24 thoughts on “Another “Nobel Laureate””

  2. Well, no one in the EU got a certificate. The problem is that the IPCC did send one out to all of the contributors to the report, so perhaps there is somewhat of an excuse if they don’t understand how the prize works. I’ll bet that the Nobel Committee is pretty steamed about it, given how it dilutes the meaning of winning one.

    1. The implication that the climate science community can’t tell the difference seems more damning than anything else said about them.

    2. Then the Nobel Committee has itself to blame by picking organizations and countries instead of individuals. Actually in theory since the picked the EU this year then all the members of the Nobel Committee are now winners of the Peace Prize. Hmm, wonder if they broke their own rules doing so 🙂

      1. Actually in theory since the picked the EU this year then all the members of the Nobel Committee are now winners of the Peace Prize.

        Actually in practice, none of them could be deemed winners of the Peace Prize: they are all Norwegians, and Norway is not a member state of the EU. (They’ll just have to be content with being Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 instead.)

    3. I’ll bet that the Nobel Committee is pretty steamed about it, given how it dilutes the meaning of winning one.

      As opposed to how giving one to Obama made the prize look so substantive and worthwhile.

    1. Maybe someone else can explain why, when reading that, a song began playing in my head:

      “Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name.”

  4. Certainly he’s being honest in listing it as “as part of IPCC”.

    I’m with Mr. Matula – the real blame here is to the Committee, not the people constituting the IPCC, for awarding a group the Prize, along with Mr. Gore – and to the IPCC for sending out the certificates.

    (For that matter, though, he “dilution” suggested was done long ago by the Committee for the Peace Prize…)

    1. No, the Nobel Committee has laid out the rules by which an individual can claim credit for a shared Nobel Prize and “as part of the IPCC” is specifically not one of them.

      And the Nobel Committee awarding “organizations instead of individuals” does not qualify as an excuse — rules are rules.

      1. No, the Nobel Committee has laid out the rules by which an individual can claim credit for a shared Nobel Prize

        Since the Nobel Prize is a monetary award, anyone who shared in it should have reported the fact on his income tax.

      2. It qualifies as a perfectly good moral excuse to me, at least, because why on earth would anyone go search out and read such rules, especially in his case?

        Remember, I said he was being honest in his claims – that mean acting in good faith. It does not mean obeying the rules that the Nobel Committee made, that he wouldn’t have even known about or had reason to seek out.

        He knew he was part of the IPCC effort in that time period. He knew the IPCC was awarded a group prize. The IPCC sent out congratulatory certificates to its members. Thus he had good-faith reason to believe he could say the thing he said, I think.

        I can’t blame him for thinking he could say he was awarded the prize as part of that group, given those things, even if the Committee’s rules say he can’t say that – because why would he even suspect that he needed to go look up some rules from the Committee to repeat what the IPCC had told him and what he knew about the Group getting an award?

        Yes, sure, the Committee can certainly tell him not to say that. And now that he’s presumably been made aware of the “rules”, he’s got an obligation to change his CV.

        But I see no reason to believe that CV entry was anything but misunderstanding of how the process works – because all the evidence available suggests that the IPCC (probably itself in ignorance of those rules) encouraged its members to think that.

        Tempest. Teapot.

        1. “Remember, I said he was being honest in his claims”

          That’s the thing. He was not. He was informed quite a long time ago that he can’t honestly make that claim.

  7. Not that I don’t agree that the strained effort to claim some of the credit for the Nobel Prize is silly; on the other hand, a CV is essentially an exercise in bullshitting your potential employers anyway. Not necessarily lying, of course, but definitely sexing up your achievements and positions and saying what that people reading your CV want to hear.

    If I were a member of the IPCC in 2007, I know that I’d have a very hard time not putting in a little remark like that, too, even if I’m fully aware that saying I “shared” in the Prize “as part of the IPCC” is nowhere near in the same ballpark as receiving it for my own personal contributions.

    Have a little sympathy for your fellow man, after all–if you’re a climate scientist with the IPCC, you need to find something to validate your existence.

    1. Yes!!! Every MSM article I saw about the libel case started with “Nobel Prize-winning scientist Michael Mann…”, as if that should shut off debate. Which, of course, it the intent.

  9. I won an art prize in the fifth grade. I think that’s probably more respected than the Nobel these days.

    1. …only if it was for a finger painting of a Crucifix in a glass of yellow kool-aid Pooh. After all, the Libs own art AND the Nobel system.

  11. I found this:-

    Bernstein: ‘Eventually, the Chairman of the IPCC (Pachauri) sent an e-mail to all of us who had worked on the reports, explaining that we really couldn’t claim that we had won the Nobel Prize, only that we had contributed to the IPCC’s winning the prize. And, by the way, the prize money was going to an education fund for climate change researchers in developing countries. We weren’t going to get any of it’

    So Pachauri himself had to specifically tell them to stop saying they had ‘won’ the prize. I assume that would include ‘sharing’ or using the term ‘nobel laureate’.

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