A Blast Of Hot Air From The Past

Holman Jenkins looks at the science of Gore's Nobel at OpinionJournal.com (free for all) and mentions a name that brings back memories:

The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet.

The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Svante Arhenius? The Svante Arhenius? Long before greenhouse gases and global warming became household terms, the name of the Swedish chemist was well-known within my cadre of friends in college. I'm not sure where we were first introduced to Svante--a meteorology class perhaps--but for some reason we latched on to him.

One of us wrote a paper that included a legitimate reference to Svante. From there, the legend was born. We attempted to work in a reference to Svante Arhenius in every paper we wrote for any class. In addition to being a famous chemist, he was also an expert on aviation safety, business law, urban planning, etc. I'm pretty sure he also had a small role in the Yalta conference (a paper I wrote largely from memory for a friend the night before it was due in exchange for a case of beer).

There wasn't any malicious motivation or fraudulous intent behind this. We were just having a little fun and tryng to give the name Svante Arhenius the attention it so richly deserved. It's nice to see that the legend lives on.