The Nobel Prize

Peace man
Oct 12th 2007
From Economist.com

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win the Nobel Peace Prize

AFP

IF THE Nobel Peace Prize were awarded for making the world a more peaceful place, then this year’s winners—Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—would be a bizarre choice. But two out of the previous three peace prizes went to people and organisations who had nothing to do with peace. The 2004 winner was Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman who plants trees, and the 2006 winners were Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, a Bangladeshi microcredit institution. (In 2005, in a radical departure from recent practice, the prize did actually go to a person and an organisation whose work has been designed to reduce the likelihood of global conflict—Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

Evidently the committee has decided to redefine the award as the Nobel Prize for Making the World a Better Place in Some Unspecified Way. In that case, Al Gore and the IPCC seem pretty good—though controversial—choices. The IPCC has put together scientific knowledge on the subject in a form comprehensible to policymakers; Mr Gore has pushed the policymakers to take action.

 Set up under the auspices of the UN to establish a scientific consensus on climate change, the IPCC has produced vast reports on the current state of knowledge on the subject every four years or so. Its latest came out earlier this year. Unlike Mr Gore, it has not struggled to make its work palatable to the masses. Its conclusions are therefore tentative, representative of the huge uncertainty inevitable in the study of a mechanism as complex as the climate. Its estimate for temperature change, for instance, ranges from a 1.1ºC rise to a 6.4ºC rise by the end of this century.

Even so, the IPCC has come in for some stick. Some scientists claim that sceptics about global warming get frozen out of the process. Some accuse it of alarmism. A prediction that warming would lead to the spread of malaria, for instance, was widely criticised on the grounds that malaria is correlated more closely with development than with temperature (it is present, for instance, in parts of central Asia, but not in the southern states of America).

Still, it would be surprising if a body studying such a vast and complex area did not get some things wrong. And, by and large, the IPCC does what it was supposed to do: it provides a robust scientific basis for politicians to get on with policymaking.

Mr Gore has been pushing them to do just that. The “former next president of the United States”, as he calls himself, tried to get America to ratify the Kyoto protocol to control greenhouse-gas emissions while he was Bill Clinton’s vice-president. Mr Clinton signed the protocol, but the Senate opposed the idea of America agreeing to a treaty that didn’t include controls on developing-country emissions, so it was never ratified.

After an agonisingly tight finish in the 2000 election, which he lost by a few Floridian hanging chads, Mr Gore refused to disappear into the political wilderness. Instead, he prowled the country in the guise of an Old Testament prophet with audio-visual aids, warning of the dangers of climate change. His slick, entertaining presentation was eventually made into a film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. That film, bizarrely for what was in effect a slide-show with lots of charts, did well at the box office and won two Oscars (although one was for a song).

Mr Gore has his detractors. His film is propaganda rather than documentary. A British judge this week ruled that it should not be shown to schoolchildren without a health warning, because there were several claims in it that were wrong: the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica are not, for instance, expected to melt “in the near future”, but in millennia. Nevertheless, America is now generally expected to accept in some form the controls on emissions that it rejected when it turned down Kyoto, and Mr Gore has been instrumental in getting it there.