Al Gore - Nobel Peace Prize Winner????

Considering the fact that Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", has questionable facts, and that it has nothing to do with Peace, the action of the Nobel Peace Prize committee is surprising. A British Court has recently correctly decided that "An Inconvenient Truth" is not Scientific fact, but rather Political propaganda.

The Telegraph of Britain on-line article, What has Al Gore done for world peace?, raises some good reasons for calling this a bad choice. Frankly, I believe it ranks with the past Nobel Peace Prizes given to Jimmy Carter and Yasar Arafat, and the Telegraph is not very kind to the Goracle.

So Al Gore is the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Admittedly, he has to share it with the United Nations’ climate change panel - but, even so, I think we need to declare an international smugness alert.

But smugness is not the end of their characterization of Mr. Gore. They follow with this comment.

The former US Vice-President has already taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet. Can you imagine what he'll be like now that the Norwegian Nobel committee has given him the prize?

According to the Telegraph, Al Gore is not only a hypocrite,

More to the point, can you imagine how enormous his already massive carbon footprint will become once he starts jetting around the world bragging about his new title?

Just after Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth - in which he asked American households to cut their use of electricity - the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research took a look at Al's energy bills.

It reckoned that his 20-room, eight-bathroom mansion in Nashville sometimes uses twice the energy in one month that the average American household gets through in a year. The combined energy and gas bills for his estate came to nearly $30,000 in 2006. Ah, say his defenders, but he uses rainwater to flush his lavatories. Is there enough rainwater in the world, I wonder?

he is also guilty of exaggerations and unsubstantiated claims.

Gore claims that the rises in carbon dioxide and temperature over 650,000 years show an "exact fit". That's wrong, says Mr Justice Burton: there is a connection, but not a precise correlation.

And then there is this.

Gore predicts sea levels rising by up to 20ft in the near future. Not so, according to the judge: that will happen only after millions of years.

Those low-lying Pacific atolls that Gore claims have been evacuated? No evidence. Polar bears who drowned swimming to look for ice? Again, no evidence: four bears have drowned - but because of a storm.

As the article makes clear, he may not be a liar, but he is an "exaggerator and a braggart".

In 1999, he boasted about having uncovered the most famous toxic waste site in America ("I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal"). Yes, but Love Canal was already notorious by the time Gore "found" it.

That's typical of his arrogance, says the non-partisan US politics website Skeleton Closet: "When he says the words 'little place', you can feel him struggling to contain his pleasure with his good deeds."

And he has serious trouble withe his memory.

Gore struggles with his memory, too. "I certainly learnt a lot from 3,000 town hall meetings across …Tennessee over a 16-year period," he told National Public Radio. And so he would have, had he actually attended 187 town hall meetings a year, which is what it works out as: he might even have managed to hold his home state in 2000.

But my favourite Gore memory lapse is his account of being sung to sleep with the lullaby Look for the Union Label, written in 1975. How sweet: being sung to sleep by your parents at the age of 27.

Then there's his evasiveness on the subject of alleged ethical violations. He resorts to "legalisms", says Skeleton Closet: although he might technically be in the right, "he has such a tin ear for the way normal people talk that he sounds like a mafia don".

In addition to Al Gore, Jr.'s memory, exaggeration and arrogance what does the Global Warming question have to do with World Peace?

Climate change is a threat to the environment, not to "peace" and international order. The prize has gone to some sleazy recipients in the past, but at least you can make a case that their actions staved off bloodshed.

Lumping together global warming and terrorism, as David Cameron did in his conference speech, is a rhetorical sleight of hand typical of opportunistic politicians who are trying to hoover up liberal and conservative votes at the same time. I don't think that description applies to the Tory leader, but it sure as hell fits Albert Gore, Jr.

When it comes to big heads, Al Gore, Jr. was already one of the biggest. Now I'm afraid he will be even more insufferable.