If the Nobel Foundation had any respectability left, it lost it when Al Gore and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change. Before this it had already been plain that the awarding of Nobel Prizes, the Peace prize and others, were highly political. How else can both Hayek and a socialist be awarded the economics prize at the same time? They can’t both be right.
The latest Nobel Peace Prize hasn’t just been awarded for something that happens to be politically popular right now. What do shrill proclamations about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have to do with peace? What does the advocating of statist environmental laws and regulations have to do with peace? Not a thing. In fact, they are very nearly the opposite of peaceful, fomenting special interest warfare through statist politics, and including legalized plunder.
Moreover, the IPCC itself is a highly politicized organization, dominated by ideological government scientists and non-scientist politicians and bureaucrats. But Al Gore is even worse. His movie, An Inconvenient Truth is rife with errors, possibly even outright lies, and even Gore is significantly at odds with the so-called IPCC “consensus.” If that weren’t bad enough, Al Gore refuses to debate his critics.
For more on this farce, see here, here (and here), here, here, here, here, here, and here. And also here, although I don’t agree with Lomborg’s unqualifiedly positive assessment of the IPCC.
[Update 10/16/07 12:45pm: Here are some more blog reactions: retired climate scientist Philip Stott (1, 2); an official IPCC reviewer calls for its abolition; and quite a few more listed here. And for a little taste of Gore’s true character, see here.]
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the