Re: Rumor Has It Gore Up For Nobel Prize This Week

On Oct 10, 5:48 pm, Florida <demeter547op...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-williams/gore-up-for-nobel-priz...

Jackson Williams

Gore Up For Nobel Prize This Week; Right Wingers Prepare to Go Nuts

Posted October 10, 2007 | 11:25 AM (EST)

Al Gore is rumored to be a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize when
it's announced this Friday, Oct. 12. The last American to be so
honored, Jimmy Carter, won on the very same day that Hillary Clinton
and the U.S. Senate voted to give George W. Bush authority to use
military force against Iraq....something about weapons of mass
destruction. That crowd in Oslo does have a sense of irony, eh?

If the former vice president wins, an important link between peace and
our global environment will be forged, while the mental stability of
his detractors will hang more precariously than a Florida chad.
(Bachelor Rush, whatever you do, don't reach for that weekend shack
pack of OxyContin in the glove box. It ain't worth it, pal.)

The full implications of Gore's work these past few years came home
last weekend, and from an odd source. Jay Barbee, longtime NBC newsman
who has covered every NASA flight since Alan Sheppard's in '61, was on
Meet The Press.

While talking about the Columbia tragedy of '03, he noted that
officials saw the foam fall during liftoff but later opted against
using spy satellites to check for damage. If they had they'd have seen
the bowling ball-sized hole in the wing and kept the astronauts at the
space station. Atlantis, already stacked and in the barn back at Cape
Canaveral, could have been wheeled out and sent up to get them, Barbee
said.

Then, out of the blue, the old reporter added the following analogy to
his tale of the gravely wounded shuttle:

"The bottom line comes down to this. This is an 8,000-mile
diameter spacecraft we're on {earth}. We're all astronauts. We're all
living in a life support system that is only 10,000 feet in thickness,
that's keeping us alive on this planet. The day will come, if it's not
a genetic virus, if it's not global warming, whatever, the day will
come that we can no longer live on this planet. The only solution is
to step off it to colonization of the moon or onto other planets.
There are 150 or so planets that we could live on that in the coming
years we'll be able to reach."

Wow, I thought. What a clear and linear thing to say; how fragile and
tenuous our hold. And then I thought about Americans who comprise the
modern ideological Right Wing, who act as if this looming disaster is
somehow science fiction or millennia away, and who treat
"environmentalism" as vaguely communist and "global warming" as
speculative liberal fantasy.

Conservatives are not inherently stupid, any more than those in the
middle or on the Left. Images of 1,000 year old ice shelves the size
of Rhode Island, radically melting and shrinking across the planet in
recent decades, are as obvious to a Righty as a Lefty. The potential
meaning of such melting is obvious, too.

That's why I'm convinced that the main reason the Right denies global
warming is not because they don't recognize plain evidence, but
because they do. They know it's not like cleaning up a polluted river.
They know it's a systemic, planet-wide problem that requires a
systemic, planet-wide response to reverse it, and that means friend
and foe alike working peacefully toward a unified goal of healing the
body before it dies.

Yet as today's Right sees it, acknowledging this fact would be a step
toward what the elder Bush once promoted as the "New World Order," not
to mention the economic toes that might be stubbed. The idea that all
the world's stakeholders must now collectively save Mother Earth from
the very real downside of industrial progress is frightening to them.
It smacks of something the "go it alone" gang on the American Right
can't begin to accept.

After all, they've already dismissed the multilateral approach to the
so-called global war on terror, and it's a disaster. And then there's
Katrina. If they bring their management skill set to global warming,
it really will be time to abandon ship and book that flight to Alpha
Centauri as newsman Barbee suggested!

Gore's Academy award winning, fact-filled documentary An Inconvenient
Truth made clear that earth's atmosphere is getting hotter, and at a
faster pace, thanks to ever-increasing man-made greenhouse gases. The
concentration of invisible, odorless, tasteless carbon dioxide alone
(C02) in the atmosphere is now 30% greater than before the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. That's astounding.

Meanwhile, 200 years late, China's one billion people (that's billion
with a "b") and her burgeoning economy are just now joining the fray.

Speaking of what's called Asia's Womb, Tom Friedman of the NY Times
reports that China is constructing the equivalent of two coal-fired
power plants every week, and these are the old style kind, the leading
worldwide villain in spewing uncaptured C02 into the air. According to
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "most of the observed
increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century
is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic
greenhouse gas concentrations."

I think that's a fancy way of saying we humans are the guilty party.

Playing dumb on global warming -- its causes and impact -- is not an
option. The science is in, and the planet is literally weeping. Gore
may or may not take Nobel gold on Friday, but such a prestigious prize
to those who have devoted themselves to educating mankind on this
issue is much deserved. It will send a strong international signal
that it's time for all nations to come together.
Go, Al, Go!
________________________-

There are two things that would go a long ways towards restoring my
faith in human nature, (1) If Gore were to win the Nobel Prize and (2)
If Bush were to be charged with war crimes.


.

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