Steven F. Hayward on Al Gore & Nobel Peace Prize on National Review Online

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjQzNDFhZTFkMmM4YWE5Nzk4ZjUxZGVkOGRiM2UzZjg=

The glitter of the Nobel overshadows the inconvenient news reported last week that a British court of law labeled Gore's movie as partisan political propaganda, pointing out 11 different errors of fact or scientific judgment, and prohibiting its screening in British public schools without a disclaimer of these defects. The Nobel will be one more quiver in Gore's arsenal of intransigent moral authority by which he refuses to debate any aspect of the subject and declares the entire matter "settled." It's never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled. It is even more problematic to suggest that climate change is not a political issue, but a moral issue, but then to demand massive political interventions in the economy to fix the problem. 

The adrenaline rush of the Nobel is likely to prove evanescent, however, and will probably turn out to be the high water mark of climate hysteria. Increasingly, climate catastrophe is coming more and more to resemble the hysteria over the "population bomb" of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those days, Paul Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and there were government commissions launched here and abroad to ponder whether we needed an aggressive anti-natalist policy. The effort to develop a population policy in the U.S. collapsed quickly and quietly when someone pointed out that any anti-natalist policy would disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. Oops.