Ian in the library… And out of it…

Today Al Gore won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC… Quite frankly, I’m not sure why this upsets me I mean when I think about the other people who have won this award…

And for those of you out there celebrating – don’t be too smug a British Judge thinks Al might have stretched the truth a little too much in An Inconvenient Truth (from the Torygraph):

Mr Gore claims that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said: “This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s “wake-up call”. He agreed that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water – “but only after, and over, millennia”.”The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.”

The film claims that low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but the judge ruled there was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

The documentary speaks of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor” – the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the judge said that it was “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor, also known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation, would shut down in the future, though it might slow down.

Mr Gore claims that two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed “an exact fit”. The judge said that, although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”.

Mr Gore says the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was directly attributable to global warming, but the judge ruled that it scientists have not established that the recession of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is primarily attributable to human-induced climate change.

Oh just in case anyone is wondering what the hell global warming has to do with peace the prize committee says:

Indications of changes in the earth’s future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

I think what upsets me the most about this is that there are places in the world – like Burma, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe – who are truly trying to tame violence and bring peace and prosperity, but instead it is awarded to a body of the UN that is proficient in writing press releases and a man who prattles on about how we’re all going to die unless we make sacrifices, but then lives in a massive house and flys from speaking engagement to speaking engagement in a private jet. In fact that’s the thing that bothers me the most about famous people who crusade for causes like this – they expect all of us to do the sacrificing but seem unwilling to make any sacrifices themselves…

rant over.