Dueling Nobels

The Tribune pays homage to our local laureate and explicates further:

The theory has broad applications in the real world. It helps to answer, for example, questions of how to devise health insurance policies that will provide the best coverage without providing incentives for misuse. Or how best to fund projects that benefit the public good by providing, for example, uncongested roads.

Great letter to the editor in the Trib. As we know, the Goracle did not win a prize in the sciences:

On Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to German scientist Gerhard Ertl, in part because of his research explaining "how toxic carbon monoxide is converted into harmless carbon dioxide" ("Coronation in science' comes on 71st birthday," News, Oct. 11).

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to former Vice President Al Gore, who claims the world faces cataclysmic global warming due to man's carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Is carbon dioxide harmless, or a pollutant? On matters of science, we should trust not the politician, but the scientist—and indeed the scores of scientists whose research invalidates Gore's alarmist theory.

Diane Carol Bast