Al Gore, Climate Panel Share Nobel Peace Prize

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to publicize and understand human-caused global warming.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee this morning announced that the former U.S. vice president and the United Nations' climate panel will equally share the prestigious award for "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Gore and the IPCC were chosen from a list of 181 candidates to split the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors (about 1.5 million U.S. dollars).

The award committee, based in Oslo, Norway, said their decision was intended to bring into sharper focus the actions "necessary to protect the world's future climate and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind.

"Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control," the committee added.

Environmental Campaign

Gore has been a leading voice among environmental campaigners who warn that Earth is under severe threat from climate change caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity.

Since leaving office in 2001, the former vice president has lectured around the world about the perils of global warming. Last year he also presented an Oscar-winning documentary on the subject, An Inconvenient Truth.

Gore "is probably the single individual who has done the most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted" to tackle global warming, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

The IPCC, based in Geneva, Switzerland, pools the research of 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries who study the causes and impacts of climate change.

Earlier this year, the IPCC concluded that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is almost certainly the cause.

The U.N. panel also warned that global warming could claim hundreds of millions of human lives due to increased risk of disease, starvation, and conflict triggered by drought, floods, storms, and other severe climate effects.

"Extensive climate changes ... may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth's resources," the Nobel Peace award committee commented.

"Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

International Alert, an independent peace-building organization based in London, has identified 61 countries around the world where climate change has raised the risk of violent conflict.

While the root cause of such conflicts will be access to resources, they will be fought out across divisions marked out by ethnicity, religion, and political allegiance, International Alert says.

Clear Message

"The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has today made it clear that combating climate change is a central peace and security policy for the 21st century," Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme, said in a statement.

"The IPCC and Mr. Gore have contributed to the unprecedented momentum on the climate-change challenge in 2007," Steiner added.

Tony Juniper, executive director of environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth, said of the Nobel announcement: "This is a very welcome signal that the world is beginning to wake up to how environmental challenges are going to shape many aspects of human welfare long into the future.

"We hope that politicians everywhere will see this signal and take heed," he added.

Al Gore, writing on his Web site, said he felt "deeply honored" to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

"We face a true planetary emergency," he said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue—it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

(Related 2006 interview: Gore on climate change, living green, An Inconvenient Truth, and more.)

Gore announced he would donate his half of the prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit group devoted to convincing the public of the urgent need for measures to counter global warming.

Nobel Week

The Nobel prizes have been awarded since 1901 based on the will of Swedish chemist, engineer, and dynamite-inventor Alfred Nobel. All of them are awarded in Sweden with the exception of the peace prize, which for unknown reasons Nobel instructed be determined by a Norwegian committee.

On Monday Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies of the United States and Sir Martin J. Evans of Britain won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work that led to the creation of "knockout" mice, a powerful tool for studying genetic diseases.

Tuesday France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Grünberg were announced as the winners of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for independently discovering the phenomenon that makes modern hard-drive technology work.

German scientist Gerhard Ertl Wednesday won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for groundbreaking studies of chemical processes that take place on solid surfaces, which paved the way for technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells and automobile catalytic converters.

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday went to British writer Doris Lessing. A prize in economics will be announced next week.

The awards are officially presented each year on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

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