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239 comments on DrumBeat: October 12, 2007

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Leanan on October 12, 2007 - 9:46am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Already the critics are complaining that climate change has nothing to do with peace. Good grief, have they been living in a cave? Even the Pentagon is warning that climate change will fuel warfare and unrest.

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ilargi on October 12, 2007 - 11:41am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

There's nothing wrong with climate change as a topic linked to peace. For those who don't get that one yet, just wait a few years more. But Gore and the IPCC are the exact wrong bodies to award it to. It's one-on-one the same as giving Kissinger the prize in 1973.

The IPCC has by now sufficiently been proven to be a hopelessly backward, always-late and inadequate panel. When 2000 scientists have to reach consensus on every single word published, that is no surprise, All that sort of organization requires is a handful of industry stoogies, and they'll never get anything right. It was set up that way for precisely that purpose: to be a huge failure. And that's the only part of it that actually works.

Gore waxes incessantly about the growth opportunities offered by climate change, if only we all get "green jobs". The 180 off-the-mark message, either utterly clueless or intentionally misleading. No, we cannot keep this economy rolling and save the planet's climate and ecosystem at the same time.

And, really, this was the message:

"This live coverage of Live Earth was brought to you by Chevy".

If that's not clear enough, we have nothing left to talk about.

Gore is as wrong as the IPCC is, and both are the completely and gloriously wrong parties to hand this award to for global warming. They fail in every sense there is. And hereby, so does the Nobel committee. And whatever still might have been done to prevent the worst outcomes, fades ever further into the distance, receding beyond horizons. It's not as if there were no other candidates with a connection to the subject. There are activists like Sheila Watt-Cloutier, and there are scientists like James Hansen.

The one word that truly fits the occassion is perverse.

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john macklin on October 12, 2007 - 11:54am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

It's amazing Hansen was passed over for the prize.

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jaha on October 12, 2007 - 4:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Giving Hansen the prize would have been my choice for this years prize, as the theme seems to be AGW, but that's not the way the system works. The peace prize is a tool for the nobel comittee to highlight something they feel is important, and that is in some way related to peace. Last year it was microcredit and economic development among the extremely poor, before that nuclear proliferation.

This year it's global warming. I have not seen Gore's movie, but a lot of people have. Gore is very famous, and the comittee decided that awarding the prize to him would get the most bang for the buck when it comes to publicity. The fact that he is just an ordinary politician and that the IPCC seems to be always hopelessly outdated doesn't matter, because most people doesn't know that.

Personally I believe Norway should give the prize back to sweden, the reason we got to hand it out in the first place was that Norway hadn't started a war in modern times, and it probably seemed like a nice gesture towards the Swe-Nor union's "little brother". After Norway went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan I don't see how we can credibly hand out this prize.

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ilargi on October 12, 2007 - 4:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

After Norway went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan I don't see how we can credibly hand out this prize.

Well, it is only fitting that the prize is awarded by the wrong people to the wrong people. That is an excellent way to make sure the wrong message is delivered.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one who sees the perversity.

Sharon Astyk wrote this morning:

Well, Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Prize, something I'm more than a little ambivalent about. On the one hand, they both did an enormous amount to draw attention to climate change, and that's really important.

On the other hand, in re: Al Gore, I'm reminded of what Tom Lehrer said when Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize, that it made political satire obsolete.

I mean the man was a participant in the Clinton policies that, among other things, allowed half a million kids in Iraq to die from sanctions.

But then again, I would have thought "never was a Nazi" was a criteria for Pope, and that's clearly untrue. And obviously the "never was a mass murderer" bar for the Nobel Peace Prize, if it ever existed, is long since broken. Probably my standards are too high.

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Twilight on October 12, 2007 - 2:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think you misjudge him. I have evolved (devolved?) to a realist (i.e. doomer) point of view, as I do not see any "solution" that would result in making our present lives and lifestyles viable again. But painting a picture of what I think is coming our way would never work, even though I really believe it is true. The fact is that with regard to climate change, the trigger has already been pulled, and the changes are already locked in for the remainder of my natural life, and that of my children as well. But we could still help change things for the longer range, and that is worth while.

To my thinking, the discussion should really be moving to mitigation strategies, as opposed to prevention, but even there I see many problems that appear to be unsolvable. Nonetheless, how can we possibly move to a discussion of mitigation, when people still deny the possibility of anything happening? Gore's efforts are targeted at the mainstream center, and I think they are well targeted too. Al Gore is clearly a bright man, and he has been thinking about these issues for a very long time. He has access to all of this information, and I think the odds that he might fail to understand the implications are slim. But he could not possibly come out and show the more dire situation reflected by reality to the masses. The blowback would destroy the message and the messenger, and nothing would be accomplished.

So what can he accomplish? I do not know, but somehow I cannot help but feel it is right to let people know the truth, even if you don't believe they'll do anything useful with it, and even if there isn't anything useful they can do with it. And the masses will need to have their truth dispensed in small doses before they are receptive to the whole picture.

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SacredCowTipper on October 12, 2007 - 2:52pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Where have we been fighting? Oh, Somalia, under great stress due to climate change, and Afghanistan, facing the same?

There is a very strong correlation between climate change that affects humans and humans affecting those around them. Any assertion to the contrary is purely Faux Noise style stupidity in motion ...

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bec336 on October 12, 2007 - 3:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I seem to recall a Pentagon report which predicted global climate change in the future, where "Once again, warfare would define human life."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0222-01.htm

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