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Dopo Carter, la fiction (fallace) di Gore: a quando il nobel a Michael Moore (o a George Clooney)?

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Oslo Syndrome. The Nobel Peace Prize ain't what it used to be.

Philip Terzian, The Weekly Standard, 29 ottobre 2007, Volume 013, n. 7

Visit the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, and cadets will show you the statue of General George C. Marshall '01 on the edge of the parade ground, and add proudly that Marshall was (and remains) the only soldier ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1953). They do this partly because Marshall is VMI's most illustrious graduate, but largely because the prize, when Marshall won it, carried with it a significance and prestige that no longer obtains.

This was painfully obvious last week, when Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.--as the Nobel committee punctiliously identifies him--was awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize, in conjunction with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As if to demonstrate how the foreign press seldom comprehends American politics, the Financial Times of London led the weekend edition with a breathless account of Gore's triumph, headlined "Gore Prize Transforms Debate on Climate."

Al Gore's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his work on climate change is likely to place the issue at the forefront of political debate in the US as the country moves into its presidential election season.

The award, which the former vice-president shares with the United Nations' body of climate experts, follows speculation about a Gore presidential bid.

Up to a point, FT. As it happens, there is no evidence whatsoever that Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize has had any effect at all on the 2008 Democratic or Republican presidential campaigns, and, according to polls, Democratic voters remain resolutely uninterested in a potential Gore candidacy. Indeed, the laureate himself, who had been coy on the subject, took the occasion to repeat his intention not to seek the presidency next year.

Gore could still change his mind, of course, and global warming might be mentioned at one of those televised debates. But it is symptomatic of the depths to which the Nobel Prize has sunk that its impact this year, such as it is, was inspired by a movie (An Inconvenient Truth) and confined to one phase of U.S. presidential politics. No doubt, a glow will emanate from Gore's capacious skull, and he will savor the ceremony in Oslo and the big gold medal with the profile of Alfred Nobel. But, as if we didn't already know, the Nobel Peace Prize ain't what it used to be.

The problem is that the Nobel Peace Prize, endowed by the conscience-stricken inventor of dynamite, has always had a slightly ambiguous quality about it--unlike, say, the prizes in physics or medicine, even literature.

For many years, it functioned as a kind of gold watch for elder statesmen: the American Elihu Root (1912), Aristide Briand (1926) of France, Britain's stalwart League of Nations advocate Lord Robert Cecil (1937), the Canadian Lester Pearson (1957). There was the occasional miscalculation, of course: The American secretary of state Frank Kellogg (1929) won for his pact, coauthored with the aforementioned Briand, outlawing war as an instrument of national policy--just one decade before the Nazi invasion of Poland. North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho (1973) shared the honors for peace in Indochina, as did Yasser Arafat (1994) for peace in the Middle East. But the prize customarily went to benevolent politicians--Woodrow Wilson (1919), Gustav Stresemann (1926), Cordell Hull (1945)--to well-intentioned people--Jane Addams (1931), Ralph Bunche (1950), Albert Schweitzer (1952)--and to humanitarian organizations--International Committee of the Red Cross (1944 and 1963), U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (1954 and 1981), Doctors Without Borders (1999).

In the past few decades, however, the Nobel Peace Prize has developed a certain political edge. The process might be said to have begun in 1962, when it was awarded to the 1954 chemistry laureate, the American Linus Pauling, whose anti-nuclear pronouncements were usually directed, with considerable heat, toward his own government. In some instances the committee has aimed its arrow at a proper target--Andrei Sakharov (1975), Lech Walesa (1983), the Dalai Lama (1989), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991)--but such lucky shots have grown increasingly rare.

In 1985, for example, the prize was awarded to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a coalition of American and Soviet "peace activists" highly critical of the Reagan administration but notably silent on the use, in the Soviet Union, of psychiatric hospitals to silence political dissidents. The 1987 award to Costa Rica's president Oscar Arias Sánchez was an evident endorsement of the now-forgotten Arias Plan to thwart U.S. efforts against Communist insurgencies in Central America. The 1992 prize to Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchú was not only recognition for "ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples"--in the delightful language of the committee--but reward for a reliable critic of the United States and author of a (as was later discovered) fictitious autobiography.

To be sure, hostility toward the United States does not always govern the choices of the Nobel Committee. But while it is impossible to find a modern laureate who could, in any reasonable way, be identified with American foreign policy, it is easy to find critics and adversaries. This includes American winners--Jody Williams (1997) of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines--and even onetime U.S. officials, such as Al Gore and Jimmy Carter (2002), whose public opposition to George W. Bush seems to have been decisive in Oslo.

Undoubtedly, the most egregious example was the award of the prize, in 1990, to Mikhail Gorbachev "for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community." It may be difficult to comprehend what, exactly, the committee was saying here, but the fact that 1990 was the first year in which it felt obliged to furnish a citation suggests that, even in Oslo, the exclusion of Ronald Reagan required an explanation.

Which brings us to the ambiguity of the Nobel Peace Prize itself. Certainly, it is right and proper to recognize and reward humanitarians, and people who resist oppression at cost to themselves. But what is the promotion of peace, anyway? Is it the pronouncement of words and the striking of attitudes, or the action that guarantees freedom against tyranny? Secretary of State Marshall was awarded the prize for his eponymous plan which assisted the postwar European recovery. But a stronger case could be made for another Nobel Peace Prize for General Marshall as the "organizer of victory" against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Gore, il premiato praticante dello scatenamento del panico

David Frum, Il Foglio, 17 ottobre 2007

E così Al Gore entra nella lista dei vincitori del premio Nobel per la Pace, insieme a memorabili personaggi come la baronessa Bertha von Suttner, Karl Hjalmar Banting, Emily Greene Balch e Eisaku Sato. Per rendere giustizia all’ex vicepresidente, bisogna dire che rappresenta senza dubbio un notevole miglioramento rispetto a recenti vincitori come Yasser Arafat e Rigoberta Menchù. Menchù, sostenitore del movimento della guerriglia di sinistra del Guatemala, vinse il premio Nobel nel 1992 grazie alla sua personale e strappalacrime testimonianza, “I, Rigoberta Menchù”. Si è poi scoperto che la sua storia era falsa, cosa che ha spinto alcuni a chiedere che il premio le fosse revocato. Come vedremo, Gore ogni tanto si lascia andare a isteriche esagerazioni, ma almeno non inventa di sana pianta. Gore rappresenta un miglioramento anche rispetto al precedente vincitore americano del premio, l’ex presidente Jimmy Carter.

Come Menchù, anche Carter è oggetto di serie questioni di integrità. Nel suo libro “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, Carter ha copiato alcune mappe disegnate dall’inviato in medio oriente Dennis Ross e le ha presentate come proprie. Quando è stato scoperto, Carter si è rifiutato di ammettere il suo plagio o di scusarsi. Peggio ancora, Carter ha sistematicamente falsificato le conversazioni fatte con il presidente siriano Hafez Assad, per creare l’errata impressione che Assad fosse ben più conciliante di quanto era in realtà. Kenneth Stein, lo stenografo presente agli incontri di Carter con Assad, si è licenziato per protesta dopo la pubblicazione del libro. “Il fatto di essere un ex presidente”, ha scritto Stein nella sua lettera di dimissioni, “non dà alcun diritto a inventarsi informazioni”.

Gore potrà anche ritoccare i dati che possiede, ma almeno non fa il pr per i dittatori. Cionostante, la scelta di dare il premio Nobel per la Pace ad Al Gore è del tutto sbagliata. Supponiamo per il momento che i cambiamenti climatici causati dall’uomo siano una realtà accertata. Supponiamo nche che questi cambiamenti climatici siano dannosi, ossia che i probabili effetti negativi (come le più gravi inondazioni nelle regioni di più bassa altitudine) superino di gran lunga gli effetti positivi (come le più lunghe stagioni di coltivazione in Canada, Russia, Cile e Argentina). Supponiamo, infine, che questi effetti negativi pongano concreti rischi alla pace mondiale, aggravando conflitti territoriali come quelli che stanno devastando il Sudan. Anche se tutto questo fosse vero, non darebbe automaticamente a Gore le credenziali di un peacemaker e tantomeno di candidato al premio Nobel.

Gore ha vinto il premio insieme all’Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Tuttavia, mentre questo organismo ha cercato di diffondere una maggiore consapevolezza sui possibili rischi, Gore mette nel suo lavoro tutta l’obiettività e l’equilibrio tipici di uno sceneggiatore di Hollywood. L’IPCC ritiene che i cambiamenti climatici possano provocare un innalzamento del livello dei mari di massimo 58 centimentri nel corso dei prossimi cento anni – cosa piuttosto preoccupante. Secondo il film di Gore “An Inconvenient Truth”, l’innalzamento dei mari sarà di addirittura sei metri, ossia dieci volte in più di quanto previsto dagli studi scientifici più rigorosi. Gore afferma che in questi anni abbiamo le temperature più elevate mai registrate da mille anni a questa parte. Ma in realtà le temperature sono state ben più alte nel corso di quasi tutto il medioevo (un piccolo indizio: è proprio per questo che i vichinghi chiamavano la Groenlandia Greenland, ossia “terra verde”). Ah, a proposito, anche quel proverbio africano che Gore cita continuamente (quello che termina con le parole “se volete andare lontano, procedete insieme”) è altrettanto autentico dei souvenir che vendono all’aeroporto di Nairobi.

Lo scorso marzo il New York Times ha pubblicato un articolo sui discorsi e sui dibattiti che si erano svolti all’incontro annuale della Geological Society of America. Un autorevole accademico ha dichiarato: “Non voglio prendermela con Al Gore. Ma ci sono molte inesattezze nelle cose che sentiamo, e dobbiamo neutralizzarle presentando i dati reali”. E cosa mostrano questi “dati reali”? Mostrano che, per quanto riguarda i problemi dell’ambiente, i cambiamenti climatici causati dall’uomo sono tra i meno pericolosi e allo stesso tempo tra i più costosi da affrontare. Il costo globale dei provvedimenti decisi a Kyoto ammonterebbe a una cifra tra i 150 e i 380 miliardi di dollari. Come sottolinea l’economista esperto di questioni ambientali Bjorn Lomborg, si tratta di una cifra sette volte superiore a quella di tutti gli aiuti per lo sviluppo attualmente forniti ai paesi più poveri. I costi di Kyoto superano quelli calcolati dalle Nazioni Unite per eliminare la malaria e fornire acqua potabile a ogni uomo della terra.

Gore definisce i cambiamenti climatici una “crisi planetaria”. Pochi scienziati usano un linguaggio simile. D’altra parte, Gore è tutto tranne che uno scienziato. Nel suo ultimo libro, “The Assault on Reason”, descrive un mondo moderno in cui le emozioni e gli slogan prendono il posto dei giudizi ragionati. Ma, se si legge con attenzione, ci si accorge che Gore ha ormai preso la sua decisione: “Se non puoi vincerli, mettiti insieme a loro”. Insomma, Gore è oggi diventato il più famoso e il più premiato praticante di quello scatenamento del panico che lui stesso afferma di condannare.

L’ultima volta che il premio Nobel per la Pace è stato assegnato a una persona nota soprattutto per le sue ricerche scientifiche è stato nel 1970, quando è stato premiato Norman Borlaug. E’ stato probabilmente il più meritato di tutta la storia di questo Nobel. Le ricerche di Borlaug nel campo dell’agronomia e del grano ad alto rendimento hanno reso possibile la cosiddetta “Green Revolution” (lo straordinario aumento della produttività dei raccolti nei paesi africani e asiatici, particolarmente in India e Pakistan). Poche persone hanno dato un maggiore contributo alla battaglia per eliminare la fame nel mondo.

E’ proprio questo il genere di opera scientifica che più merita di essere premiata: un lavoro che offre un concreto beneficio alle popolazioni grazie a un autentico progresso della conoscenza umana. Se il comitato per l’assegnazione del premio Nobel avesse voluto davvero suonare un allarme sul problema del cambiamento climatico, sarebbe bastato darlo all’IPCC. Assegnandolo anche a Gore, ha subordinato la scienza all’imbonimento, l’utilità a Hollywood. Pur sapendo che questo comitato spesso ha fatto ben di peggio, non possiamo però fare a meno di chiederci: perchè non ha saputo fare qualcosa di meglio?

Inconvenient Truths. Novel science fiction on global warming.

Patrick J. Michaels, National Review, ottobre 2007

This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.

The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.”

Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.’s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. “The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993,” according to the IPCC, “but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.”

According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

“Was” is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.

Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore’s hypothesis. Instead, there’s an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change — edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose “the right balance between being effective and honest” about global warming — and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.

These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to “do” something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years!

It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various “solutions” for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it’s well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.

And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

And there’s other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can’t even do Kyot

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