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 awards foundations.Once upon a time I really believed the Nobel Prize was a meaningful award, especially when given for peace. But as I grew older and wise to the workings of the world I have come to view it as another political device, despite their claims to the contrary.
The Nobel committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, asserted that the prize was not aimed at the Bush administration, which rejected Kyoto and was widely criticized outside the U.S. for not taking global warming seriously enough.Yeah so why mention it?
At the time, then committee chairman Gunnar Berge called the prize "a kick in the leg" to the Bush administration for its threats of war against Iraq. In response, some members of the secretive committee criticized Berge for expressing personal views in the panel's name.To further validate my point, the last American to get the Peace Prize was former President Jimmy Carter. I guess you can't have conservative values and earn a peace prize. But there are others who see this as a political machination.
"Awarding it to Al Gore cannot be seen as anything other than a political statement. Awarding it to the IPCC is well-founded," said Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist.He criticized Gore's film as having "some very obvious mistakes, like the argument that we're going to see six meters of sea-level rise," he said.And yet they gave him 1.5 million dollars for his role in crying wolf internationally. But there are some who at least tried to put it into the context of a peace prize.
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior U.N. official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.Remember Jan? He is the former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, known for calling the U.S. stingy during the tsunami relief effort of 2004. Now he is supporting the committee's decision on Gore because some nomads, herders and farmers are "in conflict" over land during a drought. A drought that is obviously the fault of global warming. Go Al! But where's the peace?
"It is a question of war and peace," said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
I guess there are a lot of folks hoping Gore would use this award as a springboard into the 2008 Presidential race. Insiders for the Goracle say President of the U.S. isn't big enough for Al now.
If anything, the Peace Prize makes the rough-and-tumble of a presidential race less appealing to Gore, they said, because now he has a huge, international platform to fight global warming and may not want to do anything to diminish it.I guess you really are somebody if becoming President of the United States would diminish what you are doing.
Personally I think Big Al got an award because the moonbats wanted to honor one of their own and there is no Nobel Prize for Global Warming. Oh there may be one some day but they couldn't wait. They need to strike while the iron is hot for their cause celebre, before common sense and scientific fact cool it off. You know like it did for the causes of homelessness, overpopulation, and the decimation of Africa from AIDS.
