Please give me a Nobel prize

How I wish I were a Nobel laureate, and preferably a real one. That’s the thought that runs through my head as I witness the altercation between Paul Krugman and Mark Steyn.

Background: Climate scientist Michael Mann, famous as the main brain behind the so-called hockey stick, has sued Mark Steyn. Steyn sums it up thus:

In 2012, Mann, the inventor of the global-warming “hockey stick”, decided to sue me, National Review, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for calling his stick “fraudulent” and deriding his “exoneration” by the same Penn State administration that covered up for Jerry Sandusky.

Krugman is sure Mann is right and Steyn is wrong and tries to come to Mann’s rescue. He invokes the mighty Google to emphasize his belief that Steyn is clueless, hopeless and pathetic:

Now for the slightly encouraging news: Mann filed suit against National Review for defamation. Also encouraging is the evident inability of NR to understand how you defend against a charge of defamation. You don’t repeat the false allegations — sorry, guys, but courts also have access to Google and Nexis, and can find that all the charges have been rejected in repeated inquiries.

Steyn replies to Krugman in Real Nobel Laureate Takes Pity on Fake Nobel Laureate:

Er, no. That’s profoundly stupid in a way that only really smart guys can be. This will apparently come as news to Professor Krugman, but – stand well back – courts don’t Google. Courts consider something called “evidence” , which has to be “introduced”.

Yes, and in fact, kids learn something about this in school nowadays. You can’t trust everything you find using Google. Shocking, isn’t it? It might actually not be true that the world is run by lizards.

So my point, really, is about the joys of being a Nobel laureate (perhaps even a fake one, depending on Google’s opinion). When Steyn says “profoundly stupid in a way that only really smart guys can be”, that’s not quite it. The key to that particular universe of stupidity is not being smart, but being prestigious. Those guys can do anything they want, intellectually that is, with impunity.  Such as using the “google and believe” method of scholarship. (That’s regular Google, not Google Scholar.) Being sloppy and superficially opinionated will never harm their exalted status.

So please, at least nominate me for a Nobel prize. Since I googled it, I know that not just anyone can do that. But if you’re a professor of social sciences, history, philosophy, law or theology, you are a qualified nominator. I just need to work out the fine points, such as which of the prizes I want.