30
Nov
No one has ever been stripped of a Nobel Prize, because this is actually specifically forbidden by the organization which administers the Nobel Prizes. According to the Nobel Foundation, “no appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize,” and no prizes can be revoked after the fact, no matter how controversial they may seem. Despite the existence of several petitions pushing for retraction of controversial Nobel Prizes, it is unlikely that the organization will change its rules to make a revocation possible.
The Nobel Committee is quite proud of some of their previous controversial nominations. They cite the fact that some of their previous winners were controversial at the time, but eventually proven correct. That’s wonderful.
But what about cases where the winner was proven to be a fraud? In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won along with Al Gore. Al Gore won for writing a book and making a movie, for profit, based on the IPCC report. In 2009, evidence has emerged that a key architect for the IPCC fudged results in order to justify climate change. That not only means the IPCC justification for winning is based on fraud, but Al Gore’s campaign is based on one as well.
I’d like to see the Nobel Committee’s response to how they deal with something like that. Controversial’s one thing, fraud is something completely different although quite often they are the same thing.
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mw on 12.01.2009
I have spent some time browsing through the the e-mails, documents, and blog reactions to the CRU data dump . Quite an eye opener. Reading the purloined e-mails and documents and understanding their context provides a greater education on the current state of global warming science than a dozen viewings of “An Inconvenient Truth”.
As a service to the blogging community, I have reversed engineered the CRU Scientific Methodology from the procedures documented in the e-mails and code. It is clear to me that they have built on the work of maverick chemist Theodore Hapner, who revolutionized thinking about the scientific method in 2006. Standing on Hapner’s shoulders, and with the backing of the IPCC – The New & Improved CRU Scientific Methodology can now be revealed – it is shown graphically on my most recent post.