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Political Correctness: The front-runners for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are a couple of global warming alarmists. With dozens of wars raging, the committee couldn’t find a single person laboring honorably for peace?

Once a symbol of distinction, this honor has plumbed shameful depths in recent years. A county fair blue ribbon has more significance. Since 1990, winners include terrorist Yasser Arafat, fraud Rigoberto Menchu, foreign-policy incompetents Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan, unreconstructed communist Mikhail Gorbachev and the useless Mohamed ElBaradei.

Each year, the Peace Prize committee has a chance to redeem itself, yet it never seems up to the task. It looks like 2007 will be no exception. Later this week, say reports, it will name as this year’s co-winners Al Gore and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian who has drawn attention to what she believes are climate change’s effects on Arctic communities.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steve Huntley noted “...earlier this year Gore “canceled an interview with Denmark’s largest newspaper when he learned it would include questions from Bjorn Lomborg, respected author of ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’ “

Does Gore know what so many have missed in their environmental zealotry — that his theory’s many flaws cannot be defended? Is he aware that the errors of his global warming ideas would be quite easily exposed by a knowledgeable skeptic?

Just what the Nobel committee really needs — another fraud in its pantheon of laureates. If Gore wins the prize as expected, it will mark another step in the long, politicized decline of a once highly regarded international award. How sad. Read more here.

By Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun Times

Seven hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend to try to get someone to talk to you and not get an answer.That’s how much the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based libertarian think tank, has forked over in six months for advertisements in national newspapers trying to persuade Al Gore to debate one of its experts on global warming issues. “We have tried, repeatedly, to contact Gore directly, with registered letters and calls to his office, and have never received a reply,” says Joseph Bast, Heartland president. A spokeswoman for Gore told me by e-mail that Heartland is an oil-company-funded group that denies that global warming is real and caused by human activities. “The debate has shifted to how to solve the climate crisis, not if there is one,” said Kalee Kreider. “It does not make sense for him to engage in a dialogue with them at this time.”

The issue is a bit more complicated than that. What Bast wants is for Gore to debate one of three authorities who dispute the former vice president’s assertion that global warming is a crisis that requires an immediate, hugely expensive response potentially damaging to the U.S. and world economies. One of the Heartland experts is Dennis Avery, an economist, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-author, with Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia, of the book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. As you might guess from that title, Avery sees global warming as a natural phenomenon in which “there may be a human factor but if so it’s small.” He describes the warming as “moderate” and says there’s been no warming since 1998. “Where’s the crisis?”

The Heartland case is not the first time Gore has ducked a forum. Earlier this year he canceled an interview with Denmark’s largest newspaper when he learned it would include questions from Bjorn Lomborg, respected author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. “Gore’s sermon is not one that will stand scrutiny,” says Christopher C. Horner, another one of Heartland’s debate candidates, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.

But the point is that Gore and his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” aren’t the last word. In March, the New York Times reported that while they praise Gore for raising awareness about warming, a number of scientists see exaggerations and errors in some of his assertions. “They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism,” the Times wrote. For example, Gore forecasts sea levels rising up to 20 feet, flooding parts of New York and Florida. But the U.N. panel’s actual estimate is that seas will rise 7 to 23 inches in this century. Read more here.

By Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters

Climate change skeptics around the world are painfully aware that the Global Warmingist-in-Chief, soon-to-be-Nobel Laureate Al Gore, despite his supposedly vast knowledge on the subject, has refused every invitation to debate his theories concerning man’s role in making things hot for the planet. Fearing the globe’s foremost warm-monger will never step up to the challenge - why should he...the debate’s over! - top scientists from everywhere you can imagine have decided to debate the former vice president the only way seemingly possible: on YouTube.

Since former Vice President and global warming activist Al Gore has so far refused to debate global warming skeptics, the debate has been brought to him. The public can now watch Al Gore make his case head-to-head against expert climatologists in the first episode of the new environmental education video series, “We Debate, You Decide,” launched by DemandDebate.com.

How delicious. The announcement continued: Al Gore has refused multiple invitations to debate in-person about global warming,” said Steve Milloy, executive director of DemandDebate.com. “So we’ve decided to let video of his previous remarks do the talking for him,” Milloy explained. In the first installment of DemandDebate’s “We Debate, You Decide” series, Al Gore ‘debates’ expert climatologists on the central issue of whether carbon dioxide drives global warming. See this debate here. Congratulations go out to Steve Milloy for a fabulous idea and a wonderful job.