At peace with the Nobel Peace Prize

Weathering the peace

The Nobel Prize week is just beyond us and there were a good few recognitions for work done though the most controversial was the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 in recognition of the science and the celebrity of the consequences global warming.

My view is that the award to Al Gore was more about making global warming an agenda issue in the highest forums of human endeavour and government rather then the nut and bolts of what is the accepted or disputed science of global weather phenomena and the consequences.

We might be in some millennial weather cycle or what we experience now might be man-made due to our consumption and disposal, it does not take away from the fact the land and water with the derivatives of food, shelter and resources are the primary causes war and dispute in many places especially Africa and the Middle-East.

Consensus for peace

The peace dividend is in finding fair and equitable means of managing these ever shrinking global resources of land and habitat being lost to development, desertification and the destruction of war all of which require a modicum of good governance and developmental economics.

Sharing the Nobel Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) where peer-reviewed science collides with compromise and political consensus indicates that the greatest advances in responding to climate change and its effects on the environment would come from UN-type organisations rather than weather propeller-heads postulating from citadels of academic overdrive.

The IPCC was formed in 1998 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess and monitor possible climate change cause by human activity the presentation that includes Al Gore gives this citation “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.”

Another Nigerian in peace

It would be remiss to forget that the Secretary General of the WMO at that time was Professor Godwin Obasi, a Nigerian of impeccable academic credentials who held the position for 19 years from 1984 but unfortunately died in March 2007, no doubt, he would have been very pleased to see this phenomenon lauded and given this kind of profile.

In the end, I am at peace with recognition that the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 regardless of what the detractors, refuseniks and critics have to say on this matter, these recipients have done more to bring this matter into the mainstream, it would however placate the Carbon Nazis.