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The New York Times
Gore and U.N. Panel
Win Peace Prize
for Climate Work
By WALTER GIBBS,
nytimes.com on the Web, October 12, 2007
OSLO, Oct. 12 — The Nobel
Peace Prize was awarded today to Al Gore, the former vice president, and to the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its work to alert
the world to the threat of global warming.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Gore
appeared before a House panel in March |
Mr. Gore “is probably the single
individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the
measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said. The United
Nations committee, a network of 2,000 scientists, has produced two decades of
scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about
the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.
Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was
deeply honored to receive the prize and planned to donate his half of the prize
to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group of which Mr.
Gore chairs the board.
“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in the statement. “The
climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge
to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global
consciousness to a higher level.”
Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said he received the news with his
wife, Tipper, early this morning in San Francisco, where he spoke on Thursday
night at a fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a fellow
Democrat.
The award is likely to renew calls by some of Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to
run for president in 2008, joining an already crowed field of Democrats.
Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he
is not interesting in running but has not flatly rejected the notion. Ms.
Kreider said Mr. Gore will hold strategy meetings with the Alliance for Climate
Protection in San Francisco today and returns to his home in Nashville over the
weekend.
In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the United
Nations committee, said he was overwhelmed at the news of the award. “I
expect this will bring the subject to the fore,” he said.
“I’m only a symbol of a much larger organization, the I.P.C.C., and it’s really
the scientific community that contributed to the work of the I.P.C.C.,” Dr.
Pachauri said, according to Reuters. “They’re the real winners of this
award,’” he said.
Mr. Gore said he would donate the proceeds from his award to the environmental
cause.
"My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to
the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that
is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the
urgency of solving the climate crisis."
The Nobel award carries political ramifications in the United States, which the
Nobel committed tried to minimize after its announcement today.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, addressed
reporters after the awards were announced and tried to dismiss repeated
questions asking whether the awards were a criticism — direct or indirect — of
the Bush administration.
He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against
the threat of global warming.
"We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge,
all of them, to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global
warming. The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of
this.”
He said the peace prize is only a message of encouragement, adding, "the Nobel
committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone."
In this decade the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and
agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including
former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the
director of the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna, in 2005.
Global warming has been a powerful issue all this year, attracting more and more
public attention.
The film documenting Mr. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of climate
change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award this year. The United
Nations committee has issued repeated reports and held successive conferences to
highlight the growing scientific understanding of the problem. Meanwhile,
signs of global warming have become more and more apparent, even in the melting
Arctic.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “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,” it said. “There may be increased danger of violent
conflicts and wars, within and between states."
The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft the
former vice president to mount another campaign for the White House. A San
Francisco-based Web site,
www.Draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an
online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr.
Gore on his win. The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in
The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter
defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral
college after the Supreme Court ruled against a recount in Florida.
“I’ll actually vote for you this time,” wrote one signee, Joshua Kadel of
Virginia, on the Web site this morning. “Sorry about 2000!”
The Gores keep an apartment in San Francisco, where their daughter Kristin
lives. The city is also the headquarters of Current TV, Mr. Gore’s
Emmy-award winning television and online news venture.
Others dedicated to the fight against global warming said the winners were at
the head of efforts to investigate and draw attention to the issue.
Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, which is based in Bonn, Germany, and oversaw negotiations that
led to the Kyoto Protocol, said recent moves by political leaders around the
world to find ways of reducing emissions would have been hard to imagine without
the contributions made by both the I.P.C.C. and Mr. Gore.
“We can recommend ways for policymakers to move forward, but without the I.P.C.C.
data being there, this would be next to impossible,” said Mr. de Boer. He
said Mr. Gore could use his enhanced stature from winning the Peace Prize to
focus on parts of the developing world where politicians need support to spread
knowledge about the dangers of climate change. “It’s very difficult to
advance on these issues without support from the general public,” he said.
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior United Nations
official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an
environmental issue.
"It is a question of war and peace," Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press.
"We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He
said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing
climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from San Francisco and
James Kanter from Paris.
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