The Nobel Committee announced that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Vice-President Gore and the scientists of the IPCC Committee. My congratulations to Gore for his work to popularize the science behind global warming and increase public awareness and to the IPCC for collecting the necessary data and achieving a consent on the science of global warming.
“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”
There is much commonality between those who deny the science behind evolution and the science behind global warming and it should not come as a surprise that there exists a strong overlap between the two categories.
The full press release below the fold
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2007
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. 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.
Indications of changes in the earth’s future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.
Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.
Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.
By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.
The same Al Gore who just had his movie ruled unfit to show in school classrooms, right?
Wrong. Next ad hominem please. How ignorance seems to be so common amongst deniers. At least you could have the decency to back up your argument with an actual reference, preferably the source ruling.
I will give you an opportunity to correct your error, if not, I will post the relevant data myself.
Time to redeem yourself. Tick Tock Tick Tock
How predictable these deniers are, and how ignorant of the facts.
It goes well beyond ignorance, to dishonest fabrication.
Do I have it right?
Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part to educate the people of the world about global warming- if global warming is combated, water scarcity will be reduced and future wars for resources will be reduced.
That is, his prize is in honour of reducing conflict in the future.
BTW, the prize was awarded to him (little spelling flame there - sure hope my attempt at bolding worked).
A preemptive peace so to speak and thanks for the spell correction
I agree, but then again, there has been an outpour of dishonest fabrications regarding the ruling.
The smell of denial in the morning. I prefer the smell of napalm… ;-)
Pim, how can you tell Patashu is a global warming denier from his comment? Am I missing something here? What happened to Popper’s comments?
please don’t critisize Patashu, he is just following the right wing talking points, they don’t even know what “peer reviewed research” means, all they have is bull pupu. Seriously, asking a right winger to respond with valid data is foolish. They have to check on what today’s talking points are. Watch him come back with a standard talking point, they just love to display their ignorance.
He’s repeated a false claim that is circulating among, and by, deniers, the most extreme form of an assertion that Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was ruled by a judge to be in error.
Information? Context? Someone who has kept up might wonder why you can’t tell that Patashu is a denier.
There’s a bug at this site; sometimes recent comments aren’t visible.
Check out this US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States to Cities. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State & City energy consumptions, demographics and much more down to your local US City level…
http://www.eredux.com/states/
Man, when you say there is a similarity between the deniers and the creationists, you are right!. I have a network of basketball fan friends from college, most of whom are somewhat conservative (not all). But two are libertarians, one of whom is a financial analyst. Anyway, most of them are skeptical on global warming. When I piped in one day, I was assaulted by the financial analyst, who accused me of not knowing science, being a narrow-minded ideologue who didn’t rely on facts, and pointing me to a whole slew of right-wing blogs for his “facts.” So, being a scientist, I checked each one bit-by-bit. All BS, and all the familiar, depressing tactics. A small group of scientists signed onto a list denying global warming. A couple of articles that couldn’t get published that were circulated around the net as an example of the conspiracy of the global warming believers to suppress criticism (the one that I evaluated in detail was complete crap – the authors don’t know how to do PCA). A lot of discussion of global warming as, basically, a religion, and some discussion that scientists have to support global warming to keep their funding (like claims that you have to accept evolution to keep your job, and that evolution is cooked up to defend a materialist worldview). And of course plenty of verbal abuse.
Patashu flat out lied!!!
“High Court Judge Michael Burton, deciding a lawsuit that questioned the film’s suitability for showing in British classrooms, said Wednesday that the movie builds a “powerful” case that global warming is caused by humans and that urgent means are needed to counter it.”
“A spokesman for the Department of Children, Schools and Families said the agency was “delighted” that students could continue to see Gore’s film. It has noted that the judge did not disagree with the film’s main point – that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are causing serious climate consequences.”
Not at all surprising, must be a creo. The judge took exception to some of Gore’s facts. I read the article and think the judge was probably off on some of his comments. The Greenland ice cap is melting faster than anyone thought possible. But predicting what the earth will be like a few decades from now is so uncertain, anything is going to be a guess. It isn’t like we have a huge data base on what happens when CO2 doubles worldwide.
Poppers Ghost
Information? Context? There must be other threads I have missed by Patashu. Damn, I just can’t tell. I’m not keeping up. Maybe it’s because my explanatory filter isn’t working.
paul
This is misreporting – the judge’s ruling puts ‘error’ in quotes; they are alleged errors. The judge only compared the film’s claims to the IPCC (“current mainstream scientific consensus”). And indeed the judge made numerous errors himself.
PvM said:
Indeed, AtBC regular Bob O’H recently discovered this little nugget by PaV at Dembski’s website UncommonlyDense:
Evolution denial, global warming denial, HIV denial…the same people use the same brainpower on all three.
original link, assuming Dembski hasn’t deleted the comment and/or entire thread by now.
It comes as no surprise, by the way, that the critic to whom PaV was replying his been banned and all his comments deleted.
He stated: “The same Al Gore who just had his movie ruled unfit to show in school classrooms, right?”
Only a global warming denier would make such a claim. Although there is a possibility that it was just an ignorant comment. Either way, his statement is untrue.
Now the truth
Stuart Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills
Nothing in the ruling supports the original statement.
Shame shame shame
I too thought the former, but googling Patashu+warming suggests that it might not be so, as s/he wrote “Why wouldn’t CO2 cause global warming? It’s classified as a greenhouse gas.”
Anyway, it was a stupid drive-by.
Here’s an analysis of judge’s nine points:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/[…]enient-.html
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/[…]enien-1.html
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/[…]enien-2.html
Even this lets the judge off too easy. The bit about polar bears is particularly bad. The judge says that there’s just one scientific study that found 4 polar bears that had drowned in a storm. Is he seriously claiming that only 4 polar bears have ever drowned? Gore is talking about polar bears drowning due to the distance they have to swim. As noted in http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne[…]le767459.ece
The judge didn’t even get the part about bears drowning in the storm right:
And the bit about Mt. Kilimmanjaro is almost as bad. Yes, Gore picked a bad example; “the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change”. But there are other glaciers for which that has been established.
What crap, from both Burton and the reporter. Burton didn’t say “Gore’s errors”, he said “some of the errors, or departures from the mainstream”. Most of these “departures” are cases where Gore says something is happening but the IPCC said we’re not sure yet that it’s happening. Those aren’t errors if Gore is right, which he probably is. Notably, the judge put ‘error’ in quotes every time referred to one of the alleged ‘errors’.
As for “alarmism”, what the heck is that? If there’s cause for alarm, it’s hardly “alarmism” to point it out. And if Gore made a few claims that aren’t quite as cautious as those of the IPCC, that doesn’t indicate that there’s a “context of exaggeration”. What “political” thesis? The judge himself said that the film is “broadly accurate”. And yet, he has mandated something that looks remarkably like “evolution is only a theory” stickers:
You mean it -wasn’t- ruled biased?
Geez, last time I listen to the news.
(and no, not a global warming denier at all, thanks)
I’ve been following this blog for years to get excellent news and scientifically sound rebuttals to the ignorance of creationism. Needless to say I’m totally flabbergasted to see you’ve fallen hook, line, and sinker for the outrageous hoax of man-made global warming. In this case it’s ironic that the same reply that serves so well to the moronic assertion that evolution is disproved by the second law of thermodynamics works equally well for the completely bogus pseudoscience that attempts to connect the earths constant long term cycles of heating and cooling to horse manure and SUV’s. Step outside and take a good long look at the large yellow ball in the sky. Don’t stare too long though because the truth just may blind you. While you’re standing outside, take a moment to get a breath of fresh air and consider a piece of advice commonly given to creationists who delve into biology discussions from a point of ignorance and consider that experts in one subject can look dismally dumb when they start asserting assumptions into another branch of science they are clueless about. Stick with evolution and you’ll do just fine but please refrain from dragging the whole site and all of your hard work down with the BS of Al Gore’s inconvenient hoax.
And, once again, another denier makes huge assertions, accuses an entire branch of science of involved in a massive conspiracy, demands opponents not discuss the issue, completely avoids addressing any of the points brought up by the author or any of the commenters, and provides absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up his or her bold claims. Shux is a textbook example of why evolution deniers and global warming deniers are so similar.
shux,
the completely bogus pseudoscience that attempts to connect the earths constant long term cycles of heating and cooling
I’ve bolded the problematic part of your diatribe. You might want to have a bit of a think about this.
Shux wrote
It has been known for 150 years that CO2 absorbs infra-red radiation and can act as a greenhouse gas.
The effect of a doubling of the level of atmospheric CO2 was calculated 100 years ago, with the predicted increase in temperature not being wildly different from current estimates.
Since the 1960s it has been known that levels of atmospheric CO2 are increasing. There is evidence from several sources that this is a result of the burning of fossil fuels.
Particulates and aerosols in the atmosphere can reduce global temperatures, as can be seen after major volcanic eruptions and also in data from several decades ago. However, pollution controls have reduced this effect.
There is no evidence of any negative feed-back processes that are remotely close to being large enough to counteract the effect of increasing CO2.
For CO2 not to be increasing global temperatures would need either a massive change in basic physics and chemistry or the discovery of a massive, hitherto unknown feedback mechanism. What are you proposing?
Remember, any claim that solar output is increasing is irrelevent in that this does not negate the predictions made from chemistry and physics. If solar output is increasing (and the evidence for this is scant) it would tend to result in observed global temperatures being greater than predicted.
Patashu said
It might be preferable instead just to pay more attention to what you write (“The same Al Gore who just had his movie ruled unfit to show in school classrooms, right?” from your first post). Moving your target and saying it was “ruled biased” is still, to my way of thinking, a biased comment.
From the ruling
The judge then looked at some (minor) issues which were ‘errors’ may cause a political bias accusation. Certainly it’s good to hear that Patashu has recognized, though not yet admitted, that the original statement was wrong, and even the second statement was still lacking in sufficient details.
Snort. What a moronic ignoramus. That the sun plays a role in climate doesn’t mean that only the sun plays a role in climate. This “the sun did it” argument is the most idiotic one held by the deniers. Has Shux even heard of the greenhouse effect? He gives no indication of it. In fact, it is Shux who is making the same sort of mistake as the creationists. by ignoring that which contradicts his ideologically based position.
Aside from the dishonest moving of goal posts, there’s your dishonest cherry picking. The judge’s ruling confirmed the very thing for which Gore was awarded the prize, so yes, that Al Gore.
I don’t walk, I sort of hover … it’s spookier. Maybe I can lure the priest into a heresy (the rabbi will probably end up dancing on the table).
I’d like to know what part of the cost argument you might find disagreeable (if any). I’m personally convinced that the fear of high costs lies at the heart of the global warming denial. And to me at least, it seems self-evident that global climate change, regardless of what all causes it, is sure to have very real costs in some regions regardless of the nature of the change. Every proposal I’ve seen to reduce emissions has associated costs to the emitters (and their customers).
My reading is also that the costs of reducing emissions are both high and quantifiable, while the benefits are mostly conjecture and speculation, and highly contingent on the emission-reduction techniques employed. Most such techniques simply substitute one type of pollution for another. Even a proposal as simple as jacking up gasoline taxes to nosebleed levels might provoke the perversity of human ingenuity - and be a hard genie to stuff back into the bottle. Politicians would spend that money on *something*, and bureaucratic programs once started are close to immortal.
To paraphrase an old caution, it’s not nice messing with mother market mechanism.
I follow Real Climate daily and sometimes post comments there. My observation is that politely expressed views do indeed eventually appear. Neither personal attacks nor, usually, off-topic comments are allowed, with occasionally some posts partially edited by the moderators. On some occasions the moderation on that site requires as long as 26 hours.
There are at least two classes of commenters there, just as there are here. There are those amateurs who have studied some aspects of climatology rather thoroughly and are often willing to help the somewhat confused and bewildered clarify some aspect of the climate sciences.
The claim that Dr. James E. Hansen engages in excess or hyperbole is simply wrong. He is a careful and responsible scientist.
If Alan wishes to carry on further regarding any aspects on climatology, I recommend that he move to Real Climate where there are several ready to provide guidance regarding the science.
Biologists might care about the climatological predictions since these appear to be related to the Sixth Mass Extinction.
I was credited with making good points when I hadn’t made any points … that all the above statement was about.
My view of those who assert any sort of “natural” market law isn’t far from my view of theologists and creation “scientists”, except that the former are much more dangerous. I suggest reading Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”.
It must be rough living in a world where everyone is beating you up.
Seriously, I suggest therapy for your persecution complex and tendency toward hyperbole. I suspect it has something to do with your Christian upbringing.
For an exposition of Washington Post slanted coverage alone, see Tim Lambert’s walk through at Deltoid, making quite a list.
A linked post also describes how the nine alleged ‘errors’ were chosen from a longer list of “alleged errors or exaggerations” as persuasive, and “did not relate to an analysis of the scientific questions, but to an assessment of whether the ‘errors’ in question, set out in the context of a political film, informed the argument” on the matter before the judge.
Malaria was a major disease in Sweden up to the 19th century. As in the rest of Europe (excepting Island) malaria lingered on to the 1920’s, when changes in farming practices, improved housing and increased availability of medication made it spontaneously disappear. [Sorry, no english references.]
The last recorded case of natively transmitted disease was 1933 in Sweden. The Anopheles mosquito is still native, just without the parasite. AFAIK the current strategic work to incorporate AGW in future planning is mostly concentrated on changing building and municipal codes for increased erosion, loss of fresh water resources, et cetera. [Note to AGW deniers: who cares what you think now anyway, AGW is already costing us $$$.] But malaria is probably expected to be a recurring risk, contingent on its spread through Europe.
As there is also parallel work to reintroduce more wet lands to somewhat ameliorate rare species habitat loss, even in the face of getting increased warm house gas release, the Anopheles habitat will certainly increase again.
Alan Bates:
I think you confuse the market of ideas that is science and its process of competition for the best science and the measure of current scientific thinking that the consensus is. Consensus can’t tell us what is the correct, verified or best science. But it can tell us what is the currently accepted science.
AGW is such. But a detailed discussion is neither here nor th…, actually, removing it to Real Climate is a really good suggestion. If not, perhaps AtBC fits.
I’m pretty sure they are referring to likelihoods by this measure, as it is describing what has already happened, and incorporating the conditional of anthropogenicity. So I sincerely doubt Fisher of all people would have had a problem with that.
And before I get hammered on a biology site, I’m aware that Anopheles mosquito comprises several species. It came out wrong.
Alan Bates said “I will respond to the question about whether or not there are peer-reviewed papers…”
Find any?, I didn’t!
Update