Nobel Peace Prize goes to Al Gore and IPCC

The author of today’s post, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

Today Al Gore and the IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their efforts to raise public awareness and understanding of the global climate change crisis. We applaud them, and also the Nobel committee for recognizing the threats global warming poses to security and stability around the world.

Congress now has the opportunity to make the U.S. a leader on climate change by harnessing the unprecedented momentum for strong policies to cap and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“It would be great to see the U.S. Congress nominated next year for taking on the problem and passing comprehensive climate legislation.” said Environmental Defense President Fred Krupp. “After Al Gore stands on the stage in Oslo to receive his award, I think the American public will turn to the leaders of both parties in the U.S. Congress to see where they stand. The scientific evidence that the former vice president and the IPCC have helped drive home tells us there’s no consolation prize for Congress if it fails to act.”

This entry was posted in News. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

8 Comments

  1. hiomoose
    Posted October 12, 2007 at 3:57 pm | Permalink

    My take on Global warming.
    No doubt that the greenhouse effect is adding fuel to the earths natural trend to slowly change it’s climate profiles every 25,000 to 100,000 years. However, I think the scientists with their deep core samples will again find it’s happened many times before, with or without fossil fuel. History will repeat itself and we will all be gone, the ocean will rise, the shoreline erodes, New York City, and others, become a coral reef, and another civilization 25-50,000 years from now, will be finding our fossils along with more dinosaur’s remains and flying saucers in New Mexico.

    More glory hounds like Al Gore and Michael Moore will come along and take credit for trying to save the Earth again.

    Don’t sell your ocean front property, yet. It ain’t gonna happen in our lifetime!

    That’s my take on it, and the following explains why:

    To read a quick synopsis, go to:
    http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

    Towards the end you will read:

    The Kyoto Protocol calls for mandatory carbon dioxide reductions of 30% from developed countries like the U.S. Reducing man-made CO2 emissions this much would have an undetectable effect on climate while having a devastating effect on the U.S. economy. Can you drive your car 30% less, reduce your winter heating 30%? Pay 20-50% more for everything from automobiles to zippers? And that is just a down payment, with more sacrifices to come later.
    Such drastic measures, even if imposed equally on all countries around the world, would reduce total human greenhouse contributions from CO2 by about 0.035%.
    This is much less than the natural variability of Earth’s climate system!
    While the greenhouse reductions would exact a high human price, in terms of sacrifices to our standard of living, they would yield statistically negligible results in terms of measurable impacts to climate change. There is no expectation that any statistically significant global warming reductions would come from the Kyoto Protocol.

    ________________________________________
    ” There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures — one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. ”

    Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
    Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
    and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
    in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal
    ________________________________________

    Research to Watch
    Scientists are increasingly recognizing the importance of water vapor in the climate system. Some, like Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, suggest that it is such an important factor that much of the global warming in the last 10,000 years may be due to the increasing water vapor concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere.
    His research indicates that air reaching glaciers during the last Ice Age had less than half the water vapor content of today. Such increases in atmospheric moisture during our current interglacial period would have played a far greater role in global warming than carbon dioxide or other minor gases.

  2. Sam I Am
    Posted October 14, 2007 at 10:08 am | Permalink

    BFD, so Al Gore joins the club along with Jimmy Carter, a failed president and Yassar Arafat, a terrorist. The Nobel Peace Prize is joke.

  3. Mister EC
    Posted October 14, 2007 at 1:24 pm | Permalink

    Of course the earth is changing, and has naturally changed, and will continue to change. Does man cause this?

    Watch these videos on Google CBC – Global Warming Doomsday Called Off

    The Great Global Warming Swindle

    Listen to Dr. Bill Wattenburg on Global Warming Hypocrites

    If Global Warming is man-made, and caused by CO2, why are they against nuclear power which creates no greenhouse gas?

    The nuclear power for a family of four for twenty years generates no more than a shoe box of spent fuel rods that critics call “nuclear waste”. The nuclear hysterics will not allow our country to reprocess the rods to extract the highly radioactive isotopes and reclaim the plutonium that can be used as new fuel. If we reprosess the spent fuel rods, the remaining “waste” that must be buried for a family of four for fifty years will fit in a pill bottle or a shot glass. Compare this to the scare stories you get from the nuclear hysterics who would have you believe that nuclear power plants generate mountains of nuclear waste that can be scattered all over the world. The total nuclear waste generated by all 103 nuclear plants in the U.S. over the last fifty years will fit in the volume of a typical high school gym (77,000 tons by weight so far). Does that sound like an enormous task? Or difficult to safeguard once it is stored a thousand feet inside of a mountain?

  4. K.C. Weber
    Posted October 14, 2007 at 4:08 pm | Permalink

    While global warming is a deffinite problem, it must be pointed out the BBC News has reported that a High Court judge has ruled that Al Gore’s Oscar winning film “An Inconvenient Truth,” has nine statements in it not supported by mainstream scientific consensus.

    The judge ruled that the film could be shown as long as updated guidelines are followed, and teachers should point out controversial or desputed sections.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm

    Mr. Justice Burton told London’s High Court that distributing the film without guidance to counter its “one sided” views would breach educational laws.

    Three of the nine errors from the film were described in the BBC News article.

    K.C. Weber

  5. anthony
    Posted October 15, 2007 at 3:40 am | Permalink

    Liberals claim to always adhere to science, and we knuckle-draggers still aren’t sure how to handle fire. For you scientific sort, a couple of questions. I’ll try to keep my big, square, hairy fingers hitting the right keys.
    First, you tree-huggers and your buddy Al claim that the burning of fossil fuels is what is causing global warming, if there is such a thing. my first question is, what caused the global warming a couple of hundred thousand years ago which was so extreme that most of what is now the continental US was covered by ocean, and what wasn’t ocean was marshland? Who were the evil oil and gas and coal producers who created all that heat? Who was the evil George Bush, the evil Dick Cheney, and ohmygod, the evil Halliburton monsters? And by the way, in order for that much water to flood the land, you great thinkers must understand that there could have been NO artic ice. So tell me geniuses, how did the polar bears and seals and all those other animals that are in such desparate straits survive? Or did they all perish along with the glaciers? Maybe GOD re-created them?
    Do you geniuses understand that at one time the northeastern US was under two and one half miles of ice? If you were keeping warm by a fireplace like those idiots in The Day After Tomorrow, when you looked up, there would be about 13,000 feet of ice over your head. Better not wait for those rescue helicopters. At that time, the shore line of what is now the US was approximately 62 miles to the east. For those of you who beleive everthing European is better than anything American, that’s about 100 kilometers. The Al Gore of that time would really have deserved some kind of prize if he could have kept all that ice from melting and ruining all that beachfront property. Somehow, the dreadful thought that the oceans might rise 2 inches over the next hundred years just doesn’t arouse the kind of terror in me that Al believes it should. I’m really sorry.

  6. Posted October 16, 2007 at 11:11 am | Permalink

    Anthony (aka “knuckle-dragger”, as you called yourself) – You asked:

    my first question is, what caused the global warming a couple of hundred thousand years ago which was so extreme that most of what is now the continental US was covered by ocean, and what wasn’t ocean was marshland?

    This is a logical error of the type called “ignoratio elenchi”:

    ———————
    ignoratio elenchi n.
    A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as “irrelevant conclusion”. [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]
    ———————

    Just because there was climate change eons ago that was not caused by human activity does NOT mean that today’s climate change is not caused by human activity. These are independent events. There is no logical reason to think they have the same cause.

    And now I have a question for you. You noted that global climate change can cause such widespread flooding that entire continents can be submerged (or at the very least, entire shorelines shifted). Eons ago there were not 6 billion humans on earth as there are today. You don’t see the flooding of heavily populated shorelines and the displacement and death of tens of millions of human beings as a problem?

  7. cochranj
    Posted October 16, 2007 at 11:40 am | Permalink

    In some way I think we can tend to lose sight of what may be more important – social responsibiilty. Sure this may be just one more cycle of many, but shouldn’t we all be responsible for our actions? Or do we just toss our hands up in the air and say the hell with it? I really don’t care if the next generation experiences an increase in health care cost because the number of incidences in treating astham significantly increases because of air pollution. I really don’t care if the price of a gallon of gas reaches five dollars. Not I. I will not lose sight of the impact climate change will have on my future years or the future years of my children.

  8. cochranj
    Posted October 16, 2007 at 11:56 am | Permalink

    In reply to comment from K.C. Weber; WOW! You mean a judge of no scientific basis passes judgement on what he deems reality and a stretch of the imagination! If that is the case, can we begin to pass laws to protect young children from being falsely led by advertisers?