The Wisconsin State Journal Bill Wineke Column: Wineke: Nobel Prize Validates Gore Efforts

Oct 12, 07:08 PM

Current Headlines: By Bill Wineke, The Wisconsin State Journal

Oct. 12--So, now Al Gore can put the Nobel Peace Prize in his trophy case.

He's having a pretty good run of things. He won an Emmy. He won an Oscar. Now, he's won the world's most prestigious award. The next thing you know, he's going to win the presidency.

Oh, wait ...

Gore will share this year's Nobel Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In announcing the award, the Nobel committee said he has done more than any other human being to alert people to the dangers of global warming.

It's pretty hard to dispute that notion. Long before any of the rest of us even thought about the dangers of what we are spewing into the atmosphere, the first President Bush referred to Gore as "Ozone man."

His movie and book, "An Inconvenient Truth," introduced millions to the worst-case scenarios associated with global warming, noting that, if certain conditions prevailed, sea levels could rise by 20 feet.

No one has seriously argued that he's wrong. The argument is about whether the Antarctic or Greenland ice shelves will really melt sufficiently to make that happen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea level rise of "only" a couple of feet.

But Gore got our attention and, once he had it, we were more willing to listen to the scientists who tell us that a sea level rise of a couple of feet might drive millions of poor people from their homes, creating a new and unprecedented catastrophe.

And, while Gore has been honored by some for his work, he has been castigated by those who don't want to hear his message.

We all know that he lives in a big house that uses lots of energy. We know that he has been known to fly on private planes. Would the nation have been better off under a President Gore? That's a little hard to say.

Gore is a prophet and prophets don't often make good political leaders. What makes them prophets is that they see the truth long before most of their colleagues recognize it. Almost by definition, a prophet is out of synch with the people he tries to lead.

Gore saw the problems of the environment at a time when few politicians did. He foresaw the dangers of invading Iraq at a time when most of those who now howl about the war were falling all over themselves to back President Bush. He saw the possibilities of the Internet a decade before the rest of us had even heard of e-mail.

One result is that in the early stages of almost any issue, Gore was a bore. He kept chattering about things the rest of us didn't want to consider. And he did so with such earnestness that he made us uncomfortable. There were lots of counter-prophets around who told us what we wanted to hear.

But there is a biblical definition of a prophet -- that what the prophet predicts will actually come true. Time after time, what Al Gore has predicted will happen, has happened.

Unlike the biblical prophets, Gore is winning honor in his own country and in his own world. The honors are for his past predictions. We'll see how we react when he comes up with his next prediction.

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