Al Gore And Nobel Prize

First of all: Al Gore eminently deserves the Nobel Peace prize. He deserves this highest of honors because as a communicator and as a leader, he has done a truly remarkable thing: Transformed the global warming issue, thereby making it much more likely to be solved, thereby potentially saving the world massive grief.

In case you hadn't noticed, today it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that we are going to take serious action to curtail human-induced greenhouse gas emissions pretty soon. Denial has gone out of style. There is still much work to do, to be sure, and we are far from being saved--we need, among other things, a new U.S. president first--and most troubling of all, it's probably too late to avoid at least some serious alterations to the planet. But nevertheless, you'd have to be blind not to notice that the politics of this issue are really, finally changing.

In short, momentum is building for a change on climate change and Gore has been a tremendous part of that. His film, his book, his congressional testimony, his Oscar, and now his Nobe,With ample and much needed help from Hollywood, in the last year and a half Gore has grown into a media and communications juggernaut, a personage and a public intellectual who is now more or less synonymous with this new period of heightened attention to climate change. Given the incredibly powerful and yet also extremely fickle nature of the modern media, to triumph as a communicator on such a complex and difficult issue, on so massive of a scale, really does merit an award as prestigious as the one that Gore has now been granted.