One overdue link and one (half ?) undue prize

Al Gore comes out with the 2007 Nobel peace prize (jointly with a UN panel: here is the story by BBC) and an Oscar this year. the story It will take me a while to be convinced of the first one since I am quiet convinced of the second one. “An Inconvenient Truth” was a very emotional film, but to say that Gore through it have

“done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted”

is not true. What I remember from the movie is that he mentioned solutions near the end without relating them to other global issues, or even relating their cost and effectiveness to each other. He did a very bad job explaining these are the only solutions available in the present and discussing how much would we lose as (an evolving planet) if we were to act in the near future. Another thing that still haunts after seeing this film is the amazingly bad job he does when explaining his graphs: first, no error bars (what does a experimental result without error bars even mean?); second, the vagueness of the terms he uses is just all over the place (anyone can manage to sound exactly like they want if they don’t define their terms properly) and last but not least, the cheesy jokes … watch out for the “I need a ladder because this plot literally goes off the chart !!! ”

Here is a TED talk given by Bjorn Lomborg, which I found more solid that Gore’s. He poses the problem as an economics exercise, which it is and in doing so he does view it side by side with other big global problems. Gore also gave two TED talks, here is one of them.

Be careful: this TED talks page has so many great speakers that it is so addictive. Here is one by Ben Saunders talking about his skiing to the North Pole experience. One awesome quote from it:

“We got to Katanga, and I think is that Katagna isn’t the end of the world but you can see it from there.”