Agreed, but there's no need to take Nobel *nominations* seriously -- the list of people who are entitled to nominate candidates is quite long. See, e.g., this Volokh post re Crips co-founder and Nobel Prize nominee Tookie Williams.

If Gore actually wins, then that's a different story.

"the list of people who are entitled to nominate candidates is quite long"

This is like saying the list of people entitled to be President is 200 million names long. As widely noted in the blogosphere, nominations are only accepted from invited nominators.

"Most importantly, to me, global warming isn't a war"

See last year.

"One, we just don't know for sure just what the results will be."

I don't know for sure what will happen if I stick my hand in a particle beam.

"Two, whatever results there are will probably occur well into the future, which means we have time to learn to deal with them."

Yep, let's unload our positive-feedback messes on our kids and grandkids.

"And three, China and India aren't on board with the whole global warming thing anyhow, so our ability to stop it solo is pretty close to zero."

Why bother to make things somewhat better since we can't fix everything alone? Why show leadership and move others to join us? Why support innovation that we can benefit from and sell to others?

""A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference," according to a Norwegian lawmaker who has nominated Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming."

These stories come around every year. Being "nominated for a Nobel Prize" is meaningless. It simply means that any of hundreds of thousands of people can put your name on a list -- as many names as they like. Hundreds. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.

And thousands of names are listed every year.

And every year we get "so and so controversial/absurd person has been nominated!" indignant stories, usually from wingers of one variety or another working the outrage alley.

I'm amazed people fall for this every year; I've been watching it happen like clockwork, every year, since the Seventies.

rilkefan: "As widely noted in the blogosphere, nominations are only accepted from invited nominators."

You're kidding, right?

Qualified Nominators – The Nobel Peace Prize
The right to submit proposals for the Nobel Peace Prize, based on the principle of competence and universality, shall by statute be enjoyed by:

1. Members of national assemblies and governments of states;
2. Members of international courts;
3. University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes;
4. Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
5. Board members of organizations who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
6. Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; (proposals by members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after February 1) and
7. Former advisers appointed by the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Couldn't be more exclusive, eh? Want to guess how many human beings on the planet fit in category 1 alone? How about #3?

My assumption, which may be a poor one, is that when Norwegian politicians are pushing the issue, it's more than just a silly nomination like those that have been mentioned above.

Gary, thanks for giving me cover, but the point we both missed (and apparently Prof Volokh as well) is that list just specifies the domain of people who can be invited to nominate; to actually be able to nominate someone, you have to have been invited to do so by the Nobel Committee. However, I don't think this necessarily invalidates the idea that the mere fact of being nominated may not be particularly significant.

rilkefan:
"One, we just don't know for sure just what the results will be."

I don't know for sure what will happen if I stick my hand in a particle beam.

Is it your contention that the effects of the various proposed actions to address global warming are just as predictable as the effects of your sticking your hand in that beam?

"Two, whatever results there are will probably occur well into the future, which means we have time to learn to deal with them."

Yep, let's unload our positive-feedback messes on our kids and grandkids.

So "we have time to be cautious" is equivalent to "let's not do anything about it for generations"?

Why bother to make things somewhat better since we can't fix everything alone?

Are you saying that we can make things somewhat better at no cost to ourselves, or that it's inarguable that the cost is definitely worth the improvement?

I'm probably a little more sympathetic to your views than Andrew is, but I don't think the right course of action is anywhere near clear-cut enough to justify your using those reductive rhetorical questions rather than engaging in polite discussion.

ken,

Rule number one on global warming: for some people, it's about religion, not science. And you know that religion can never be discussed in an even tone. So I assume that, when I write about it, I'll get some posts from the zealots and I don't get worked up about it.

I don't argue about global warming because it's not a topic I'm particularly knowledgeable about. But FWIW.

"My assumption, which may be a poor one, is that when Norwegian politicians are pushing the issue, it's more than just a silly nomination like those that have been mentioned above."

Recognizing your caveat -- and mine in return is that perhaps you've read stuff you're not citing here -- is to ask if, in fact, "Norwegian politicians are pushing the issue." Do you have a cite for as many as, perhaps, five, Norwegian politicians pushing this issue/nomination? You've only mentioned a lone person, so far.

"Gary, thanks for giving me cover, but the point we both missed (and apparently Prof Volokh as well) is that list just specifies the domain of people who can be invited to nominate; to actually be able to nominate someone, you have to have been invited to do so by the Nobel Committee."

I'm not aware of that; do you have a cite? Here is the process:

September – Nomination forms are sent out. The Nobel Committee sends out invitation letters containing confidential forms to individuals qualified to nominate – members of national assemblies, governments, and international courts of law; university chancellors, professors of social science, history, philosophy, law and theology; leaders of peace research institutes and institutes of foreign affairs; Nobel Peace Prize Laureates of previous years; board members of organizations that have received the Nobel Peace Prize; present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; and former advisers of the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

What's significant is who winds up the (secret) short list. But that's almost never leaked in a way that anyone can confirm.

Further:

[...] In recent years, the Committee has received well over 140 different nominations for the Peace Prize. (The numbers of nominating letters are much higher, since many are for the same candidates.)

New nomination rules, effective from 2003. Compared to the old rules the list of nominators has been slightly expanded.

Any one of the following persons is entitled to submit proposals[...] The same list follows. But there's no "invitation" required.

Also here:

[...] Nominations for the Prize may be made by a broad array of qualified individuals, including former recipients, members of national assemblies and congresses, university professors, international judges, and special advisors to the Prize Committee. In some years as many as 199 nominations have been received.

(Obviously I over-stated when I said it was thousands.)

As a side issue:

However, the Parliament has no say in the award issue. A member of the Committee cannot at the same time be a member of the Parliament, and the Committee includes former members from all major parties, including those parties that oppose NATO membership.

The nominees and winners don't have to have anything to do with war, by the way. Martin Luthor King ended no wars, and neither did Albert Schweitzer, or Mother Teresa, or Andrei Sakharov, or Amnesty International, or UNICEF, or Elie Wiesel, and on and on. The idea that to be nominated one has to do something related to war is simply incorrect. As the Committee says:

In addition to humanitarian efforts and peace movements, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded for work in a wide range of fields including advocacy of human rights, mediation of international conflicts, and arms control.

"Humanitarian efforts" should be stressed, and they take a wide view (the first Prize was to the founder of the Red Cross, not someone who negotiated a peace treaty). Last year, for instance, it was Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank. That wasn't objectionable to anyone of any political bent (other than, perhaps, the few remaining neo-Maoists in the world), though, so no one complained that the Prize shouldn't go to someone who did something about something that "isn't a war."

The year before that it was the International Atomic Energy Agency. Here is the list of winners. Note how very many were to people for things that aren't about wars.

So either most of the winners have been "silly" (a useful fallback position), or the objection to Al Gore, whatever other merits or demerits he might possess, for not having done something about a war is factually and historically baseless, I'm afraid.

Gary, what you cited is what I was working from -- I read that to mean that the committee selectively invites x number of people to nominate, and given the relatively small number of nominees, I assumed that x was fairly small as well. But they're not overly forthcoming about the invitation process, so I wouldn't put any money down on my interpretation.

Andrew, true enough, but my impression of rilkefan from ObWi is that he's generally not a zealot and is worth talking to.

ken,

rilkefan is a good man, from what I know of him. But, when it comes to global warming, it seems pretty clear based on his comment that there's little profit in further discussion with him. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but my observations of people who believe strongly in global warming are that they are very similar to heavily religious people. They know things that, in all likelihood, they can't possibly know, and they brook no dispute or disagreement regarding their beliefs. After a while, it just seems pointless to try and argue with people who have established that they're not going to change their minds regardless of the evidence.

Having said all that, I was probably unfair to lump rilkefan in with that contingent, and I apologize for it.

Gary: "You're kidding, right?"

I was more or less quoting the first sentence in the authoritative source I linked to, so no.

kenb, Andrew, we're cool, sorry if I got over-snarky. Let me put it this way: global warming is hard science, and I think there's enough reliable non-technical discussion out there to show that the points I objected to amount to disagreeing with physics. As far as I understand it, the biggest issue unresolved is how much we care about impoverishing people in the future to improve our standard of living - aka "discounting".

And I'll admit to a pro-innovation & science bias, but I think we could be doing a lot about global warming at little expense if we actually were willing to admit it's an important issue.

"Perhaps I'm being unfair, but my observations of people who believe strongly in global warming are that they are very similar to heavily religious people. They know things that, in all likelihood, they can't possibly know, and they brook no dispute or disagreement regarding their beliefs."

As I said, I don't argue about global warming, because I'm not in any way particularly knowledgeable about it, and I'm simply not qualified to argue about it.

I am curious, though, to know how that describes these people:

In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate change scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

[...]

The report summarized the fourth assessment since 1990 by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, sizing up the causes and consequences of climate change. But it is the first in which the group asserts with near certainty — more than 90 percent confidence — that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming since 1950.

In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists and reviewers, put the confidence level at between 66 and 90 percent. Both reports are online at http://www.ipcc.ch.

[...]

Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each report, but the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say over the thousands of pages in four underlying technical reports that will be completed and published later this year. Full report here. Are these scientists all, instead, religious believers, or, well, what? I'm trying to understand how this explanation works, or would work, or is supposed to work.

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

URL:
Remember me? YesNo

Comments: