By RICHARD BYRNE and RICHARD MONASTERSKY
The Norwegian Nobel Committee's announcement on Friday that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reflected a recognition of much academic research on global warming and a view of climate change that is common in higher education.
In its announcement, the committee cited the work by both the politician and the panel "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 efforts cited by the committee have resonated deeply on American campuses in laboratories, dormitories, and administrative offices. Academic scientists have provided much of the research and documentation on climate change, and students have increasingly organized around the issue. At the upper level of university administrations, hundreds of presidents in the past year have pledged to combat global warming on their campuses (The Chronicle, June 13).
Through his book and his documentary film, the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, and his foundation, the Alliance for Climate Protection, Mr. Gore has been a tireless proselytizer on the issue of climate change. His share of the prestigious peace prize will certainly add momentum to public awareness and consensus-building on climate-change issues.
Yet Mr. Gore stresses that he has built his case about the dire state of the global environment on a scientific foundation, much of which has been provided by the panel with which he shares the $1.5-million award.
Scientific Consensus
In recognizing the climate-change panel, commonly known as the IPCC, the Nobel committee essentially honored the work of thousands of university scientists who have contributed to the panel's reports since 1988.
For its most recent assessments, released this year, the panel involved more than 2,000 scientists and issued its strongest statements to date on the topic. The IPCC concluded that there is a greater-than-90-percent chance that human beings are responsible for the rising temperatures evident around much of the globe and that the pace of change is "very likely" to accelerate in the coming decades (The Chronicle, February 16 and April 20).
In a telephone interview, Renate Christ, secretary of the panel, said that the award "is certainly a recognition that climate change is something that deserves attention. … The Nobel committee saw very much the connection between climate change and impacts for human society."
The panel's conclusions and the work of Mr. Gore have both had a tremendous impact on campuses in the United States, said Anthony D. Cortese, a leader of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, in which campuses pledge to reduce their greenhouse-gas pollution.
Mr. Gore's influence on academe is readily apparent, as he has frequently spoken on college and university campuses, said Mr. Cortese. But the IPCC has also made its mark on American universities because "its scientific reports were primarily based on the scientific work of people in colleges and universities," said Mr. Cortese.
"In many cases, the presidents signing the Presidents Climate Commitment are saying that we believe the scientific work of our own faculty and that it's been validated through the normal peer-review process, the normal process of scientific inquiry, and also by this extraordinary group of scientists in the international panel on climate change," said Mr. Cortese, president of Second Nature, an organization that promotes sustainability initiatives in academe.
Not since the Manhattan Project has such a large concentration of scientists worked on such a vast social problem, he said. "The IPCC represents one of the most innovative approaches to complex scientific issues that has been developed by the scientific community," he said.
Campus Awareness
The award, which will be presented in December, also seems destined to heighten awareness of the climate-change issue on America's campuses—from student organizations to the offices of presidents and chancellors.
The Presidents Climate Commitment, signed by 414 presidents so far, pledges campuses to come up with concrete plans to reduce their carbon emissions and eventually to become "climate neutral," which means eliminating their net emission of greenhouse-gas pollution.
Kathleen Schatzberg, president of Cape Cod Community College and a leader of the effort, said the joint peace prize "will help us persuade more colleges to sign on."
Ms. Schatzberg said that Mr. Gore's efforts on the issue have gone far deeper than mere publicity. "It's not just the film that's important, but the institute where he's training fellows," she observed. "There are now at least several dozen people who are trained to give his presentation and to localize it. Al Gore can only go so far. Many of us have had these people in our campuses."
On her campus, she added, "we're seeing students respond to this even more quickly than faculty and staff. They realize that this is their future."
Gore's Role
Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said that Mr. Gore deserves credit for bringing attention to the problem. "There's nobody else in the world who you could identify as a leading spokesperson for the climate issue," he said. "For raising awareness, he's got to be singled out as a very effective champion."
But campuses and the rest of society will have to do far more if they want to seriously tackle the problem of climate change, he added. "Awareness is a great thing, but if it doesn't translate into practical action, it's kind of wasted."
Clark A. Miller, an assistant professor of public affairs at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at Arizona State University, has written widely on the politics of environmental issues. He said that Mr. Gore's work had taken the "thousand-page monstrosities" produced by the IPCC and other scientists who study the issue and brought their findings into wider American political and cultural debate.
"The public has no idea who the IPCC is," said Mr. Miller. "You needed someone to communicate this issue in the United States in a broad public way." Mr. Gore "is an incredibly astute U.S. politician," he said. "He understands the political culture of the United States."
The key to the former vice president's success, observed Mr. Miller, is that he has focused not only on the long-term forecasts that make up much of climate-change science, but also on more-immediate effects. "When you look at how we regulate" environmental issues, said Mr. Miller, "we do not regulate unless there is explicit harm. If you look at the movie, it's all about harm."
Mr. Miller said that the question of why Mr. Gore did not achieve more on that issue during his time in the Clinton administration is an important one to ponder. "The stance that the Clinton administration took on environmental issues," said Mr. Miller, "was that they would do a lot of work behind the scenes. … They did not make it a public issue. That was a strategic choice that the Clinton administration made."
