The Al Gore groupie editorial in The News & Observer this morning is embarrassing in its naivete and dishonesty. Years from now, when some grad student or blogger finds it in the digital archives of the long-dead dead-tree editions of The N&O, it will be laughed at as we laugh at turn-of-the-century editorials touting phrenology. Here is some of their puerile gushing:

Gore, who has written books and appeared in his own Academy Award-winning film on the subject, is deserving. He has used his high profile and his eloquence to sound alarms that needed to be heard. Along the way, he’s taken the barbs of his critics and kept up the fight and the faith. Thanks in large part to him, the subject of climate change and its threat to humanity is now locked on the public radar.

So, Gore, who has written a book and appeared in his own home movie is deserving of a peace prize? As many less enraptured commentators have pointed out, climate alarmism hasn’t much to do with world peace, other than cement the political and ideological nature of the Nobel Peace Prize. It also was deemed immaterial that Gore’s film is riddled with inaccuracies. I guess the “higher truth” makes Gore’s dreadful scholarship acceptable.

While Gore was stumbling through his press conference yesterday, an actual climate scientist was speaking in Chapel Hill:

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth. …

“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”

You’ll note that the story on Dr. Gray appears in the Sydney Morning Herald. The N&O couldn’t be bothered with it, apparently, since it appears nowhere in my edition this morning. Far be it from The N&O to throw the cold water of actual facts on what they call Gore’s “patriotic,” “profound” and “spectacular” efforts needlessly to scare the hell out of everyone.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: The Sydney Morning Herald erred when it said Dr. Gray spoke at “the University of North Carolina.” Gray spoke at UNC-Charlotte and the story originated from The Charlotte Observer. A copy editor in Sydney apparently decided that “UNC-Charlotte” would just confuse Australians. Still, since The N&O and The Charlotte Observer are both McClatchy papers now, I’m surprised The N&O didn’t carry that story, even if it didn’t take place in Chapel Hill.