Al Gore, Ignoble Laureate
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, October 05, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Political Correctness: The front-runners for this year's Nobel Peace Prize are a couple of global warming alarmists. With dozens of wars raging, the committee couldn't find a single person laboring honorably for peace?
Once a symbol of distinction, this honor has plumbed shameful depths in recent years. A county fair blue ribbon has more significance. Since 1990, winners include terrorist Yasser Arafat, fraud Rigoberto Menchu, foreign-policy incompetents Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan, unreconstructed communist Mikhail Gorbachev and the useless Mohamed ElBaradei.
Pulling the world apart, not together, with his global warming claims.
Each year, the Peace Prize committee has a chance to redeem itself, yet it never seems up to the task. It looks like 2007 will be no exception. Later this week, say reports, it will name as this year's co-winners Al Gore and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian who has drawn attention to what she believes are climate change's effects on Arctic communities.
It will be interesting to see how those two will be linked to anything resembling the promotion of peace.
Neither can meet the committee's qualifications by being "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
On the contrary, Gore, Watt-Cloutier and their eco-activist allies have created a divide where none should exist. They have fostered an us-against-them world where global-warming skeptics must be subdued by the global-warming believers.
The two sides cannot live in tranquility by agreeing to disagree: Doubters must be mocked, maligned and marginalized.
In fact, it would be hard to find a less deserving recipient than Gore, a man who has:
• Lied repeatedly about the existence of a scientific consensus that man's emissions of greenhouse gases are warming the Earth. Skeptics are easy to find, as only a few minutes of riding the Information Superhighway that Gore thinks he built will show .
• Made a propaganda film about climate change that a British court has deemed to be so biased that teachers there who show it must warn students about its subjectivity.
• Possibly been driven to his climate alarmism because of something called Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In a piece for IBD last year, Dr. Henry I. Miller, a physician and fellow at the Hoover Institution who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, laid out a good case that the former vice president "is disturbed."
Well, maybe he is, maybe he isn't. We're not experts. But the guy has already won an Oscar; does the Nobel committee really need to stoke the fires of his vanity even more?
• Continued to duck invitations to debate his theory. "We have tried, repeatedly, to contact Gore directly, with registered letters and calls to his office, and have never received a reply," Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute in Chicago, told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steve Huntley.
Huntley notes that earlier this year Gore "canceled an interview with Denmark's largest newspaper when he learned it would include questions from Bjorn Lomborg, respected author of 'The Skeptical Environmentalist.' "
Does Gore know what so many have missed in their environmental zealotry — that his theory's many flaws cannot be defended? Is he aware that the errors of his global warming ideas would be quite easily exposed by a knowledgeable skeptic?
Just what the Nobel committee really needs — another fraud in its pantheon of laureates. If Gore wins the prize as expected, it will mark another step in the long, politicized decline of a once highly regarded international award. How sad. |
