The peace nobel price 2007 went to Al Gore (that’s this slideshow-guy) and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
“for 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“.
Since climate change possibly leads to more conflict (e.g. over water reserves or arable land) and since there is no dedicated enviromental price that carries the same reputation as the peace nobel (propably because we still see enviromental problems as temporary) this seems a justified and good decision of the nobel committee.
While (as far as I can tell) the decision for the IPCC goes uncontested some people try (again) to turn Al Gore into a controversial figure. A particularly annoying example is Matthew C. Nisbet who asks at his blog if Al Gore is contributing to a perceived (by Nisbet, that is) communication crisis. His argument is that, while more and more US Citizens of a Democratic persuasion think of anthropocentric global warming as a problem Republicans usually don’t. That Republicans deny global warming is, according to Nisbet, all the fault of Al Gore.
This is of course nonsense. Republicans dislike Al Gore for pretty much the same reasons that arsonists dislike the fire brigade – the latter defies the raison d’être of the former, and denying there is problem comes more naturally to them than changing their ways (I should point out that I’m aware that similar rifts in society exist in other countries, it’s actually Nisbet who makes an US-centric argument). I think Nisbet is actually trying to save his hobbyhorse, some sort of semantic Sleipnir that has lost at least six of his eight legs to the flak it drew from other bloggers (please excuse the strange metaphor, since the mythical horse Sleipnir is the bastard of a traitor it seemed somehow fitting).
Matthew Nisbet clings to a theory called frelling frakking “framing” science – I’m not actually sure how his version of the theory relates to the linked Wikipedia entry, since the main assertion in his blog is that others are doing “it” wrong, and there is little advice on how to do things right. The only unambigous instruction I found was to claim that it’s really possible to reconcile science and religion (and that I do not believe; the only way to reconcile both is to pervert either your science or your religion). The basic idea seems to be that scientists should phrase their work in more folkloristic terms so that it becomes more accessible to laypersons, and that if somewhere somehow somebody fails to understand a theory scienticts should be severly reprimaneded for their failure to educate each and every simpleton.
Better blogs than mine have commented on why this particular post of Nisbet was so stupid; I like to add the reason why I am personally against framing (at least where it exceeds a reasonable extent of simplifying matters for the laypersons sake). The reason is that I am a science fiction fan, and as such the idea behind “framing” sounds uncanningly familiar.
In 1956 James Gunn published a story called “Witches must burn”. The protagonist of that story is a scientist, a psychologist who tries to flee the US after a superstitious mob has torched down the universities and killed his colleagues. On the run he uses every means at his disposal – his knowledge as a scientist and an experimental device that allows him to pick up brainwaves from others and, by careful interpretation, to vaguely anticipate their actions. He nearly made it out of the country when he meets an underground cult of Nisbets former scientists who disguise as witches and wizards. At first he does not believe in what they tell him, but little by little they manage to convince him that the universities deserved to burn, and those friends and colleagues deserverd to die, because scientists had isolated themselves so far from the ordinary population that lynching them became the understandable and in fact only possible reaction. The only way to counteract that would be, as Gunn phrases it in the story, for the scientist to become “one of the ordinary people again” and to engage in a way of science that is not offensive to the masses.
That is was Matthew Nisbet has to offer – a third rate idea from a second rate story published fifty years ago in a pulp magazine. And equipped with that he contends he could do a better job to educate people about science than actual educators and scientists. How does he dare?
As for Al Gore, he did a great job communicating some of the science behind climate change (even if some of the points from “An Inconvenient Truth” may be outdated by now. Such is the nature of science). I hope he doesn’t run for US president – while he has made clear that for him it’s the USA first (and why not? He is, after all, US-American), as long as he remains the public face of the cause instead of a combatant in the trenches of US politics we others can feel that he not only speaks to us but, to some extent, for us. And since (speaking for Europe) we are a lot less educated than american liberals courteously claim we sure can use a great spokesperson like him.
