It's sad to see what's become of the Nobel Peace Prize over the years. PowerLine has a good summary:

When did the Nobel Peace Prize go off the tracks? Today's award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years:

2005: MOHAMED ELBARADEI (joint winner). He's done such a nice job with Iran.

2002: JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America. A true cosmopolitan, he has undermined the foreign policy of his own country and vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world.

2001: UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA. KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General. Among other things, respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest scams in history.

1994: YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority for his efforts to create peace in the Middle East. A cold-blooded murderer before and after receiving the award.

1992: RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. Faker and author, sort of, of I, Rigoberta Menchu.

1988: THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. Notwithstanding rapes and sex abuse committed by the team in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo, still doing fine work all over the world.

Jay Richards, on National Review Online, notes how Al Gore is dropping all pretense that his global warming crusade has anything to do with hard science:

Keeping to the trend of politicized awards, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In his initial statement, however, Gore explains that global warming isn't a political issue at all: "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."

Glad he cleared that up. I had been thinking it had something to do with science.

Of course, Gore winning the Nobel Liberal Prize comes right on the heels of a UK judge ruling about the many inconvenient inaccuracies in Gore's alarmist propaganda film:

Al Gore’s award-winning climate change documentary was littered with nine inconvenient untruths, a judge ruled yesterday.

Mr Justice Burton identified nine significant errors within the former presidential candidate’s documentary as he assessed whether it should be shown to school children.

...In what is a rare judicial ruling on what children can see in the class-room, Mr Justice Barton was at pains to point out that the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change.

The claim that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” was dismissed as “distinctly alarmist”. Such a rise would take place “only after, and over, millennia.

...Mr Gore’s suggestion that the Gulf Stream, that warms up the Atlantic ocean, would shut down was contradicted by the International Panel on Climate Change’s assessment that it was “very unlikely” to happen.

The drying of Lake Chad, the loss of Mount Kilimanjaro’s snows and Hurricane Katrina were all blamed by Mr Gore on climate change but the judge said the scientific community had been unable to find evidence to prove there was a direct link.

The drying of Lake Chad, the judge said, was “far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and overgrazing, and regional climate variability”.

The judge also said there was no proof to support a claim that polar bears were drowning while searching for icy habitats melted by global warming. The only drowned polar bears the court was aware of were four that died following a storm.

What's so amazing about the Al Gore phenomenon is that his followers view him, and he views himself, as some sort of quasi-religious figure. This is part, I think, of a larger movement, especially among liberals, but not exclusively, to fill a spiritual void in their lives, a void caused by, among other things, the rejection of any kind of traditional religion, or belief in God, and the fantastic standard of living most in the West have achieved.

Hmmm, sounds like a post for another day.