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.…
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176 - Dr Dreadful
RJ, going by your bio you weren't around for much - if any - of the Seventies, so I can understand your misconception as to how much of a hoo-ha there was about global cooling. That is to say: not much.
Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the subject. I would particularly draw your attention to the second sentence: "This hypothesis never had significant scientific support".
To be fair, the specter of "nuclear winter" was a bit of a nail-biter back then, so I can forgive you for confusing the two issues.
Also, I think you're misusing the term "consensus" here. Even in Galileo's day most scientists did not seriously think the Sun went around the Earth. They didn't make a big noise about it, though, because heresy and its consequences was a very real concern back then. Galileo's error was to publish his research without regard to the establishment's (read: the Church's) reaction. It wasn't until the Reformation that the "scientific consensus" came around to the idea that it was now safe to agree with and enlarge upon Galileo's work.
177 - Dr Dreadful
For "Galileo" read "Copernicus". My laptop was playing up and I ended up accidentally posting an earlier draft of my comment. My apologies. But the two men got into pretty much the same sort of scrapes. Their actual intent was to demonstrate the wonder of God's Creation. Both of them seriously misjudged the Church's reaction.
178 - 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.
179 - Clavos
@#175:
Agreed.
That's what I meant by writing "Had Copernicus relied on "consensus," the sun would still be revolving around the earth."
Just trying to inject a little humor into a discussion that's far too serious....
180 - RJ
"RJ, going by your bio you weren't around for much - if any - of the Seventies, so I can understand your misconception as to how much of a hoo-ha there was about global cooling. That is to say: not much."
Yes, I understand that no one is allowed to discuss events that occurred before their birth. (This explains the dearth of Civil War historians...)
However, the myth of "Global Cooling" was, in the 1970s, considered credible enough to be published in Newsweek:
The evidence in support of these [Global Cooling] predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
...
But they [scientists} are almost unanimous in the view that the trend [Global Cooling] will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
...
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change [Global Cooling], or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality. [emphasis mine]
And it's worth pointing out that one of today's major supporters of the "Global Warming" theory was a major supporter of the "Global Cooling" myth just three decades ago.
But, you're correct. Having grown up in the 1980s and 1990s, I have absolutely no right to comment on anything that occurred in the 1970s. Mea Culpa.
181 - RJ
#179
Yes, I understood exactly what you were saying. And it was humorous. I was just extrapolating it to the contemporary debate over "Global Warming" ...
182 - Clavos
Another (scientist) voice of reason in the GW debate....