Nobel Peace Prize goes to Al Gore, IPCC for work on climate change

As Nobel Prize week winds down, the final award is the Peace Prize. This year, the award went to a person and an organization: Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The award cited "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." The winners had been rumored for months, and certainty about the recipients' identity rose as the date of the award neared. Still, there are a number of surprising aspects about the win that are worth discussing.

The first is simply the fact that, in a world with several ongoing wars and insurgencies, the Peace Prize has gone to work on a topic that's largely been relegated to the science and business sections of the news. The prize committee's reasoning was that uncontrolled climate change poses a severe threat to future peace, and thus that the winners were acting to prevent conflicts prophylactically. Climate change "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources," reads the citation. "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."

One of the factors that is likely to heighten any controversies surrounding this award is that both the IPCC and Gore's film are generally recognized to be somewhat flawed, if well intentioned. The IPCC has been preparing reports based on the current scientific findings and consensus for nearly two decades. But that consensus is the product of the general scientific community, and the views of scientists on most topics cover a broad spectrum. As such, the IPCC's efforts to put hard probabilities on various aspects of climate change has left them open to accusations of glossing over complexities.

And those are just the issues with the science. Most press accounts and governmental decisions focus less on the scientific bodies of the IPCC reports (which can run hundreds of pages), and more on the summaries for policy makers. These summary documents are meant to reduce the science to easy-to-digest statements about the key facts. Unfortunately, they're hashed out at contentious meetings that include both scientists and diplomats from the UN membership and sometimes run all night before agreements are reached. In the end, the most commonly discussed pieces of IPCC reports are as much the product of diplomatic compromises as they are the product of the underlying science.

Meanwhile, the award to Al Gore came on the same week that a judge in the UK officially declared parts of his film, An Inconvenient Truth, to be scientifically inaccurate. Most of the issues cited appear to be the product of the typical challenges that come with the simplifications needed to popularize science and the inability for speakers on a strict time limit to discuss the intricacies of a complex topic. Gore could have done better, but the same can be said for many scientists that try to produce similar works for popular audiences.

In the end, the court decision focused on subtle and dry scientific issues—what percentage of the loss of some glaciers is the result of higher temperatures, and what is due to changes in precipitation patterns? The fact that this sort of science has become the subject of court cases that make headlines around the world is really what Gore and the IPCC are being cited for. Getting the public to recognize any complex scientific issue is a challenge. Climate change has implications that are primarily decades in the future, while acting on it requires lifestyle changes in the present, both of which add to the difficulty of motivating the public to action.

It was a bit of a surprise to see a topic with largely scientific and technological underpinnings receive the Peace Prize. But following the reasoning of the Nobel Committee suggests it may not be the last. As humanity's technological advances increase its ability to alter the world around it, the potential for scientific findings to have implications for the future peace will only increase as well.