After more than 20 years of working on environmental issues, playing a key part in forming the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and recently with the film "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore has thrust the global climate change issue into the public consciousness. He has been so successful with this that even President Bush has admitted that global climate change is a problem.
For putting the dangers posed by climate change on the global political agenda he has now been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in a shared nomination with Canadian environmentalist Sheila Watt-Cloutier.
Vuzmanon February 01 2007 11:10:20
The shift in focus from the Cold War and the global power struggle, and to a lesser degree terrorism, towards global climate change is certainly what prompted this nomination.
In related news the "%3BDoomsday Clock"%3B has been moved from 7 to 5 minutes to midnight, also to reflect the dangers posed by global climate change. The Doomsday Clock has previously just referred to the dangers of nuclear weapons, but the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which are behind the Doomsday Clock, have decided to change the Doomsday Clock to also reflect the dangers of global climate change, as they have "concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons"
Norlanderon February 01 2007 12:34:33
It's quite easy to become nominated as we learned during the death sentancing of nominee Stanley "Tookie" Williams ...From the LA Times:
According to Nobel Prize nominating rules, any "professor of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology" and any judge or national legislator in any country, among others, can nominate anyone for a Nobel Peace Prize. Past nominees include Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Fidel Castro. Any "professor of literature [or] of linguistics," among others, can nominate anyone for a Nobel Prize in literature.
Naturally, many nominees have real merit. But being nominated by one or a few of the hundreds of thousands of eligible nominators is little evidence of such merit. This is especially so when the nominee is a source of controversy, and when it may seem that nominating him may prevent his execution.
Norlanderon February 08 2007 18:23:18
Another example of how little it takes to be nominated as now Rush Limbaugh has been nominated aswell.
