Al Gore and IPCC WIN the Nobel Peace Prize

Ooh, why don't you tell us about all the framing techniques Gore used to avoid driving away potential allies by not openly criticizng people who deny the seriousness of climate change? I'm sure his works have lots of examples of compromise and helping his opponents save face!

Let the Gore- and IPCC-bashing begin.

It will be as tiresome as ever.

Many of us will feel compelled to respond, and that will only put us on an old merry-go-round.

I choose to salute Gore, the IPCC, and the Nobel Committee, then sit back as a spectator to the inevitable nonsense. I suggest that we all let the "skeptics" rail without responding to them.

Folks, cheer the awardees; but don't take the bait.

Congratulations! Best pick since Yassir Arafat!

It's not exactly Gore bashing...but everybody ought to read Nisbet's post about some of the problems with how Gore communicates on GW

http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science/2007/10/nobelist_gore_contribut…

A HIGH AWARD WHICH IS WELL DESERVED TO BOTH RECIPIENTS.

I really like Randy Olson's take from his post at Shifting Baselines yesterday, before the award was announced. It's no secret he's been an open critic of An Inconvenient Truth, but he's also able to provide the unique perspective of being both a filmmaker and ocean scientist:

I have a few thousand complaints against the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth and yet, there's no denying it was the right movie at the right time. And if the criteria for the Nobel Peace Prize is to have "made a difference," then he is solidly deserving. The announcement comes on Friday. Here's to hoping he gets to add it to his trophy shelf.

And after watching a very vacuous environmental movie recently, I walked out with three times more respect for Al for his having had the guts to put real data in a movie. He showed, once again, there are no rules when it comes to making movies, contrary to what the people who run Hollywood like to believe (yet consistent with what Oscar winning screenwriter William Goldman always said).

Regardless of what one thinks of Gore's views about global climate change, we ought to be amazed at how the Nobel committee has interpreted Nobel's will. When creating the peace prize he stipulated that it should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

When was the last time Gore did anything remotely like that?

Bob Koepp raises an interesting question about how this work contributes to peace.

Here's my take:

If we continue business as usual, the polar ice shelves will melt dynamically and much more rapidly, eventually flooding coastal areas around the world. It may take 400-500 years, or it may happen by mid-Century if the worst-case scenarios come to pass.

It's impossible to say what the world will be like politically in 500 years, but a mid 21st-century flooded Bangladesh would send millions of refugees into India and Pakistan, which have nuclear weapons aimed at each other.

Bob Reiss alluded to similar threats to peace when he titled his book The Coming Storm: Extreme Weather and Our Terrifying Future. Click my name for a review.

Addendum to my reply to Bob, from a newspaper report:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Another book I reviewed that discusses this (click my name) is Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers.

To anyone who has read read what those "enviro-alarmists" at the Pentagon have said about the potential implications of "abrupt climate change", it should be obvious how the work of Gore, IPCC and others addressing climate change contributes to world peace.

From the Pentagon report An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
(October 2003)

"This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern."

"Conclusion
It is quite plausible that within a decade the evidence of an imminent abrupt climate shift may become clear and reliable. It is also possible that our models will better enable us to predict the consequences. In that event the United States will need to take urgent action to prevent and mitigate some of the most significant impacts. Diplomatic action will be needed to minimize the likelihood of conflict in the most impacted areas, especially in the Caribbean and Asia. However, large population movements in this scenario are inevitable. Learning how to manage those populations, border tensions that arise and the resulting refugees will be critical. New forms of security agreements dealing specifically with energy, food and water will also be needed. In short, while the US itself will be relatively better off and with more adaptive capacity, it will find itself in a world where Europe will be struggling internally, large number so refugees washing up on its shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life."

Too much of 'may', 'potentiallly', 'quite plausible' and 'possible' for my empiricist proclivities -- especially in comparison to Nobel's "shall have done." And has any report from the Pentagon ever concluded that something was not "a U.S. national security concern"?

Peace is never a certainty -- not now and not in the future.

Nor are future climate and its consequences (or any other future) a certainty for that matter -- unless one has a crystal ball, that is.

Unfortunately, I don't have one, I'm certain the Pentagon doesn't have one and I don't believe the Nobel committee has one either (but I could be mistaken on the latter count).

Bob Koepp, I think you're trolling here. Let's look at the last 10 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize:

2006: Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank
2005: International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei
2004: Wangari Maathai
2003: Shirin Ebadi
2002: Jimmy Carter
2001: United Nations, Kofi Annan
2000: Kim Dae Jung
1999: Medecins Sans Frontieres
1998: John Hume, David Trimble
1997: International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Jody Williams

Have any of these really worked for "work for fraternity between the nations", "the abolition or reduction of standing armies", "holding and promotion of peace congresses"?? According to the official notes, perhaps Jimmy Carter, the UN, Kim Jung and John Hume and David Trimble count, vaguely. So the Nobel Peace Prize has a long and established history of very widely interpreting its brief. Now maybe you think most of these people above don't deserve the prize (along with Mother Teresa, Amnesty International etc. etc.) but that's quite a different argument, isn't it?

A list of the distinguished names Al Gore now joins, courtesy of Powerline:
2005
MOHAMED ELBARADEI (joint winner). He's done such a nice job with Iran.

2004
WANGARI MAATHAI. The Kenyan ecologist peacefully teaches that the AIDS virus is a biological agent deliberately created by the Man.

2002
JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America. A true cosmopolitan, he has undermined the foreign policy of his own country and vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world.

2001
UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA.
KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General. Among other things, they have respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest scams in history.

1994
YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority. He was a cold-blooded murderer both before and after receiving the award.

1992
RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. She is the notorious Guatemalan faker and author, sort of, of I, Rigoberta Menchu.

1988
THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. Notwithstanding rapes and sex abuse committed by the team in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo, still doing fine work all over the world.

Neuro-conservative,

Depending on how one chooses to count individuals and organizations, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded at least 115 times since its inception. Out of that list, you'v selected a grand total of.... 8 names--not one of which was accompanied by any properly documented factual details about the context of the awards and what relevance if any they had to the crimes you allege (real and imagined).

You would do well to remember that cheap ad-hominem does not a compelling argument make--especially when it's defended with the most amateurish kind of cherry-picking.

Scott -- What sort of "documentation" do you require? Do you deny that Arafat was a terrorist? That Menchu was a fraud? That Maathai believes that HIV could not come from monkeys but was devised as a bioweapon?

I think you may have missed the point of my post - I am not making an ad hominem attack against Al Gore. I am pointing out the way the Oslo Committee has debased the currency of the Peace Prize -- by naming a veritable rogues' gallery in nearly half of last 20 years.

Neuro,

You're right that Arafat was a terrorist, but he shared the 1994 prize with Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres for the 1993 Oslo acords. At the time of the award, they appeared to have negotiated a peace between intractable enemies.

I could have forgiven Arafat his terrorism -- you know the old saying, "One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter," -- but I could not forgive his showing his true colors by backing out of the accords at Camp David, then running a corrupt administration that exacerbated poverty in the Palestinian territory under his control.

Israel and the Palestinians are still suffering the consequences of that corruption, which managed to make a terrorist organization like Hamas look good.

I'm not saying the committee, in retrospect, made a good choice. They also honored Henry Kissinger and Le-Duc Tho during the Vietnam War. Political satirist Tom Lehrer, a favorite of mine, described that event as making political satire obsolete.

But I am saying that their choices are made in prospect, not retrospect. Now I happen to think that the IPCC was an inspired choice, and probably Gore, too. Ten years from now, we'll have a much better idea of whether he was being alarmist or sounding a badly needed warning, despite a few flaws in presentation. For now, you and I will have to disagree about that.

Fred-- One of the main points in that Powerline piece is that the Stockholm-based scientific awards are determined only after the winner's ideas have stood the test of time -- even Watson & Crick had to wait 9 years. By contrast, the Oslo Peace Prize Committee tries to inject contemporary politics into their decisions, often to their long-term discredit. As for this year's selection, I'm with Bill Gray: "We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was."

Incidentally, that cliche about "one man's terrorist" is one of the most pernicious ideas to derive from New Left moral relativism. Arafat was always a terrorist, which was obvious in 1993 to anyone not blinded by left-wing nostrums. Even the people who supported him were not so foolish as to think him a freedom fighter. They liked him because he killed Jews.

Neuro,

I enjoy our discussions, even when we disagree.

It is not for you or me to decide whether the Nobel Peace Prize should require the same period of reflection as most Nobel science prizes. I say "most," because the 1986 and 1987 Physics awards were for very recent discoveries. the 1986 Prize was split between an old insight (electron microscopy) and a new variant (scanning tunneling microscopy). The 1987 prize went to high-temperature superconductivity, which was a year old.

In any case, it is unfair to use hindsight to criticize an Award made "in the moment," even if we disagree about whether it should be made in the moment.

As for the "one man's terrorist..." quote, I share your disdain for moral relativism. I see that phrase instead as a reflection of political reality.

In fact, we can look at the example of Israel and note that its pre-nationhood history includes many terrorist acts against the British, and its founding statesmen, whom I admire, were involved in those acts.

That's why I could have been forgiving of Arafat's terrorist past, even though his actions were against Israelis, if only he had figured out how to become a statesman. In 1993, when he won the Peace Price, he looked like he might indeed turn out to be a statesman.

Boy were people wrong about that!

Fred -- I enjoy our discussions as well. I only wish that all parties were as reasonable in disagreement. Our politics today is far too toxic.

That said, I urge you to avoid drawing any equivalency, or even comparability, between Arafat's terrorism and the pre-statehood actions of Begin and his contemporaries. This is not the forum for an extended discussion of Middle East history (I think global warming is divisive enough!), but please be aware that those sorts of arguments are not only historically inaccurate, but are also frequently trafficked by some very unsavory types.

"I urge you to avoid drawing any equivalency, or even comparability, between Arafat's terrorism and the pre-statehood actions of Begin and his contemporaries."

Good advice, Neuro. I guess I didn't make myself clear.

In 1993, it seemed possible to think that Arafat had the potential to become a statesman, i.e. to hope that there might be comparability.

Subsequent events proved how misguided that hope was.

I also agree this is not the place to discuss Middle East politics, though I suspect our positions are fairly close on that issue.

And we both seem inclined to allow history to judge whether Gore's Peace Prize was an act of inspiration, delusion, or somewhere in between.

Right now, we are on opposite poles on that. But I have a proposal: Let's meet for a drink in 2017, at which point history will have provided plenty of evidence, and we will probably will be closer in our interpretation.

It's a deal -- I'll buy the first round of frozen daiquiris if you're right, and you can by the first round of hot chocolate if I'm right!