Iowa Liberal

So word on the street, by which I mean “the internet,” is that they’re probably gonna give Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow. I personally don’t know one way or the other whether he deserves it or not, because I – this may come as a shock to some of you – am not on the Nobel committee. What I do know is exactly what our friends on right-leaning blogs all through our beloved series of tubes will have to say about it. They’re going to be outraged. Some of them are likely to lose coherence about it. Let it never be said that wer are not lookin’ out for our unhinged friends! We have done your bloviating for you in advance, since we are pretty sure we know exactly what you already plan to say. Copy and paste away, Patriots!

As predicted weeks ago here on [name of blog; hypertext link to post that doesn't actually predict anything], the once-proud Nobel Prize was today degraded, when, in a purely partisan act, it was awarded to Al Gore. Never mind that [hypertext link to blog post referencing a scientific study bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil] his theories have been roundly debunked and discredited, though they have [on each word of the preceding phrase, three consecutive hypertext links to blog posts, two of which cite the presence of rain somewhere in the world as solid scientific evidence that there is no such thing as climate change, while the remaining argues that since it's a nice warm day, things can't be so bad]. What chafes me is that this prize, about which I once cared so much, and which I follow heatedly every year [link to previous years' entries about the Nobels; or no such link to any such entries, in their, ahem, absence], has now become yet another typical leftist exercise in America-hating. By awarding this prize to an American politician whose position on climate change is wholly uncontroversial within the general scientific community, the Nobel committee announces to the world that they’re not concerned with being on the vanguard of science. While the process of hypothesis/data/analysis has to it a certain romantic appeal, isn’t it time we moved forward? Everyone I know agrees that opinion/hypothesis/presentation of supporting data – in that order – is the cutting edge of what I like to call “the new scientific method.”

It’s a little depressing that the Nobel committee, in its rush to annoy me personally by not joining in on more mindless partisan lulz, has overlooked the real growth that has taken place in science over the past seven years. Universities may have once been where we looked for answers, but the writing is on the wall: real research, the kind I can use, is freely available. One need only follow links on political blogs, and enjoy the amateur speculation of middle-management dudes
who once took chemistry and are now skimming the abstracts of studies who academic provenance is meaningless to them. I know if Alfred Nobel were alive today, he would join me in decrying Al Gore, because Al Gore was in the Clinton administration, and there is consequently no way I’m going to agree with anything he has to say, even if, as I’ve said, an overwhelming scientific consensus suggests he’s on the right side of the fence here.

There will be an alternate award given to Dr. Kent Hovind by this blog
later in the week.

-Thomas Tallis

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