gore v. akasofu

Right, so Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his climate crusading. I spent part of the morning with Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who until this year led the fancy new International Arctic Research Center on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. His field of study is the northern lights, but lately he's been looking into climate change, and has been widely spreading his belief that it really isn't caused by human activities -- mostly -- and that there's nothing we can or should do about it other than adapt.
Thursday he talked to a group of UAF students; Friday morning he met with a group of local miners.
He ripped on the IPCC and its findings, and took a few jabs at Gore, basically for promoting bad science.
He's a very small man, and very polite, and also very witty, so when he sent me an e-mail later in the day, I'm pretty sure he meant it tongue-in-cheek. He had no problem with Gore winning the peace prize, he wrote, as long as it's not a science prize. More on him later.