Defining Peace Down

[Big Don]

[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times]Defining Peace Down[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times]James Tarranto[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times]Opinion Journal.com[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times]October 12, 2007[/FONT][/FONT]
Excerpt:
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times] On Tuesday the Nobel Foundation announced that Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance. This morning Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his global warmist propagandizing. But despite Gore's scientific pretensions, his prize was not in physics, or in any other scientific discipline. The best he could do was the Peace Prize.[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times] Gore became only the second former U.S. vice president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Theodore Roosevelt, 101 years ago. (A sitting veep, Charles Dawes, also won in 1926.) A comparison between Roosevelt's prize and Gore's shows how far the Nobel Peace Prize has strayed from its original purpose: Roosevelt won the prize for negotiating a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Gore won it for something that has nothing to do with peace.[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times] But if you look at the list of Nobel Peace Prizes, you'll see that in recent years it has often gone to people or organizations whose work, while often worthy, has little to do with the promotion of peace per se. Last year the prize went to a Bangladeshi banker and a bank for their efforts to make credit available to the very poor. In 2004, it went to Wangari Maathai for planting trees in Kenya.[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Times][FONT=Verdana, Times] One reason for this may be that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has had reason to be disappointed in the results when it has given awards to more traditional peacemakers.[/FONT][/FONT]
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/index.html

 

[Big Don]

Bankers? Fake scientists, notorious terrorists... Peace Prize...

 

[Flying Crane]

Setting aside the issue of the Prize, is there something you find objectionable about the work that these people have done?

 

[Big Don]

Gore? Or other Nobel laureates?
Gore's global warming hypocrisy is fairly well known. Telling people to drive less while flitting around the world on private jets, having a monthly gas and electric bill higher than some people's annual mortgages, making a movie with enough distortions and outright lies to choke a spotted owl...yeah, you might say I have a problem with his "work". As to past laureates, yeah, I have a few problems there too...
The short list:
Giving Yassar Arafat a Peace prize is akin to naming Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot great humanitarians.
Jimmy Carter, well, yes, he has tried to be a broker of peace, and failed at every turn. Shouldn't a prize be for an actual accomplishment? Most prizes are.
Mr Yunus, and his bank: While certainly admirable, their work has nothing to do with propagating world peace.
Le Duc Tho, what exactly was his contribution to peace? After the treaty, he was instrumental in seeing thousands of his countrymen rest in peace...

 

[Blotan Hunka]

From Wikipedia:

The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish and Norwegian: Nobels fredspris) is the name of one of five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

 

[Flying Crane]

Gore's global warming hypocrisy is fairly well known. Telling people to drive less while flitting around the world on private jets, having a monthly gas and electric bill higher than some people's annual mortgages, making a movie with enough distortions and outright lies to choke a spotted owl...yeah, you might say I have a problem with his "work".

wow. While I cannot speak to Mr. Gore's personal energy consumption, if you really believe Global Warming is little more than lies and distortions, I suggest you are terribly misinformed. This issue is absolutely not in dispute among the legitimate scientific community.

Those who do try to dispute it seem to be among the following:
1) Politicians who are afraid to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation because they don't want to face the economic and social ramifications connected to the problem
2) Big Oil and other related industries who profit from the exploitation of the Earth's natural resources
3) "Scientists" who have sold all credibility by acting as the mouthpiece and tool of 1 and 2 above.
4) members of the duped public who are willing to sit and look the other way because it is more convenient.

I don't believe Mr. Gore ever suggested he was a scientist. He is just working to educate the public and make the problem clear so we get off our stupid asses, pull our collective heads out of the sand, and do something about it.

Jimmy Carter, well, yes, he has tried to be a broker of peace, and failed at every turn. Shouldn't a prize be for an actual accomplishment? Most prizes are.

I dunno. Seems like those even willing to work on peace are few and far between these days. At least he's been willing to get out there and try, unlike so many of our current and former politicians. Maybe that's worth something.

Mr Yunus, and his bank: While certainly admirable, their work has nothing to do with propagating world peace.

to the contrary, I will suggest that giving the very poor the opportunity to better their position is a huge humanitarian act. When the disenfranchised and downtrodden find hope and a chance to build a better life, then social unrest and the potential for explosive violence and civil war diminish greatly. I can't imagine begrudging these people this kind of opportunity and I hold only respect for someone willing to extend them that chance.

It just sounds like you've got some very hostile attitudes towards some things that I just don't understand what there is to be hostile about.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

Hardly....

The Climate of Fear

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | December 24, 2006

BACK IN 1961, Rod Serling set an episode of "The Twilight Zone" in New York City at a time of uncontrolled global warming. Somehow the Earth's orbit had shifted, and the planet was moving inexorably toward the sun. "This is the eve of the end," Serling intoned in his introduction. "Because even at midnight it's high noon, the hottest day in history, and you're about to spend it -- in the Twilight Zone."

The episode revolves around a few desperate New Yorkers struggling to survive the murderous heat. As the temperature climbs, social order crumbles. An intruder, crazed with thirst, breaks into an apartment to steal water. An elderly woman collapses and dies. Thermometers shatter, their mercury boiling over. Finally Norma, the main character, screams and passes out. Then comes the twist: Norma wakes up to find that it's snowing outside. She'd been having a nightmare. The Earth isn't hurtling toward the sun, after all; it's spinning away from the sun. The world isn't going to end in searing heat, but in a dark and deathly deep-freeze. Fade to credits.

Well, that's climate change for you. Maybe Mother Earth is warming up, or maybe she's cooling down, but either way it's always bad news.

Here, for example, is former vice president Al Gore in 2006, on the threat posed by global warming: "Our ability to live is what is at stake." It doesn't get much more dire than that.

Yet here is climatologist Reid Bryson, in Fortune magazine's award-winning analysis of global cooling in 1974: "It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth -- like a billion people starving." It doesn't get much more dire than that, either.

Bryson's article is quoted in "Fire and Ice," a richly documented report by the Business & Meida Institute, an arm of the Media Research Center. Climate-change alarmism is at least a century old, and the report offers many examples of it:

In 1902, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures. But by 1923, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada," the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.

So it was curtains for the Canadians? Uh, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times announced that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat." Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren't off the hook after all: "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in "The Cooling," his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union." And now? "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the Times reported in 2002.

Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can't be true. Or to wonder whether any of them are.

Perhaps that is why most Americans discount the climate-change fear-mongering that is so fashionable among journalists and politicians. Last spring, as Time magazine was hyperventilating about global warming ("The debate is over. Global warming is upon us -- with a vengeance. From floods to fires, droughts to storms, the climate is crashing"), a Gallup poll was finding that only 36 percent of the public say they worry "a great deal" about it.

Still, there is always a market for apocalyptic forebodings. Paul Ehrlich grew rich predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings from starvation and epidemic disease. "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome's 1972 bestseller, warned that humankind was going to experience "a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline" as the world's resources -- everything from gold to petroleum -- ran dry. Jonathan Schell and Carl Sagan forecast a devastating "nuclear winter" unless atomic arsenals were frozen, or better still, abolished. Those doomsday prophesies never came to pass. Neither have the climate-change catastrophes that have been bruited about for a century.

"The whole aim of practical politics," wrote H.L. Mencken in 1920, "is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Some things never change.