From a University of Tennessee press release: Former VP Gore to Receive Honorary Doctorate from UT Knoxville
KNOXVILLE — Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore will be honored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with only the third honorary degree granted by the campus. The degree was approved by the UT Board of Trustees at their meeting Feb 26th.
Gore will receive the degree — an Honorary Doctor of Laws and Humane Letters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology — at the spring commencement exercises of the College of Arts and Sciences on May 14. He will be the featured speaker at the ceremony, addressing graduates and their families along with the gathered faculty.
“Vice President Gore’s career has been marked by visionary leadership, and his work has quite literally changed our planet for the better,” said UT Knoxville Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. “He is among the most accomplished and respected Tennesseans in history, and it is fitting that he should be honored by the flagship education institution of his home state.”
Gore, whose career in public service and business has spanned four decades, is currently chairman of Current TV, an Emmy-award-winning, independently owned cable and satellite television nonfiction network for young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism. He also serves as chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm that is focused on a new approach to sustainable investing.
Gore’s appreciation and personal interest in the institution of higher education is apparent as he serves as faculty member/visiting professor at various institutions across the country. A UT Knoxville faculty member holds the Nancy Gore Hunger Chair for Excellence in Environmental Studies, endowed by Gore to honor his late sister. Gore also is a distinguished member of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy’s board of directors and honorary co-chair of the Tennessee 4-H Club Foundation Inc. with UT Extension.
Gore, a native of Carthage, Tenn., was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the U.S. on Jan. 20, 1993, and served eight years in that office. During that time, Gore was a central member of President Clinton’s economic team. He served as president of the Senate, a Cabinet member, a member of the National Security Council, and as the leader of a wide range of administration initiatives. Prior to his service as vice president, Gore was twice elected to the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, in 1984 and 1990, and represented Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District — the seat held by his father, Al Gore Sr., before his own service in the Senate — in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1976 to 1982.
He received a degree in government with honors from Harvard University in 1969. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in the Vietnam War. Upon returning from Vietnam, Gore became an investigative reporter with the Tennessean in Nashville, where he also attended Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School and then Law School.
Gore was the co-winner, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change. He is the author of the best-selling books “Earth in the Balance” and “An Inconvenient Truth” and also is the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary.
In addition to his roles with Current TV and Generation Investment Management, Gore is a member of the board of directors of Apple Inc., a senior adviser to Google Inc., and a partner with the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He is a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and chairs the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit organization designed to help solve the climate crisis.
He and his wife, Tipper, live in Nashville. They have four children and three grandchildren.
Gore will join entertainer and philanthropist Dolly Parton and former Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. as the only recipients of honorary degrees from UT Knoxville.
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Now here’s the interesting thing. The Knoxville News Sentinel ran an op ed saying “Al Gore a fine choice for honorary degree” and at the same time ran a reader poll on their website.
Here’s the results as of 10:30PM PST 3/3/10
As far as I know, there’s been no effort by anyone to flood the poll, I learned about it only as I’m writing this entry. Maybe too many people saw him interview with Conan O’Brien a few weeks back. You can vote if you wish here.
h/t to Leif Svalgaard
Patrick Davis (05:06:22) :
“Bill Tuttle (04:39:18) : ”
In my opinion, he is an insult to anyone who has served time in the forces.
We just considered him a late arrival of one of “McNamara’s 100,000.” The insult is his sycophants insistence that merely *being* in Vietnam ennobled him — while slamming the rest of us as PTSD-ridden, drug-addled, murderous psychopaths.
Which I resent — I *never* did drugs…
Hey!!
Leave Dr. Seuss alone.
A fine, fine author and illustrator.
(My wife’s a children’s librarian so I ought to know)
Well if the university is as bad as the BoT is stupid . . . . it would be a great place to avoid attending or having a degree from.
My first thought was how much money did he give the U?
Oh, my.
Poll results as of 14:07 GMT are:
No 96% 6674
Yes 3% 231
Not sure 0% 18
But it’s not a *scientific* poll. It hasn’t been peer-reviewed…
Money changed hands.
Talking about value of some science degrees, see what I found on Real Climate blog:
Post: Some of the energy going into the oceans gets converted to potential energy due to the higher surface level, i.e. “work” is being done to push up the surface against gravity. Does anybody have a sense of how much this reduces the surface temperature?
[Response: Completely negligible. Work out the average movement up of the centre of mass of the ocean due to thermal expansion- maybe 0.5/mm per year. Calculate the increase in potential energy m*g*delta h per m2, and you get roughly 6×10^-5 W/m2. Roughly 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the heating rate. – gavin]
So small, 6×10^-5 W/m2? Well let us “uneducated trolls” estimate it ourselves:
Linear thermal expansion coefficient for water at 20 C is A=6.910^-5, 1/K (taken from Wikipedia, of course). Let’s assume that only L= 1 m of water is heated up, and the increase of temperature is DT = 10C. Then, linear thermal expansion DL = A*L *DT= 6.910^-5*1*10 = 6.910^-4, m. The center of gravity raises half of that and then the increase of the potential energy per unit area is DE_p=ro*L*g*DL/2 =ro*L^2*g*A*DT, where water density is ro=10^kg/m^3, and g=10m/s^2. Then for the case of 1 m thickness of the heated water layer and temperature increase of 10C the increase of potential energy per square meter is DE=3.4 W/m^2. This is 5 orders of magnitude higher than estimated by Mr. Gavin. However, it could be that he assumed that only top10 millimeters of water is heated and the average increase of temperature is only 1 degree C. Or may be, just may be he assumed that the increase of potential energy is DE=ro*DL*g*DL/2? I bet that the last one is what he did; however, one way or another he can’t make a simple estimate!
A new degree for professional scammery? Very nice, didn’t see something like that before: “Dr. h. c. scam” …
Hum, I guess UT is just like the peace prize people……..only worth the paper it’s printed on. I wonder if Obama is next for this as well?
Next Wharton will give Madoff a honorary doctorate in Business Administration
My Two Cents: Seems the university needs a donation. Surely they realize that Gore has the money for a substantial one…
One commentor accidently hits the nail on the head:
“Anyways, your donations (except to athletics) are nothing in comparison to the NSF and DOE funding, which provides researchers at UT millions for researching CLIMATE CHANGE!”
Al Gore and a duck walk into a bar.
The bartender say’s “Where did you get that”
“From Tennessee” says the duck
Given former Vice President’s Al Gore’s famous prediction that the Arctic sea ice will all disappear by the summer of 2014, shouldn’t the University hold off to see if his “vision” is even close to being correct?
Unbelievable!!! An insult to anyone who earned a degree the hard way. And an insult to all those smart people that didn’t earn a degree for one reason or another but would certainly deserve one.
This Al Gore character must have sold his soul to the devil to constantly get accolades for his BS (that’s Bull SH…..not the other B.S.)
Peter Hearnden (05:55:46),
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that A. Gore is an idiot. Sub-par mediocrity may be more accurate.
I would reserve the term idiot to Gore’s sycophants, including the fawning Mr Cheek, and others.
Advertisement fun again: I got a large ad for an IQ test below the picture of Gore 🙂
What can you expect out of a University that dumbs down its science department by combining it with the liberal arts school. They tried that at UAH in the 90’s and the students and faculty revolted and kept it from happening.
The reason given was that the math department was too hard and that we wanted to get more students through the system (i.e.) lets make more money off these rubes that did not get an education in high school.
The editor of the newspaper is telling people to “get over it. Al Gore is a fine choice.” Obviously not tongue-in-cheek. What a disgrace for the degree mill and the rag.
” Peter Hearnden (05:55:46) :
[…]
enquiry it seems to me it needs to drop posts tagged (insultingly) ‘Al Gore is an idiot’ […]”
In my eyes, Al Gore isn’t an idiot. He’s the best conman around, on par with the guy who sold the Eiffel tower.
Just a thought! I note one or two of you chaps have picked up on a story about victims of Hurricane Algore in New Orleans. Might this just be a good thing after all, because they will have to prove beyond a “reasonable doubt”, in a court of law, that burning fossil fuels actually have caused global warming? How on Earth would they get a fair trial, by finding a jury of 12 good men and women who have never heard of global warming or climate change? Surely a court case would put the UNIPCC on trial, the EPA on trial, James Hansen on trial, etc?
AtB
May 14th should be May Day in Knoxville. If you value your business and your job be there to register your disgust. We need all of you to show up…farmers, railroaders, miners, small business people. Gore has extorted millions from all of us. Let`s all meet in Knoxville on May 14th.
You’re kidding? really? An online poll is “interesting?”
Anthony, this is pretty pathetic.
I don’t like the guy either, and if I thought there was any actual value in the poll, I’d head over and vote ‘no’. But there isn’t a lick of value in an internet poll, and I’m kind of surprised Anthony would waste any time on it.
Well he did invent the internet, didn’t he?