The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, in Oslo, Norway, announcing the winners today. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Al Gore and to a United Nations panel for their work on global warming.
Photo: Daniel Sannum Lauten/Getty Images -- Agence France - Presse
Two Voices, One Message on Climate
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: October 13, 2007
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is being conferred for two starkly different ways of communicating about human-caused global warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change speaks in the measured voice of peer-reviewed science and government-negotiations. In four reports issued since 1990, it has always focused on the most noncontroversial findings. In 2001, for instance, it concluded, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”
The other awardee, former Vice President Al Gore, delivers brimstone-laden warnings of an unfolding “planetary emergency.” He has not shied from emphasizing the most emotionally potent, though least certain, consequences of warming, such as its link to hurricane intensity and the likely pace of sea-level rise.
Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University and a lead author of some of the climate panel’s reports in 2001 and this year, said he was thrilled to have climate elevated by the prize. But he said the focus on Mr. Gore as a personality and politician might distract from the strong consensus among researchers on the risks posed by unfettered greenhouse gas emissions.
“If the spectacular nature of his presentations and the personalities involved become the story instead of the science,” he said, “then it becomes counterproductive.”
But some scientists, historians and policy experts said yesterday that both messages — with all the imperfections attending each — seem necessary for a looming, planet-scale problem to get attention.
The Nobel “is honoring the science and the publicity, and they’re necessarily different,” said Spencer A. Weart, a science historian at the American Institute of Physics and author of The Discovery of Global Warming, a recent book charting climate research through the last century.
He added that both are essential because the science alone, laden with complexity and some unavoidable uncertainty, would never jog average citizens or most elected officials.
“The I.P.C.C. was set up to be the lowest common denominator, to weed out anything anyone could disagree with,” Dr. Weart said. “It was deliberately created, largely under the influence of Reagan administration, because governments didn’t want a bunch of self-appointed scientists from academies and so on out there. It’s no accident that it’s the Intergovernmental panel,” he said. “Even the Saudi government has to agree. That means that when the I.P.C.C. says you’re in trouble, you’re really in trouble.”
But if the profile of the climate issue had not been raised with the release of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary on Mr. Gore’s climate work, the panel’s latest reports, released in three parts from February through April, would not have had nearly as much impact, some experts said.
Among those crediting Mr. Gore for elevating the climate issue — if differing from him dramatically on solutions — is the former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich is co-author of a new book, “A Contract With the Earth,” accepting that human-caused warming poses unacceptable risks and pushing, among other things, for the United States to aggressively develop non-polluting energy technologies.
“In a way, Vice President Gore, by raising the intensity of the issue, by talking about it, raised the challenge for those of us who think there’s an alternative to say, O.K., right emotions, wrong answer,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview this week before the Nobel announcement. “But then we have an obligation to provide an answer.” He said he prefers incentives to boost energy research over Mr. Gore’s preference for a mandatory limit on gases, both nationally and globally.
Some longtime critics were less willing to give Mr. Gore credit. “I am delighted that Al Gore got a Peace Prize — which is NOT to be confused with a Nobel Prize for science,” S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist and one of a small, vocal group of longtime skeptics of dangerous human-caused warming, said in an email.
Some scientists who have participated in the panel’s reviews and published climate studies for many years said the award reflected that the global community had, after two decades of cyclical attention — and rising emissions — absorbed that humans are pushing on the planet’s thermostat.
But several such experts said they remained concerned by a deep persistent split over what to do about it — between those, like Mr. Gingrich and President Bush, who prefer a focus on technological advances and those, like Mr. Gore, seeking a regulatory approach forcing cuts in emissions.
“It’s been a long slog,” said Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist who has participated in the periodic climate assessments since the early days of the panel. “The award reminds us that expert advice can influence people and policy, that sometimes governments do listen to reason, and that the idea that reason can guide human action is very much alive, if not yet fully realized.”
Global Warming
On Feb. 2, 2007, the United Nations scientific panel studying climate change declared that the evidence of a warming trend is "unequivocal," and that human activity has "very likely" been the driving force in that change over the last 50 years. The last report by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 2001, had found that humanity had "likely" played a role.
The addition of that single word "very" did more than reflect mounting scientific evidence that the release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests has played a central role in raising the average surface temperature of the earth by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900. It also added new momentum to a debate that now seems centered less over whether humans are warming the planet, but instead over what to do about it. In recent months, business groups have banded together to make unprecedented calls for federal regulation of greenhouse gases. The subject had a red-carpet moment when former Vice President Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," was awarded an Oscar; and the Supreme Court made its first global warming-related decision, ruling 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency had not justified its position that it was not authorized to regulate carbon dioxide.
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The greenhouse effect has been part of the earth's workings since its earliest days. Gases like carbon dioxide and methane allow sunlight to reach the earth, but prevent some of the resulting heat from radiating back out into space. Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would never have warmed enough to allow life to form. But as ever larger amounts of carbon dioxide have been released along with the development of industrial economies, the atmosphere has grown warmer at an accelerating rate: Since 1970, temperatures have gone up at nearly three times the average for the 20th century.
The latest report from the climate panel predicted that the global climate is likely to rise between 3.5 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit if the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere reaches twice the level of 1750. By 2100, sea levels are likely to rise between 7 to 23 inches, it said, and the changes now underway will continue for centuries to come.
Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., the 45th vice president of the United States (serving two terms under Bill Clinton) is perhaps the political figure most closely associated with advocacy for environmental causes, and especially with making the case for action to control emissions of gases that scientists say are changing the earth's climate.
Mr. Gore's political career reached a climax in the bitter, months-long recount battle that ended in his narrow defeat by George W. Bush in the contested presidential election of 2000, which was settled by the Supreme Court's final ruling on Bush v. Gore. But his continuing work on the environment brought him renewed acclaim, particularly through the documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth," which won an Academy Award.
Long before the question of climate change was widely discussed, Mr. Gore took an interest in it as a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee from 1977 to 1985, and subsequently as a Senator from 1985 to 1993. (His father, too, was a Representative and a Senator from Tennessee.)
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In his first book, "Earth in the Balance" (1992), he described the struggle over environmental damage as ''the central organizing principle of world civilization." And he called the spread of democratic government around the world "an essential prerequisite for saving the environment.''
He also is widely recognized for his early advocacy of making the new networking technologies of the Internet available to the general public. He is a member of the board of directors of Apple Inc. and is a senior adviser to Google Inc.
He is the cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and cofounder and chairman of Current TV.
After taking a magnanimous stance in defeat after a bitter fight over the disputed Florida election results, Mr. Gore later became an outspoken and harsh critic of the Bush administration's policies, especially on the war in Iraq. And he retained substantial loyalty from Democratic partisans, including some who have urged him to run again in 2008, or who have sought to draft him as a candidate. He has demurred, but never flatly ruled out another run.
The New York Times, 12 de Outubro de 2007
