First of all you can watch a 10-minute interview with Geir Lundestad (noted historian and director of the Nobel Institute) about the connection between climate change and peace. He makes the connection by pointing to the desertification of the Sahel and the conflicts that has caused.
The logic of Al Gore's Nobel is pretty straightforward. Climate change is related to war, Al Gore has raised awareness of climate change and helped efforts to combat it, therefore Al Gore has helped prevent future wars. In this post, I will once again establish the link between climate change, and war and peace. Then I will show the impact Al Gore had on raising the awareness of climate change, thus justifying Al Gore in particular for the award.
There are dozens of links between climate change and issues of war and peace, but for the sake of brevity I will look at resource wars, refugees, and state failure.
Climate change will indirectly cause resource wars by shifting resources between countries (one country's arable land becomes desert, while Siberia becomes farmable). I've looked at the link between climate change and resource wars before in a post highlighting an article by David Zhang on climate changes' impact on war frequency in China:
...when societies adapt to a certain amount of resources, anything that leads to constraints on those resources will lead to conflict. Thus, current global climate change will most likely lead to conflict, even though it is warming rather than cooling. Human civilization has adjusted to climate of a hundred years ago. Any sudden shift that leads to a constriction on resources, whether its oil, arable land, housing, or water, will lead to conflict over that resource.There are several different types of resource wars. Some wars are fought as simple grabs for resources, such as Charles Taylor's efforts to dominate diamond mining in Liberia, Foday Sankoh's similar efforts in Sierra Leone, and Saddam Hussein's effort to grab Kuwaiti oil. At other times, the theft of resources is what allows a previously-existing insurgency to continue - that is what is currently happening in Iraq with oil smuggling.
Both types are relevant to climate change-triggered conflict, but most relevant is another type of conflict that develops over resources which were previously not valuable, but which some sudden change renders more value. One recent instance of this in the news is the military positioning between Canada, the United States, Norway, Denmark, and Russia over 'ownership' of the Arctic Sea. Now that the icecap is melting, the Arctic sea is suddenly valuable for shipping routes and the oil hidden underneath. In my opinion, war is unlikely in this case, but it serves as a high-profile example of the dynamics at work. ComingAnarchy has been following this with posts here, here and here. Resource wars could also break out over other resources, such as livable land, arable land, water, etc.
Next, climate change and refugees. This is a very simple causal link - climate change will directly create more refugees through more extreme weather such as droughts and hurricanes (Katrina's strength may or may not have been impacted by climate change, but the IPCC states that it's "likely that future tropical cyclones will become more intense" due to climate change). Norman Myers forsees up to 150 million "environmental refugees" in the coming years due to global warming and population growth (Norman Myers. Environmental refugees in a globally warmed world. Bioscience, 43:11). Helping refugees is a cause worth of a Nobel in the past (the 1954 prize went to the UNHCR).
Related to refugees is the link between climate change and state failure. Climate change will also cause more war because the burden of refugees on already weak states will lead to state failure, civil war, insurgency and conflict. One of the factors that defines state failure is a large presence of refugees, so the relationship is QED.
Now, time to show that Al Gore significantly raised awareness of climate change. I think this is pretty self-evident, but if there are any doubters out there, I did some simple research through Lexis Nexis. I used newspaper coverage as a proxy variable to look at public awareness. I looked at the number of articles referenced either "climate change" or "global warming" in the period of May 24 2005 to May 24 2006, and compared it with the number of articles that reference "climate change" or "global warming" between May 24 2006 to May 24 2007. The significance of May 24 2006 is that it is the release date of An Inconvenient Truth, so it compares a year before to a year after. Here's the data:
| Media source | Year previous | Year after | % increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York Times | 708 | 1311 | 85.17% |
| Washington Post | 568 | 1133 | 99.47% |
| Financial Times | 890 | 1627 | 82.81% |
| USAToday | 122 | 288 | 136.07% |
| AP wire reports | 676 | 1866 | 176.04% |
This establishes correlation, not causation. However, in skimming a lot of the articles from both time periods, the articles were about Gore anyway, so in my mind that shows causation. (If that doesn't satisfy you, do your own research!)
Thus:
(climate change is directly related to war)
+
(Al Gore caused a huge increased in the public awareness of climate change)
=
(Al Gore contributed to a huge step
to the prevention of future climate change wars)
+
(Al Gore caused a huge increased in the public awareness of climate change)
=
(Al Gore contributed to a huge step
to the prevention of future climate change wars)
And that is an accomplishment worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
