Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize today. They will each receive a gold medal, a diploma and split about $1.5 million. The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10 in Oslo.
Here's the committee's press release:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. 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.
Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. 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.
Through the scientific reports it has 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 one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.
Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.
By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be 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 "world" - or at least the millions of the world's citizens who have seen An Inconvenient Truth, and the far fewer who have read the IPCC's extensive reports on global warming - may indeed have an understanding of the measures that need to be adopted. But we're far from overcoming the political obstacles in the way of actually adopting those measures. One of the chief obstacles sits today in the Oval Office. Scores of others clutter Congress.
As the smearing and ridiculing of Gore and NASA scientist James Hansen by the global warming deniers prove, greedheads and ideologues will stand in the way even when megadisaster looms. They began their rancid challenge to those who warned us about global warming more than two decades ago, and they have yet to surrender their campaign of self-interested falsehoods. You can count on many of the biggest liars to repeat some of those falsehoods today. To solve the crisis, even to ameliorate it, requires trashing their BS and shoving them aside. We have Al Gore to thank for his relentless effort to popularize the message that can help us achieve that.