Testing the Climate.(The Talk of the Town)(Al Gore's Nobel Prize)

Last week, Al Gore, at the start of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, took note of a curious coincidence. Almost exactly seven years earlier--on December 12, 2000--the United States Supreme Court had called a halt to the Florida recount, thereby un-electing him President. "I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken--if not premature," Gore told the dignitaries assembled in Oslo. "But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose."

The Nobel Peace Prize is given out on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. It's the only prize that, following a quirk in Nobel's will, is administered by the Norwegians, rather than the Swedes, and the only one that is awarded not for solving a problem but for merely trying to. Sometimes, the hope expressed by the Nobel committee is realized--as it was by Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk, for example, in 1993. Just as often, the prize ends up honoring an illusion--Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, in 1994--or a cause that's as hopeless as it is noble: the Dalai Lama, in 1989; Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991.

What kind of prize will Gore's turn out to be? Though the answer to this question won't, of course, be known for years, in recent weeks there have been encouraging signs that the Goricle's message is getting through. At the end of November, in England, top executives of a hundred and fifty global businesses, including the C.E.O.s of Coca-Cola, DuPont, and United Technologies, issued a statement declaring that "the benefits of strong, early action on climate change outweigh the costs." The statement, which was released just before the latest round of international climate negotiations got under way, in Bali, called on world leaders, with perhaps a bit too much metaphorical vigor, to "seize this window of opportunity." A few days later, in Canberra, the new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, took office and, within hours of his swearing in, signed his country on to the Kyoto Protocol. (Rudd's action left the United States the only major industrialized nation that has refused to ratify Kyoto, and thus accept binding greenhouse-gas reduction targets.)

The Bush Administration continued to temporize--in Bali, the American team managed to gum up negotiations on a treaty to succeed Kyoto, parts of which lapse in 2012--but it seems increasingly isolated, even within the borders of its own country. In early December, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved a bill, co-sponsored by John Warner, Republican of Virginia--a self-described convert on the issue of climate change--that would reduce carbon emissions from major sources seventy per cent by 2050. All the top Democratic candidates for President have proposed "cap and trade" plans to sharply reduce America's carbon emissions, and, last week, all the ...