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A recipient not worthyI had been out of the country for a few days. My international flight landed in Atlanta. As I walked to my connecting flight's gate I see Al Gore's face plastered on CNN. Scrolling across the bottom of the screen it says that Al Gore had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I stood there and laughed at the screen. Maybe I had been gone longer than I thought. Maybe the earth had shifted on its axis. What could be happening? But it was true. Along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Al Gore shares the prize, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such a change." Global warming is an issue of peace? Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, says that global warming could lead to more scarce natural resources leading to conflicts over those resources. Perhaps that could be true, but what is most certainly not true are some of the facts that Al Gore uses to promote his man-made global warming cause and his film "An Inconvenient Truth." The film, and Gore's assertions are more theory than fact. A British judge recently ruled that the film was full of inaccuracies and misinformation and students must be warned as such before being shown the film. Of the nine inaccuracies that the judge pointed out, he said the most alarming was the film's assertion that sea level will rise up to 20 feet in the near future, when actually that would take a "millennia," the judge ruled. In fact, it appears that some of IPCC's own data conflicts with Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" film. Reports show that IPCC notes "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected." Could it be that the only way Al Gore and his man-made global warming theories could be recognized with a Nobel prize is in the peace category because the theory has little to do with science? Past recipients of the peace prize have been people truly interested in peace: An Egyptian man who works to keep atomic energy from being used as a weapon of war, a Kenyan woman who fights to free African women from oppression and teaches the poor ways to sustain themselves, and to an American woman who worked to ban and clear anti-personnel landmines. Does narrating a film full of half-truths equate to Nelson Mandela's 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime? Does going on a first class publicity-seeking tour equate to Elie Wiesel's 1986 award for suffering in one of Hitler's death camps and then leading the fight against violence, repression and racism? Does spending the last year or so on his newest "mission" equate to a lifetime of devotion to the poorest people of the world as Mother Teresa did for her prize in 1979? I, for one, think not. Holly Martin can be reached by phone at 1-800-452-7171 ext. 1806 or e-mail at hmartin@hpj.com. 10/22/07 Date: 10/17/07
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