By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
Not to deny Al Gore his full honors but it seems to us that the Nobel went rather far afield in awarding the former vice president the prize for peace for espousing and publicizing a special, if widely held, view of climatology. And indeed Gore did share the award with 2,000 or so scientists who make up the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Generally the prize goes to what are more generally considered peace activists -- Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, for example. And although the list is secret Gore's rivals for the awards included a roster of longtime human rights advocates.
The success of Gore's film ``An Inconvenient Truth," an Oscar-winning documentary that takes an alarmist view of climate change, especially global warming (Gore says "we face a true planetary emergency"), positioned him for the prize. And a British court has questioned some of the claims in the film, among them that sea levels will rise 20 feet ``in the near future."
The Nobel committee made the long stretch linking global warming and world peace by arguing that the disruption, mass migrations and competition for natural resources caused by climate change could mean ``increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."
Nobel officials deny it but many others see the award as a jab at the Bush administration for its rejection of an international treaty calling for drastic reductions in carbon emissions. Among them is global warming skeptic Bjorn Lonborg who saw nothing wrong with giving the prize to the U.N. panel but said, ``Awarding it to Al Gore cannot be seen as anything other than a political statement."
But, as Gore surely learned after the Florida recount when he almost became president, once you've won it really doesn't matter how you got there. And it is not as if Gore is a late comer to the cause of environmentalism or something he took up to keep his name in the news.
The environment has been a career-long avocation of his. Shortly before he became vice president he published the bestselling and also alarmist ``Earth in the Balance."
Even though we're still not sure we see the link between peace and polar bears, we congratulate Al Gore and the U.N. scientists on their prize.
The article is distributed by Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com).