Joel Luther

I friggin love Oslo, Norway. Some great things have come out of there, the best being Opera (obviously). Today my love for this great city went down just a tad.

It was announced today that Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for "his 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 change". Did you catch that? Al Gore won a Nobel PEACE Prize.

The criteria to win a PEACE prize is that the winner must "work for peace, and [work to stop] the ongoing problems of war and conflict around the world." Is there any way that going around making false claims about global warming can help with world peace?

In his film An Inconvenient [un]Truth, Al Gore makes several false and absurd claims about global warming. In fact, a judge has recently made it illegal to show the film in a public school without a disclaimer. Gore states that:

1. A sea level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting ice sheets in the near future.
Evidence has shown that such a change would only occur after multiple millennia.
2. Low-lying Pacific atolls have already been evacuated.
There is no evidence of any evacuation taking place.
3. The Gulf Stream, which warms the Atlantic, will shut down.
It is very unlikely the Gulf Stream will 'shut down'; however, it may slow down.
4. Graphs showing a rise in C02 and a rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years show an exact fit.
There is a connection between the graphs, but they do not establish what Al Gore claims.
5. The disappearance of snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro was caused by global warming.
This is simply unestablishable. It cannot be proven that the disappearance of snow was caused by man-made climate change.
6. The drying of Lake Chad is an example of the catastrophic effects of global warming.
Again, insufficient evidence to back up this claim.
7. Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming.
Still no evidence. If you're going to make this ludicrous claims, at least try and show us some evidence.
8. Polar bears have been found to have drowned while swimming long distances (up to 60 miles) to find ice.
Only four polar bears have been found that had drowned, and those died during a storm.
9. Coral reefs were bleaching because of global warming.
You cannot separate the impacts of global warming from other factors.

Of course, my resentment towards Vice President Gore stems from my skepticism of the absurd claims that man caused global warming. Allow me to borrow the words of my favorite presidential candidate, Fred Thompson:

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto.

NASA says the Martian South Pole's ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter's caught the same cold, because it's warming up too, like Pluto.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non-signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn't even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There's a consensus.

Ask Galileo.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Today isn't the first time the Nobel committee has awarded the Prize to someone undeserving. In 1994, Yasser Arafat was awarded the PEACE prize for his 'efforts to create peace in the Middle East.' Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian guerrilla soldier and diplomat. He founded Fatah, an organization whose name is an Arabic acronym for 'sudden death'. On May 8, 1972, Arafat and his Black September group hijacked a Sabena flight to Vienna and forced it to land at the Ben Gurion Airport in Lod, Israel. On May 30 the PFLP, with the aid of the Japanese Red Army, carried out a shooting rampage known as the Lod Airport massacre which killed twenty-four innocent civilians. On July 9, Israel assassinated the PFLP spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani and his niece. Two days later, various PLO factions retaliated by bombing a bus station, killing eleven civilians. In September 1972, Black September kidnapped and brutally murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. On April 11, 1974, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command carried out a shooting raid on the northern Israeli town of Qiryat Shemona resulting in the deaths of eighteen civilians. On May 15, militants from the DFLP - disguised as Israeli soldiers - stormed a school in Ma'alot holding members of the student body hostage. Israel's Sayeret Matkal special forces group killed all of the militants but not before they had killed eighteen of their hostages. Israel retaliated by bombing seven Palestinian refugee camps in Southern Lebanon killing twenty-seven civilians. Arafat was involved in the Khartoum diplomatic assassinations, in which five diplomats and five others were killed. (Just to name a few.)

In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Prize. I don't really feel the need to give information on Jimmy Carter, because he's just an idiot all around.

Switching gears, yesterday the House Homeland Security Committee advised Congressional staffers to get vaccinated for various diseases before attending this weekend's race in Concord (very close to where I live). People are genuinely upset about this, which is hilarious to me. Representative Robin Hayes, of Concord, said this yesterday: "I have never heard of immunizations for domestic travel, and as the representative for Concord, N.C., I feel compelled to ask why the heck the committee feels that immunizations are needed to travel to my hometown. I have been to numerous NASCAR races, and the folks who attend these events certainly do not pose any health hazard to congressional staffers or anyone else." And another representative said this today: "If anything, it's the NASCAR fans who should get immunized against Washington officials, not the other way around." These people are ace.

And it's Friday night, so football! Tonight was homecoming, and we won! We rock. We're 2-6 now! But, it's all good because we won 36-7. That's like our best game yet. The last time we won it was 35-7...

Later.