BECAUSE OF THEIR untiring and outstanding work to raise awareness about global warming, former US Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Oct. 13.
The awarding ceremony will be in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10.
“This is a chance to elevate consciousness on global warming that we face now,” said Gore, speaking to reporters in Palo Alto, California. “It is truly a planetary emergency and we have to respond to it quickly.”
Gore said he would donate half of his $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization that he founded aiming to reduce global warming by cutting pollution emission.
“That amount is very small compared to the enormous challenge that lies ahead,” Gore added, “including organizing an immense grass root movement and a mass publicity drive focused on trying to change the way people think.”
During its announcement, the Nobel committee cited Gore and the IPCC “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for measures that were needed to counteract such change.”
Elaborating on this year’s Nobel laureates that the Norwegian committee has proclaimed, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, Nobel committee chairman, said in making the announcement that “through scientific reports issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”
“Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming,” Mjoes explained.
According to Rajendra Pachauri, UN panel chairman, the honor goes to all scientists and authors who have contributed to the work of the IPCC, a UN-sanctioned group established by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme in 1918 that aims to study climate change information and review scientific studies from around the world.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was delighted with the news that Gore and the IPCC will share the prize.
Gore was praised by the Nobel committee as being “one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians” who has done the most to create greater global understanding of measures that needed to be adopted.
