I lied. I couldn't stay away, not with all the kudos going on here (except for level-headed Glen) for Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace(!)Prize for his so-called documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

It begins with a searing, harrowing nightmare vision of the world to come:

One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when -- KERPLUNK -- an acorn fell on his head.

"Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."

Whoops -- wrong eco-doom blockbuster. The point is though that respected figures have been forecasting the end of the world pretty much since the beginning of the world.

Consider some of Chicken Little's eminent successors in the field:

In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, distinguished scientist Paul R. Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" -- nothing could possibly be done to avoid mass starvation.

In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome annnounced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.

In 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?

In 1977, Jimmy Carter, president of the United States (incredible as it may seem), confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."

In spite of all these doom-sayers' predictions, millions didn't starve, and oil gas and gold didn't run out and kids aren't skating on the frozen Everglades.

The renowned meteorologist, Dr. William Gray (think hurricane forecasting), does not subscribe to anthropogenic causes of global warming. He says that humans are not responsible for the warming of the earth and that "we are brainwashing our children."

Now, who am I going to believe? Dr. William Gray with his MS in Meteorology and his PhD in Geophysical Science, who explains that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures (related to the amount of salt in ocean water) was responsible for the global warming that he acknowleges has taken place and who also says that a period of cooling will begin soon and will last for several years...or am I going to believe that politician, pseudo-scientist Al Gore with his bachelor of arts degree in government?

What we should be worried about is what really did happen in the last third of the twentieth century. In that period, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the global popoulation to just over 20%, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%. Right now we are at parity, but we continue to decline, while they continue to increase.

A clash of civilizations, that's what we really should be worried about.

Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, specified that the prize was "to be given to the person or society that renders the greatest service to the cause of international fraternity, in the suppression of reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses."

I just don't see how Al Gore, by making a movie about global warming (caused by man or not) comes under that definition. Surely, didn't the prize committee have another nominee under consideration that would have more aptly fit that description?

Barbara