9
Oct
2009
Nobel Bombshell
“Are you kidding me??” That was my exclamation upon hearing the news this morning that President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about fodder for a return from a long blog break! I thought. I could spew for a week straight on the insanity, insult and downright tragedy of the choice.
Now that I’ve calmed down, I must acknowledge that while embarrassing and ill-advised, the choice was not insane. The Nobel Prize Committee may decide on anyone they choose, including those undeserving. The prerogative is indisputably theirs. But here’s the thing:
I was in Johannesburg and Soweto in April of 1994, reporting on the first all-race elections of South Africa. I had the privilege of a front-row seat at a Mandela speech, given from a Soweto soccer field. To say I was Impressed was then and remains an inadequate description. For enduring 27 years in prison and embracing as friends the guards who kept him captive, for agreeing to a joint government with those who had kept him imprisoned, for renouncing the violence that had justified his capture and imprisonment to the apartheid regime, and for rallying a people to fight on for as many decades as it took to achieve legal equality, Nelson Mandela was a most deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The fact that a president who has yet to accomplish anything other than impeccable delivery of an eloquent speech is now in the same category of world achievers as Nelson Mandela is both baffling and enraging. Those who drank the kool aid might argue that my conclusion is to be expected, given my frequently-recorded disdain of the current U.S. president and my stated admiration for the former South African one. However, my outrage is just as deep-seeded when comparing Mr. Obama to those whose accomplishments are questionable to me.
For example, I question the accuracy of global warming statistics and the methods used to arrive at them. We live in a world where, ever since the creation of the broadcast news creature called the weatherman, there are constant jokes about what a waste of space weather people are. Their predictions are simply unreliable. If the forces of nature are such that no matter how much scientific knowledge we have, weather predictions are wrong (and often so), then how can anyone in their right mind trust the accuracy of predictions about the state of our atmosphere several decades from now?
When I was a child in the 1970s, the big fear was that another ice age was coming; the planet was allegedly cooling at a rapid pace. By the 1990s, global warming was the threat, and the predictions at that time were that we’d be dealing with significantly higher oceans by now. Instead, the earth’s temperature has declined in the last decade, leading a growing number of scientists (almost all outside of the United States) reevaluating those computer models upon which carbon footprint controls are based. Yet, none of these rather large and valid questions about the accuracy of climate change data detracts in any way from the time, effort, passion, and bona fide work that Al Gore put into informing the masses about an issue he believes detrimentally affects all of humanity. I don’t think his conclusions of gloom and doom are right, but I had no issue with him receiving the Nobel Prize for his lifelong work. That’s the key that’s missing from any sentence describing why the Nobel was awarded to Barack Obama.