Living up to one’s Nobel Prize (Sept. 2)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
It is getting so that getting the Nobel Prize may be a little like being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You might say: How is that? Well, occasionally when an athlete would be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, that person would break a leg, or get fired from a team, or be exposed as a child molester. Something like that.
Now, we have two Nobel prizewinners being embarrassed by not quite living up to why the prize was given.
First, you may remember, President Obama got the Nobel Prize for Peace last year, before he had barely been president for nine months. His nomination had been made before he was inaugurated. The Nobel committee said the prize was given for Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
It did not say what those extraordinary efforts were, but he did go around and shake a lot of hands and bow, so if that’s what gets you a Nobel Peace Prize, a lot of international Rotarians should be up for the prize next year.
In his speech Tuesday, he took credit for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, but that withdrawal already had been scheduled by the time he took office. It was made possible, you may remember, by the “surge,” which Obama opposed.
Another Nobel Prize winner taking some heat (if you’ll excuse the pun) is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which with Al Gore got the Nobel Peace Prize three years ago.
According to The Wall Street Journal, an independent investigation of the panel’s pronouncements on global warming has concluded it’s time for “fundamental reform” of the organization, especially of the assertions it has made about whether the warming of the earth’s climate is as much caused by human activity as the panel claims that it is.
Some critics, says the Journal, are calling for the chair of the panel, Rajendra Pachauri, to resign. Pachauri says he doesn’t want to.
The next Nobel Peace Prize winner probably should refuse the award to avoid the embarrassment.
