; particularly in light of the number and size of his abodes, and because I'm convinced that he has based his conclusions on faulty information and questionable computer models.
3. There is no "winning" or "losing" side to the "argument," which is actually a discussion. Nothing I've seen in all the reading I've done on the subject (and, because meteorology and climate science have been interests of mine for many years, I've done a lot of reading on the subject) has convinced me that the bulk of GW is anthropogenic.
4. I continue to oppose measures to cut "greenhouse gases" that are not fiscally sound or are unfavorable to the US while giving other nations a pass.
5. I strongly support R&D into alternative, renewable fuels. Reaching a point where we can tell the likes of the Al-Saud family and Hugo Chavez to get lost should be a primary goal on the order of Kennedy's push to put a man on the moon, with all necessary funds and resources allocated immediately.
If that's "losing," fine; call it what you want.