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Green PeaceDid Al Gore deserve a Nobel Prize for his work on global warming?

By Stephan Faris
Posted Monday, Oct. 15, 2007, at 5:30 PM ET
Al Gore. Click image to expand.

When Al Gore became a Nobel laureate on Friday, it was the second time in four years that the prize for peace had gone green. In 2004, its recipient was Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan politician responsible for planting millions of trees to combat soil erosion. The day after she was recognized, I asked Maathai what reforestation had to do with ending conflict. "What the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war," she answered. "Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace."

This year's award, which Al Gore shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, took Maathai's sentiment to a global scale. "Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness," said Ole Danbolt Mjøs, the committee chairman. "There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

But does global warming really cause war?

The idea of a connection between conflict and climate change is fairly new, and one that had been mostly relegated to academic journals until earlier this year. Then, in June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon went on record to suggest global warming as a cause for the fighting in the Darfur region of Sudan. He pointed out that warming in the tropical and southern oceans, fueled in some part by climate change, led to a decades-long drought and clashes between herders and farmers over the degrading land. When a rebellion broke out against the central government, Sudan's leaders fought back by arming and supporting the herders against the farmers—and the entire region fell into war. If global warming did cause the Sudanese drought, then it's also responsible for the 200,000 to 450,000 lives that have been lost over the last four and a half years. We may very well be watching the first major conflict caused by emissions from our factories, power plants, and cars.

Other early hot spots for warming-related conflict are likely to be in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, or the Caribbean—places where institutions are weak, infrastructure is deficient, and the government is incompetent or malevolent. The crisis in Darfur has already stretched into Chad and the Central African Republic. Nomads from Sudan, spillovers from Sudan's desertification, are pushing deep into the Congolese rain forest. In Ghana, nomadic Fulani cattle herdsmen, forced by the expanding Sahara desert into agricultural lands, are buying high-power assault rifles to defend their animals from angry farmers.

Climate-change conflict is even spreading into the Arctic, where normally pacific Canada and Norway have joined the United States, Russia, and Denmark in a five-way tussle over mineral and shipping rights unlocked by the melting ice. Thus far largely symbolic, the conflict could take a more serious turn as the waters warm and military traffic increases. Norway and Russia already face each other down over fish in the Barents Sea. And Canada and Denmark take turns pulling up each other's flag on Hans Island, a stretch of icy rock the size of a football field. These countries may be arguing over small fries right now, but what happens when oil is at stake?

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Stephan Faris is writing a book about the political, economic, and strategic impacts of climate change.
Photograph of Al Gore by Nicholas Roberts/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph of a statue from the Ming Dynasty on Slate's home page by Agence France Presse.
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