After Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, and now Al Gore, can Michael Moore be far behind as a prime candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize? It truly makes one wonder if there are any standards for truth and objectivity in awarding the prize, or has it entirely become a form of ratification of politically correct leftist dogma.
And in the aftermath, Tom Friedman, a columnist and author for whom I have (now dwindling) respect as a professional in spite of my disagreement with him on many issues, wants to know “who will succeed Al Gore?” as a world leader. I was halfway through his article on this point before I realized that he was actually being serious.
But, hey, the demagogues are winning the global warming debate, even to the point of the successful discrediting as Holocaust denial equivalency anyone who might challenge them on the science at issue. The truly damaging part of this is that the credibility of the entire scientific enterprise is at stake, for as Patrick Basham of the Democracy Institute so well notes, at the heart of the scientific enterprise is a curious and always difficult tension between certainty and the possibility that certainty can suddenly dissolve. As a result of this age old and well founded tension, the skeptic has a right to ask first, that the normal standards of scientific evidence are brought to the climate debate and second, to make certain there is not some politically driven and premature closure of what is a scientific controversy. Gore and his fellow travelers have failed at both, and the rush to judgment that they are pursuing is not only dangerous to our long term economic growth, but a threat to the scientific method.