Gore for Nobel Prize

[4moreyears]

Although I disagree with his politics it is good to see him making a contribution in an area that often gets overlooked. Regardless if believe what he discusses in his documentary is id good to bring awareness and discussion to this topic.


OSLO, Norway - Former Vice President Al Gore was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his wide-reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming, a Norwegian lawmaker said Thursday.

“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference,” Conservative Member of Parliament Boerge Brende, a former minister of environment and then of trade, told The Associated Press.

Brende said he joined political opponent Heidi Soerensen of the Socialist Left Party to nominate Gore as well as Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier before the nomination deadline expired Thursday.
Story continues below ↓ advertisement

“Al Gore, like no other, has put climate change on the agenda. Gore uses his position to get politicians to understand, while Sheila works from the ground up,” Brende said.

"I think climate change is the biggest challenge we face in this century," Brende said.

During eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore pushed for climate measures, including the Kyoto Treaty. Since leaving office in 2001 he has campaigned worldwide, including with his Oscar-nominated documentary on climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Norwegian lawmakers are among the thousands of people and groups with rights to nominate Nobel candidates. Others include members of national governments, past laureates, members of the awards committee and its staff, and many university professors.

The winner is traditionally announced in mid-October, with the prize always presented on the Dec. 10 anniversary of the death of its creator, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

The secretive Nobel committee never comments on specific nominations, but members often note that anyone can be nominated. Last year, there were 191 nominations for the prize that went to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded to help the poor.

Other announced nominations for the 2007 prize include Vietnamese Monk Thich Quang Do and Sail Training International, a British-based charity helping young people develop through sailing.

The five-member Norwegian awards committee accepts proposals postmarked by Feb. 1 and expects a rough count of nominations on Feb. 12.

In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, which Brende said shows the award committee's focus on ecological problems as a source of conflict.

Link (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16920923/from/RS.1/)

[ELVIS]

Why scientists find climate change so hard to predict.

Oct. 23, 2006 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15391426/site/newsweek/)

In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.



:elvis:

[scamper]

Have they figured out what caused global warming before humans were on this planet?

[m_dixon1984]

Left-wing nuts - want to scare to us into thinking the world is going to end because of we're polluting the environment.

Right-wing nuts - want scare us into thinking the world is going to end because of nuclear arms proliferation and Islamic fundamentalists with aspirations of world domination.

Let’s hope the DLR/VH rumours are true because it seems time is running out for this reunion to happen.

:bottle:

M

PS - It' too bad there aren't any major volcanoes in the middle-east. A major eruption there could wipe out Islamic fundamentalists and cover the earth's atmosphere in a layer of volcanic ash that would cool the planet for a decade or more. That would shut everyone up.

[knuckleboner]

Originally posted by scamper
Have they figured out what caused global warming before humans were on this planet?

dude, don't confuse natural climate change (which takes place over millenia) with man-made climate changes (which apparently take place over decades).

at this point in time, damn near every scientist out there has agreed that man's actions have had some effect on the global climate, causing changes. the science is pretty strong.



now, feel free to argue whether it's going to happen today or 25 years from now; or whether we should be looking to have ZERO impact on the climate (and possibly no civilization as a result) or whether we should try to manage and balance man's impact.

but ignoring the scientific effects altogether is pretty selfish, in that we don't care what happens to the next generation, or pretty foolish.

[sadaist]

Whether you believe in global warming or not, we should still be finding ways to have a cleaner environment.

[Matt White]

Originally posted by sadaist
Whether you believe in global warming or not, we should still be finding ways to have a cleaner environment.

DING DING DING

CORRECT...ABSOLUTELY...CORRECT

http://scnc.sandcreek.k12.mi.us/main/hs/sports/sa/gold_medal_rocking_md_wht.gif

[scamper]

Originally posted by sadaist
Whether you believe in global warming or not, we should still be finding ways to have a cleaner environment.

I'm for that.

[scamper]

Originally posted by m_dixon1984
cover the earth's atmosphere in a layer of volcanic ash that would cool the planet for a decade or more.

Now we're talkin, snowboarding year around...

[FORD]

Meanwhile, in Crawford Texas, the BCE was secretly plotting to steal this award from President Gore........

[hideyoursheep]

Originally posted by sadaist
Whether you believe in global warming or not, we should still be finding ways to have a cleaner environment.


But........what about my Roadrunner and my SUV's?


ME ME ME ME ME!

That's where it begins. ;)

[Nitro Express]

I live right next to the biggest supervolcano in the world that could errupt at any time. We are history here if that thing blows.

I'll just let the rest of you fight over what little food is left after the world is plunged into tottal darkness for a year from all the ash in the atmosphere.

[Nitro Express]

Al Gore is on a roll with Oscar nominations and Nobel Prize nominations. Who wants to fuck that up by running for president? Plus, the new president is going to have a hell of a job cleaning up monkey poo at the Whitehouse.

[Lqskdiver]

Gore should have just run on the Green Party. Now they prais e the guy out of pity.

[scamper]

Originally posted by hideyoursheep
But........what about my Roadrunner and my SUV's?


ME ME ME ME ME!

That's where it begins. ;)

But.....what about flying across the country for my vacation....
Shut down the airlines they are the biggest sources of pollution out there.

[hideyoursheep]

Originally posted by Nitro Express
Al Gore is on a roll with Oscar nominations and Nobel Prize nominations. Who wants to fuck that up by running for president? Plus, the new president is going to have a hell of a job cleaning up monkey poo at the Whitehouse.

With the current world situation being what it is, I think the presidency is over his head.
And I'm still pissed at Tipper. :mad:

[hideyoursheep]

Originally posted by hideyoursheep
But........what about my Roadrunner and my SUV's?


Just kidding. I NEVER WILL own an SUV.

[sadaist]

Originally posted by hideyoursheep
But........what about my Roadrunner and my SUV's?


ME ME ME ME ME!

That's where it begins. ;)

At EVERY freeway offramp where there is a stop sign, look over at the shoulder. Hundreds of cigarette butts. Look alongside just about any road or freeway, walk a neighborhood on a Saturday and see what people are washing into the gutters, look at a gas station trash can & see how many recyclables are tossed into it, or a fast food restaurant with styrofoam containers.

Humans can be quite disgusting.

[sadaist]

Originally posted by hideyoursheep
Just kidding. I NEVER WILL own an SUV.

I will. I need a truck-like vehicle for my work that also has room for a family. I don't need a Hummer, Navigator, Denali, or other land yacht. I don't need 40" tires with a 10" suspension lift just so I can crawl over speed bumps at less than 1-mph. An S-10 Blazer type vehicle does the trick.

[Nitro Express]

Originally posted by hideyoursheep
With the current world situation being what it is, I think the presidency is over his head.
And I'm still pissed at Tipper. :mad:

With a wife like Tipper you would think Al would be a bible thumping right wing Republican.

[scamper]

Originally posted by sadaist
I will. I need a truck-like vehicle for my work that also has room for a family. I don't need a Hummer, Navigator, Denali, or other land yacht. I don't need 40" tires with a 10" suspension lift just so I can crawl over speed bumps at less than 1-mph. An S-10 Blazer type vehicle does the trick.


I love my SUV it doesn't get driving very much but it's there when I need it.

[Seshmeister]

Originally posted by Nitro Express
I live right next to the biggest supervolcano in the world that could errupt at any time. We are history here if that thing blows.

I'll just let the rest of you fight over what little food is left after the world is plunged into tottal darkness for a year from all the ash in the atmosphere.

I dunno why you get up in the morning at all...:)

If that thing goes up we'll all be extinct within a year or two.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by m_dixon1984
Left-wing nuts - want to scare to us into thinking the world is going to end because of we're polluting the environment.
...

And scientists...

[Nickdfresh]

Yeah, global warming is so "fake," that Exxon-Mobil is offering to bribe anyone with proper "scientific credentials" to decry it...

:rolleyes:

Science a la Joe Camel

By Laurie David
Sunday, November 26, 2006; B01

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.

Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film's theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.

And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996, mostly for the association's "Building a Presence for Science" program, an electronic networking initiative intended to "bring standards-based teaching and learning" into schools, according to the NSTA Web site. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board. And in 2003, NSTA gave the company an award for its commitment to science education.

So much for special interests and implicit endorsements.

In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school.

And Exxon Mobil isn't the only one getting in on the action. Through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars, the oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox.

NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called "Running on Oil" and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel," a shameless pitch for oil dependence.

The education organization also hosts an annual convention -- which is described on Exxon Mobil's Web site as featuring "more than 450 companies and organizations displaying the most current textbooks, lab equipment, computer hardware and software, and teaching enhancements." The company "regularly displays" its "many . . . education materials" at the exhibition. John Borowski, a science teacher at North Salem High School in Salem, Ore., was dismayed by NSTA's partnerships with industrial polluters when he attended the association's annual convention this year and witnessed hundreds of teachers and school administrators walk away with armloads of free corporate lesson plans.

Along with propaganda challenging global warming from Exxon Mobil, the curricular offerings included lessons on forestry provided by Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, Borowski says, and the benefits of genetic engineering courtesy of biotech giant Monsanto.

"The materials from the American Petroleum Institute and the other corporate interests are the worst form of a lie: omission," Borowski says. "The oil and coal guys won't address global warming, and the timber industry papers over clear-cuts."

An API memo leaked to the media as long ago as 1998 succinctly explains why the association is angling to infiltrate the classroom: "Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future."

So, how is any of this different from showing Gore's movie in the classroom? The answer is that neither Gore nor Participant Productions, which made the movie, stands to profit a nickel from giving away DVDs, and we aren't facing millions of dollars in lost business from limits on global-warming pollution and a shift to cleaner, renewable energy.

It's hard to say whether NSTA is a bad guy here or just a sorry victim of tight education budgets. And we don't pretend that a two-hour movie is a substitute for a rigorous science curriculum. Students should expect, and parents should demand, that educators present an honest and unbiased look at the true state of knowledge about the challenges of the day.

As for Exxon Mobil -- which just began a fuzzy advertising campaign that trumpets clean energy and low emissions -- this story shows that slapping green stripes on a corporate tiger doesn't change the beast within. The company is still playing the same cynical game it has for years.

While NSTA and Exxon Mobil ponder the moral lesson they're teaching with all this, there are 50,000 DVDs sitting in a Los Angeles warehouse, waiting to be distributed. In the meantime, Mom and Dad may want to keep a sharp eye on their kids' science homework.

laurie@lauriedavid.com

Laurie David, a producer of "An Inconvenient Truth," is a Natural Resources Defense Council trustee and founder of StopGlobalWarming.org.

Link (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112400789_pf.html)

[Nitro Express]

What I don't get is these fuckers getting rich at Exxon-Mobil have nowhere to go. One nuetron bomb can wipe out all the financial data in the United States we all become equally worthless. Money hits a point where it no longer has any value and it certainly can't buy your way to another inabitable planet. Live in the International Space Station? Being in prison is more comfortable than that thing.

[Seshmeister]

Shit floats to the top.

[scamper]

Originally posted by Nitro Express
Being in prison is more comfortable than that thing.

That's a whole new issue.

[FORD]

Congratulations to President Gore and his associates for the Best Documentary Oscar!!

And now this word from the Grateful Dead...........

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We don't own this place, though we act as if we did,
Its a loan from the children of our children's kids.
The actual owners haven't even been born yet.

Bur we never tend the garden and rarely we pay the rent,
Some of it is broken and the rest of it is bent
Put it all on plastic and I wonder where well be when the bills hit.

We can run,
But we cant hide from it.
Of all possible worlds,
We only got one:
We gotta ride on it.
Whatever we've done,
Well never get far from what we leave behind,
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can't hide.
Oh no, we can't hide.

I'm dumpin my trash in your back yard
Makin certain you don't notice really isn't so hard
Youre so busy with your guns and all of your excuses to use them.

Well, its oil for the rich and babies for the poor,
We got everyone believin that more is more,
If a reckoning comes, maybe we will know what to do then.

All these complications seem to leave no choice,
I heard the tongues of billion speak with just one voice,
Saying, just leave all the rest to me,
I need it worse than you, you see.
And then I heard....
The sound of one child crying.

Today I went walking in the amber wind,
Theres a hole in the sky where the light pours in
I remembered the days when I wasn't afraid of the sunshine.

But now it beats down on the asphalt land
Like a hammering blow from God's left hand
What little still grows cringes in the shade till the night time.

[Nickdfresh]

Now run for President and save us from sWillery and Kid Obama!

[ULTRAMAN VH]

Inconvenient Truths
Novel science fiction on global warming.

By Patrick J. Michaels

This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.






Inconvenient Truths 02/23

Public Disservice 07/26

The Global-Warming God 10/05


The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.”

Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.’s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. “The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993,” according to the IPCC, “but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.”

According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

“Was” is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.

Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore’s hypothesis. Instead, there’s an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change — edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose “the right balance between being effective and honest” about global warming — and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.

These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to “do” something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years!

It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various “solutions” for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it’s well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.

And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

And there’s other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can’t even do Kyoto?

When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it’s not just Gore’s movie that’s fiction. It’s the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too.

— Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
www.townhall.com

I think it is important to take care of our environment, but involving politicians is a recipe for disaster. The convenient truth, is that the global warming scare tactics will be used as a new burden for taxpayers. The California emissions program is already being put on the table here in Maryland for 2011.

[scamper]

I missed the nobel prize award show.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by ULTRAMAN VH
[B]Inconvenient Truths
Novel science fiction on global warming.

By Patrick J. Michaels

...
— Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
www.townidiot.com

LMFAO?! Cato institute?

I wonder if he was senior fellow for enforcement of human rights under the Hitler regime too?

Yeah, I know, all the 97% of the world's scientists (that aren't employed by Exxon-Mobil) are wrong...