And the Nobel Prize for Dishonesty...

Can you win the Nobel Prize for telling exaggerations if it is in a good cause? we will soon see. Al Gore has been nominated.

Keep in mind that it doesn't take much to get a nomination. Still, the reason for the nomination is telling. One of the people making the nomination explained why he nominated Gore and Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier:

"Al Gore, like no other, has put climate change on the agenda. Gore uses his position to get politicians to understand, while Sheila works from the ground up," Brende said.

"I think climate change is the biggest challenge we face in this century," Brende said.

The way that Gore put climate change on the agenda is by a presentation that is somewhere between exaggeration and outright lies. One point that he frequently makes is that the ocean levels will rise 20 feet by the end of the century and he presents this as a hard fact.

The truth is that at the time he filmed his presentation the estimate was more like 20-50 inches. The current estimate (unless it is revised by tomorrow's release) is 5-22 inches. That's between 12 and 48 times the level that Gore gave.

All of Gore's arguments are like this. Gore, like many who worry about global warming, worry that the public is not taking the issue seriously enough. Their solution is to exaggerate the consequences, silence debate, and gloss over the cost of mitigating CO2 emissions.

It probably says something that the nomination came from a socialist but I'm not sure what.