The Nobel Propaganda Prize

Al Gore? With monks facing bullets in Myanmar, journalists being suppressed and killed in Russia, terrorism and poverty and sickness rampant worldwide, The Man who Was Almost President is the most deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize? Of course, the prize has a history of questionable winners--for every Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, you have Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, and Yasser Arafat (and I do not mean to compare Al Gore to these last three in terms of moral equivalency--he is far superior).

I do like Gore, and I appreciate the passion with which he promotes his cause. He does a tremendous service in raising awareness that more attention and money need to be devoted to the environment and renewable energy sources. But on climate change he has acted irresponsibly—by playing Chicken Little. News flash: the sky is not falling. Disaster is not imminent. Sea levels are not about to rise 20 feet and swallow Florida. The end is not nigh.

A high court judge in the UK found An Inconvenient Truth to be "alarmist" and "one-sided," and to include nine key errors. Unfortunately, the most popular "documentaries" are in reality propaganda pieces (see: Michael Moore). We would be better served if they were actually careful examinations of the science and arguments on both sides, thus allowing the viewer to come to his/her own conclusion. Science is the pursuit of truth. Knowledge advances through debate and disagreement—has there truly been a debate on climate change? I do not mean if the planet is warming or not—it is. But what is the net result of such change? What can we expect? To what degree are humans responsible? How much can be attributed to natural causes? What is the silver lining? Is there anything we can actually do to stop it, or are we better off focusing our efforts on adaptation?

The key point here: climate change does not necessarily have to be bad; undoubtedly some will have to make changes to their way of life, but for others it could mean an increase in quality of life. With increased warmth, agriculture could grow in places where it could not before. Also, there will be less cold-related deaths, which far outnumber heat-related ones. What other benefits are there and, for those who will be negatively impacted, how can we use our ingenuity to offset the change? Such inquiry is unfortunately not politically correct; we are not supposed to say that an island in the south Pacific must adapt because of the Western world's use of fossil fuels. But does anyone believe that humans, overall, would have been better off without the use of oil and coal? If so, I would like to hear your argument against mankind's progress.

The judge reviewed the movie because someone objected to it being shown to children in school. The environment is a subject that kids must learn about; but when they are more scared of climate change than terrorism, something is very wrong: sixty percent of middle school children surveyed are frightened most by global warming and other natural disasters, compared to only 22 percent for terrorism. Horror films like The Day After Tomorrow do not help. They should be more scared about politicians' assaults, from both the right and left, on science--how little money is going to renewable energy research, stem cells, and space exploration, and how politicized the research is.

Instead of indoctrinating people to be in a perpetual state of fear, we should be teaching them to be more waste-and-energy conscious. And we most certainly need better science education. I have had people say to me that recent events, earthquakes, tsunamis, and Hurricane Katrina, were a direct result of global warming. Katrina was a category 3 storm when it made landfall (more powerful storms have hit the Gulf Coast decades ago). The reason it was so destructive was not climate change, but the failure of the government to adequately build and maintain flood defenses. There are many who blame every ill on global warming. How could people be so ill-informed? We must stop politicizing science and getting science lessons from politicians.

Research must lead the way to policy, not the other way around.