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
Well, it looks like Dr. Al and Dr. Tom Karl are peers!
(Of course, it makes me wonder why I took prelim exams, did research and class work for four years, then wrote a dissertation and defended it to get my Ph.D. This looks to be much easier…)
UTen isn’t a real University anyway, notice the orange and white, notice their initials? Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, the real UT in Texas.
This isn’t too different from getting honored by Devry – which is fitting for our good buddy Al
Bill Tuttle (06:08:32) :
I imagine the poll has been slightly skewed by WWUT 🙂 Since I live in TN, I felt obligated to vote.
Ah yes, Al Gore. Does anybody remember the fuel additive MTBE? It just so happens that this fuel additive was ground water poison. It can be cleaned up, but it ain’t cheap. Does anybody remember who was the one pushing MTBE? Answer: Al Gore and Carol Browner.
Here is what is known. A disciple (and yes I mean disciple) of Al Gore, Carol Browner, knew MTBE was groundwater poison but destroyed those documents. The data was suppressed that showed a dissenting viewpoint; sound familiar?
For sins like this, Al Gore gets an honorary doctorate. Hey, I recycle a lot. I haven’t damaged groundwater and aquifer supplies. I guess I should dump nuclear waste in my local groundwater if I want to be awarded an honorary doctorate.
MTBE shows us that obviously a tiger can’t change his stripes. Once an eco-scammer, always an eco-scammer. And what is worse, people think the tiger is this safe innocent cute kitten who couldn’t harm anybody.
If you want a history of Al Gore and MTBE, don’t use Wikipedia. Magically, Wikipedia doesn’t include the connection between Al Gore and MTBE, not anywhere. Not even under the page dedicated to the MTBE controversy. Just use your search engine of choice and search for the words Al Gore MTBE. This link will get you started.
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg67617.html
Al Gore is an idiot? Maybe.
Al Gore has a neurosis for power? Maybe also.
Al Gore a man of letters? No.
Come on guys, let up. He wrote some very good fiction.
When the last nail goes into the CAGW theory and it becomes totally debunked, those organizations that heaped praise on Al Gore are going to see their credibility go down the drain.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (02:16:12) :
“He is among the most accomplished and respected Tennesseans in history”
Is Tennessee that bad?
The poll should answer your question as to how Tennesseans feel about that statement. Gore doesn’t garner much respect around here that I’ve ever seen, thus he couldn’t even win his home COUNTY back in 2000, much less the entire state. And Eastern TN is very conservative, so the poll results aren’t surprising to me in the least (currently at 96% as I type this).
Take it from someone who has lived in TN his entire life. We don’t claim him.
…………….BarryW (05:17:31) :
Dr. Parton should be outraged.
Which one?
Pointman,
I have one more item to add to your “how to” if you’ll pardon my springboarding on here…
Those serious scientists who have both supported and cautioned the skeptical movement should continue their work, and be supported in that work. They are the ones who are trying to ferret out the underlying climate processes that will, in the end enrich us all – and I do mean monitarily.
Mike
Is it just me or does Al look like the Joker in that photo? How appropriate 🙂
“He is among the most accomplished and respected Tennesseans in history…”
That’s a pretty questionable judgement.
Unable to complete seminary or the other graduate program he started in law, he’s being given a freebie by UT. Kind of like his political career where daddy gave him a leg up. Of course while he was accomplished enough to make it to a heart beat away from the presidency for eight years (and a few danglin’ chads away in 2000), it’s worth remembering Vice-President John Garner’s judgement on the job, “It’s not worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
Saying he’s among the most respected Tennesseans is equally puzzling. Perhaps it means that outside of the state, he is a respected Tennessean. Because inside the state, the people had the good common sense to reject him in 2000. I suspect most people would choose Jed Clampett (he was from Tennessee wasn’t he?) over Gore today.
They should have given her two doctorates. Talk about faking the evidence and hiding the decline and maximizing the peaks. Actually, a Dr. from UofT is perfect for Gore. The clown on his merry-go-round.
johnnythelowery (05:25:46) Thanks a lot for your OSHA data in regard to tobacco smoking.
We should ask, and research about the unconcious motivation of those who passionately reject tobacco smoking, why is it so that these are the SAME PEOPLE (Al Gore among them), who fanatically believe in Global Warming, favor gay marriage, abortion, the “day after pill”, minority rights (child molesters included), “human rights”, international crime court, population control, big government, income redistribuition, social “justice”, AIDS´ fraternities, AH1N1 vaccination, women priesthood, “black holes”, “dark matter”,etc,etc.?
johnnythelowery (05:25:46) :
“…. it looks like the Anti-Smoking campaign was a dry run for the AGW campaign.”
———————–
Absolutely not. The anti-smoking campaign goes back to the 1950s when three medical researchers independently discovered a link between increased rates of cancer and smoking. (Nazi scientists made this link earlier but that is another story.) The response of the tobacco industry (namely British American Tobacco – BAT – the biggest player) was to try to isolate the harmful chemicals and remove them to eliminate this problem: however, it proved to be impossible to remove nicotine, which is both the active addictive agent that makes smoking pleasurable and the main carcinogen. So after the mid-1960s, despite its own research showing a very serious link between cancer and tobacco smoking, BAT shifted gears to suppress negative evidence, throw ‘smoke’ in the debate about the effects of tobacco, and promote ‘lite’ low-tar cigarettes as being more healthy. Its own research showed that smokers smoked more of the latter to compensate for the lower nicotine hit. In the meantime, there was an increasing body of individuals who lost their own health or who lost loved ones or who were otherwise victimized by the tobacco industry and its addicts who took up the fight to protect people from the harmful effects of tobacco: promoting smoking bans that took years to get in place; getting, with great difficulty, truth-in-packaging laws passed to force the tobacco companies to reveal the health threats of their products; and simply overcoming the deliberate obfuscation of the health effects of tobacco smoking by the tobacco industry.
There are no parallels with the AGW debates ON EITHER SIDE:
1) Since there has been no catastrophic global warming, there have been no victims of AGW. By contrast, there have been millions of victims of the tobacco industry – I am one, as I lost my mother to this destructive habit.
2) The obfuscatory science has been carried out by those seeking to ‘fight’ this non-existent problem, who ironically are the supporters of the AGW money-granting industry, rather than the opponents.
How to put this?
Tobacco companies = vested interests
AGW scientists, politicians, big business = vested interests
opponents of tobacco companies = victims, victims rights advocates, people
seeking the truth
-people who saw the collateral damage of smoking,
costing society millions (billions?) of dollars
opponents of AGW catastrophism = victims of misconceived taxes and
carbon credit schemes that serve no purpose but to line
the pockets of the AGW advocacy industry and tin-pot
dictators
– scientists and other individuals seeking the truth
– people who see the collateral damage of AGW
catastrophism: i.e. wasted resources, failure to fund
effective conservation measures such as funding improved,
less-polluting technologies, other research on truly serious
environmental problems
Scientists researching health effects of tobacco, who confirmed cancer and other health-problem links – vilified and smeared by tobacco industry
Scientists researching problems with AGW science, disproving links between CO2 and excessive warming – vilified and smeared by AGW scientists and propaganda industry
The one major difference is that while the media was confused by the tobacco industry’s tactics, it generally sided with the anti-tobacco science and evidence. By contrast, the main-stream media has also been confused by the AGW science, but because the MSM has failed to identify the big-industry links with the AGW carbon-trading scheme, or in some cases is complicit, it has backed the AGW ‘industry’ and opposed the scientists who have genuinely uncovered problems with the theory.
If you want a parallel with any precedent for the AGW debacle, it has to be the link between CFCs and the ozone layer, and the Montreal Protocol, which was a genuine dry-run for then demonizing CO2 – and the targets were big industry and consumer complacency. I really think that by drawing any parallels with the fight with Big Tobacco, you are playing into the hands of the global warming catastrophists.
anti-AGW scientific experts = or parallel scientific experts who were vilified by the tobacco companies who sought to smear their science by many of the same tactics used by AGW supporters
Gore deserves every bit of praise that he’s gotten for bringing this issue to the political front and center…
Meanwhile, March 2010 tropospheric temps continue the near record levels that we saw in January and February…
See: http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
and so the year is still very much on track to be the warmest year on instrument record. With solar activity increasing rapidly, and GCR’s on the decline, short of a Mt. Pinatubo type volcanic activity, we will have a record warm year. But still, I think arctic sea ice wil NOT see a record low summer minimum this year, but definitely in 2011.
How does all this warmth fit into the models of those who say the earth is cooling (or at least not warming?)
Sharon (05:06:17) :
“I’m not sure if awarding honorary degrees is one of those uniquely American practices. ”
No, I’m afraid that it is rampant here in Blighty too. Some of the honorary doctorates go to TV comedians, would you believe. Mind you, some of the so-called ‘universities’ are little more than colleges of further entertainment.
He is probably the SON OF THE BEAST, announced by the Apocalypse of Saint John. He was reborned as the 2012 draws near and the Kali Yuga era has recently ended ☺.
Actually, who cares? History will not be kind to him or his ilk. It is a minor footnote and only adds to the absurdity of our times.
Many people have been killed in wars to protect this Country – for THIS?
This is insane.
– Igor!
– Yes, master.
– I’ve been named a doctor.
– Good for you, sir!
– Yes, isn’t it.
– Oh, master.
– Yes, Igor?
– Does this mean you will be resuming your assembly of the Frankenclimate monster?
/Carl Hult
Thats a Ph.D in Marketing right?
The people that should know him best, the people of TN, almost universally dislike him based on the poll and the lack of TN votes in his bid for president. This is another example of the disassociation of academia from the real world.
When my daughter graduated from UNC, John Edwards was the commencement speaker. When she graduated from William and Mary law school, John Edwards was the speaker. At least it wasn’t Al Gore.
Dolly Parton? I know the two reasons why.
Alanthebrit: Actually, in a civil action the plaintiff only has to prove by a preponderance of the evidence. ie, fifty percent plus a smidgen.