Fat Albert's Latest Consolation Prize

In other non-news, the Nobel Committee put the finishing touches on its long descent into irrelevance and left-wing political hackery by following the lead of its vaccuous Hollywood counterparts:

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s climate change panel won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for counteracting it.

Gore, whose film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award earlier this year, had been widely tipped to win Friday's prize, which expanded the Norwegian committee's interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts that have traditionally been the award's foundations.

"We face a true planetary emergency," Gore said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

Apparently the committee's "interpretation of peacemaking" has been expanded to the spreading of hysterical mendacities designed to drag mankind back to the technological and civilizational Stone Age. It's a good thing the waistband of my boxer shorts isn't stretched that far, or I'd never be able to hold my pants up.

Evidently the committee has its own fondness for bearing false witness, as its chairman tossed off a few groupiesque whoppers of his own:

The Nobel committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, asserted that the prize was not aimed at the Bush Administration [snort], which rejected Kyoto and was widely criticized outside the U.S. for not taking global warming seriously enough.

"We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge, all of them, to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming," Mjoes said. "The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this."

"Conquer"? Isn't that a militaristic term? I thought this was supposed to be a "peace" prize.

I guess the British courts haven't gotten the memo, because they have a less sanguine view of Fat Albert's pagan proselytizing:

The judge said that, for instance, Gore's script implies that Greenland or West Antarctica might melt in the near future, creating a sea level rise of up to twenty feet that would cause devastation from San Francisco to the Netherlands to Bangladesh. The judge called this "distinctly alarmist" and said the consensus view is that, if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, "but only after, and over, millennia."

Burton also said Gore contends that inhabitants of low-lying Pacific atolls have had to evacuate to New Zealand because of global warming. "But there is no such evidence of any such evacuation," the judge said.

Another error, according to the judge, is that Gore says "a new scientific study shows that for the first time they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find ice." Burton said that perhaps in the future polar bears will drown "by regression of pack-ice" but that the only study found on drowned polar bears attributed four deaths to a storm.

At issue in this case was whether Gore's enviromarxist propaganda flick could be shown in British classrooms. Alas, the judge didn't ban its exposure to young limey skulls of mush; but he did say that it could not be part of science curricula, but rather had to be identified for the political trash that it is.

The growing recognition of which is, it seems to me, why the Nobelers packed Ozone Man's trophy case, and not to bolster what would be a really Quixotic presidential bid:

For years, former Vice President Al Gore and a host of climate scientists were belittled and, worst of all, ignored for their message about how dire global warming is. On Friday, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their warnings about what Gore calls "a planetary emergency."

One left-wing extremist lies, another bunch of them swear to it, and that somehow serves as vindication? Tell me again what "science" has to do with any of this?

Steven Hayward believes that this emptyheaded PR flourish is the greenstremists' last global warming hurrah, at least until the next vehicle for their insipient chicken-littleism trundles along:

The adrenaline rush of the Nobel is likely to prove evanescent, however, and will probably turn out to be the high water mark of climate hysteria. Increasingly, climate catastrophe is coming more and more to resemble the hysteria over the “population bomb” of the late 1960s and early 1970s....

Likewise, climate change is a real phenomenon, but the catastrophic scenario of Gore and his fellow climate campaigners is steadily fraying around the edges if you follow the scientific literature closely. Has anyone noticed, for example, that global temperature has been flat for the last decade, after two decades of slow and steady increase from 1980 to 1998? Most of the climate models suggest global temperature should be consistently warming with the rise of greenhouse gases, but it has stopped. This increasingly inconvenient truth will eventually become too obvious for even the media to ignore. Meanwhile, the real world economic consequences of Gore’s policy agenda (which Obama and Edwards—but not Hillary—have signed up for) are so extreme that no self-governing people will ever submit to it, which is why a few
environmentalists have gone so far as to say openly, “down with democracy.” Go ahead; make my day; try that out on the American people. The Democratic Congress can’t even pass a modest emissions trading scheme that would barely begin to enact Gore’s agenda, because they are afraid of its cost.

Prediction: In twenty years Gore or his climate alarmist successors will be lucky to appear on cable access TV, and Gore’s Peace Prize will take its place alongside Le Duc Tho’s 1973 award as a Nobel embarrassment.

Perhaps. I think Mrs. Clinton will push as hard for Gore's agenda as she will for version 2.0 of her health care putsch. She'll just save it for her second term - and if/when Congress doesn't give it to her, she'll just impose it by Executive decree, a la Hugo Chavez. Democracy will, indeed, have nothing to do with it.

Which certainly brings into question how the architect of this mythlogical madness can possibly be described as a "hero" in any but a delicatessenary context, to say nothing of being feted as "a prophet in his own time," as Kenneth Sherrill, a political analyst at Hunter College in New York, cooed. Or bestowed an award that used to mean something, and would have been far better deserved by, say, "the hundreds, if not thousands of monks in Burma who just sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of non-violent regime change."

They laid down their lives fighting liars and despots. The Nobel committee now reserves its highest accolade for those who would follow in their footsteps.