Word: gores
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...That's not a bad place to be, but you won't find Gore gloating about it. This prize, after all, is a recognition that Gore has done more than anyone else (excepting Mother Nature) to bring about a sea change in public opinion. An overwhelming majority of Americans - 90% of Democrats, 80% of independents, 60% of Republicans - now say they favor "immediate action" to confront the climate crisis. Gore helped make that happen, but he can't take too much satisfaction in it. As he told me last spring, "Time is running out, and we still haven't done...
...tipping points, the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. For environmentalists, 2007 is likely to be remembered as the tipping point when public understanding of the existential threat of climate change reached critical mass. If that's true, no one will deserve more credit than Al Gore, who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize today along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Gore spoke about the threat of the greenhouse effect as a Senator in the 1980s, when it was just emerging from the thicket of scientific literature, and after losing...
...Gore's win was widely expected, but there may still be those who wonder how an environmentalist could be, as the Peace Prize's description goes, the person who has "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." They shouldn't. Climate change is already a key instigator of conflict in areas like Darfur, where drought likely worsened by global warming helped trigger a civil war that has claimed over 200,000 lives. (Nor are Gore and the IPCC the first greens to win the Peace Prize; that would be the Kenyan Wangari Maathai, a conservationist...
That the IPCC was named along with Gore came as more of a surprise, but it's an elegant inclusion. If Gore has been the lead singer on climate change for years now, the IPCC - a loose network of more than 2,000 scientists from around the world - has been his chorus. Established by the U.N. in 1988 as the final scientific authority on global warming, the IPCC has issued four assessments - the most recent this year - taking the current temperature of climate change. Reading the successive reports, which grow more and more confident about the reality and the danger...
...that's the point. Gore and the IPCC have been prophets of doom, laying out the threat of climate change for any who would listen. We cannot claim that we were never warned, and the message has sunk in for even the most recalcitrant listeners - witness President George W. Bush's White House summit on climate change last month. That success is a triumph for the rational scientific thinking that motivates both Gore and the IPCC. It's the idea that if we simply marshal enough facts, enough data, enough PowerPoint slides, and present them to the world, the will...