IN BUSH'S ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE THERE ARE WMDs AND GLOBAL WARMING IS JUST A PLOT BY SOME DIRTY HIPPIES TO EMBARRASS HIM

It's probably too good to be true that the U.S. would go from a leader universally despised as a tyrant and criminal to one who is an ex-politician favored to win a Nobel Peace Prize. While psychopathic maniacs in the self-contained alternative universe in which right-wingers reside have nominated a bigoted, bloodthirsty, drug addicted radio clown for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the likely winner is looking like Al Gore. If for no other reason, Gore will win because the whole world wants to rebuke Bush's destructive, rogue Regime. Of course, Gore's vehicle, An Inconvenient Truth, is a documentary that may have far more impact on the world than Bush's 8 excruciating, illegitimate years in the White House.

Gore was nominated because his tireless work-- including the film-- to draw the world's attention to the dangers of man-made climate change. As Boerge Brende a Conservative Member of Parliament in Norway told the A.P., "A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference... Al Gore, like no other, has put climate change on the agenda. Gore uses his position to get politicians to understand... I think climate change is the biggest challenge we face in this century."

Today I awoke and read a headline in the Guardian: "Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study." Did I mention a self-contained alternative world above? It tries spilling over and impacting normal people. With members of that universe, like Cheney and Bush at the healm, it manages to do that a lot.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

How cool is that separate paragraph about the travel expenses?