"But Critics Say"

It was impressive to watch the network news on Friday as they marked the announcement of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize for climate change advocacy.  Among other things, they celebrated the number of hybrid cars bought and the number of fluorescent light bulbs installed.

While nobody would want to rain on Al Gore’s victory parade, one cannot imagine that if President Bush had won an award the reports would lack the all important “But Critics Say” paragraph.  Yet there was not a breath of a suggestion that Al Gore’s ideas were in the least controversial.

We conservatives first noticed the important cultural artifact “But Critics Say” during the Reagan years, and really got to miss it when it went into decline during the Clinton administration.

But climate critic Dr. William Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University said to an audience at the University of North Carolina,  as reported by Steve Lytte:

[A] period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.
"We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

Dr. Gray is an expert in the forecasting of hurricanes.  “We’re brainwashing our children,” he said.

The Nobel Peace Prize is certainly a remarkable institution.  Probably the best way to understand it is as an annual expression of the current enthusiasm of the bien-pensant global academic middle class.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But all the celebration of climate change advocacy makes it difficult to be a critic.  Dr. Gray:

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants."

And what is academic freedom worth without a grant for academic research?