An Inconvenient Truth, Indeed

Brace yourself for the Nobel Prize being branded a vast left-wing conspiracy.

That is the kind of whinging that can be expected from global warming deniers if Al Gore wins or shares the Nobel Peace Prize, as The Times of London is breathlessly speculating, for his Oscar-winnging documentary An Inconvenient Truth and his other efforts to sound the alarm.

While this, in my view, would not mean that Gore would suddenly throw his hat into the presidential campaign ring as some folks speculate and even more hope, it would be a richly ironic and well deserved smackdown of the amazing number of conservatives who are still singing from the George Bush hymnal and believe that the precipitous rise in global temperatures has less to do with greenhouse gases generated from industrialization and automobiles than cow farts.

Richly ironic because Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and endowned the prizes, wasn't anyone's idea of a liberal, and to the extent that the prizes can even be viewed as political, a goodly number have gone to conservative academics and scholars, notably economists.

For the record, I don't think the Peace Prize is worth the powder to blow it up with and haven't since it was shared by Lee Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger in 1973 for "ending" the Vietnam War.