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What happened

Former Vice President Al Gore won the NobelPeace Prize last week for sounding the alarm aboutglobal climate change. He shared the award with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change, an organization of 2,500 scientists that has extensively investigated the impact of manmadegreenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate.

Gore, whose documentary An Inconvenient Truth won two Oscars this year, is “probably the single individualwho has done the most to create greater worldwide understanding” of the issue, said the Nobel

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Committee. In the century ahead, said committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes, climate change maycontribute to conflict and war as rising sea levels,prolonged droughts, and changes in agricultural productivity trigger “large-scale migration and lead togreater competition for the Earth’s resources.”

The award fueled speculation that Gore would enter the 2008 presidentialcampaign, but he reiterated this week that he has “no plans to run.” “The climate crisis is not a political issue,” said Gore, “it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all humanity.”

What the editorials said

Seven years after losing his bid for the White House, said the San

Jose Mercury News, Gore landed a hell of a consolation prize. After

the contested 2000 election, Gore could have gone into a permanent

sulk or become a bitter old crank. Instead he recommitted himself to

his first passion, the environmental movement. Gore’s fans may wish

he’d spent the last seven years in the Oval Office, but “history may

yet record that his loss to President Bush was the world’s gain.”

It will take decades or even centuries to know whether Gore’s most

dire warnings are accurate, said the Chicago Tribune. But even if his

science proves imperfect, it won’t diminish his achievement. When

Gore first brought global warming to mainstream attention, critics

mocked him. But Gore “set a shoulder against public ignorance and

complacency, and moved opinion by marshaling facts in a way too

compelling to ignore.”

What the columnists said

Gore’s Nobel, said Steven F. Hayward in National Review Online,

“represents the final debasement of a once-prestigious award.”

This sanctimonious bag of hot air joins previous winners Jimmy Carter and Yassir Arafat in the parade of “frauds and poseurs’’ that the Nobel Committee—composed mostly of politically motivated European liberals—have chosen to honor. An Inconvenient Truthwas propaganda, laced with gross exaggerations, errors, and alarmism. Twenty years from now, we’ll look back at this week as “the high water mark of climate hysteria.”

“What is it about Gore that drives right-wingers insane?” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Their personal attacks on his character can’t all be based on disagreements over climatology. The real cause of “Gore derangement syndrome” is that his very existence reminds them of “the stain of illegitimacy” on the Bush presidency. The American people chose Gore, and his growing stature as a world

leader—combined with Bush’s abject failures—serves as painful proof that conservatives were wrong. But trying to demonize Gore hasn’t worked. “He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.”

You don’t have to be a crazy to think Gore doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, said Bjorn Lomborg in The Boston Globe. It’s one thing to honor the meticulous, responsible scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s quite another to make them share the award with a fear-monger like Gore. Should global warming really be our priority? Money spent to cut carbon emissions would save far more lives if used to fight malaria, malnutrition, water pollution, and HIV. On the other hand, helping Third World nations develop their economies and infrastructures may temporarily result in higher emissions, but it “will enable these societies to deal much better with future problems—including global warming.”

What next?

Gore has until Nov. 2 to declare his candidacy if he wants to be on the ballot in New Hampshire, but aides and analysts say there’s virtually no chance of that. Gore’s real plan is to “harness the speculation about his intentions to become a more formidable force on environmental policy and a power within the Democratic Party,” said Elisabeth Bumiller and Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. “Why would he run for president,” said congressman and former Clinton advisor Rahm Emanuel, “when he can be a demigod?”