'We have to act quickly'

2007-10-13 08:15

Palo Alto - For years, former Vice President Al Gore and a host of climate scientists were belittled and, worst of all, ignored for their message about how dire global warming is.

On Friday, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their warnings about what Gore calls "a planetary emergency."

Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists. This scientific panel has explained the dry details of global warming in thousands of pages of footnoted reports every six years or so since 1990.

Gore, fresh from a near miss at winning the US presidency in 2000, translated the numbers and jargon-laden reports into something people could understand. He made a slide show and went Hollywood.

His documentary An Inconvenient Truth won two Academy Awards and has been credited with changing the debate in America about global warming.

For Gore it was all about the message.

"This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now," he said on Friday at the offices of the Alliance For Climate Protection, a nonprofit he founded. "The alarm bells are going off in the scientific community."

Despite a live global stage, Gore did not take questions from reporters, avoiding the issue of a potential 2008 presidential run. His aides repeatedly say he will not enter the race. Gore donated his share of the $1.5m prize to the nonprofit.

"For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honour and the recognition from this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency," Gore said in brief remarks. "It is a planetary emergency and we have to act quickly."

Thank you, Al

In announcing the award earlier in the day in Oslo, Norway, Nobel committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said the prize was not a slap at the Bush administration's current policies. Instead, he said it was about encouraging all countries "to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming."

President George W Bush, to whom Gore lost in the 2000 election, had no plans to call Gore to congratulate him. But spokesperson Tony Fratto called it "an important recognition" for both Gore and the scientific panel.

Gore is the first former vice president to win the Peace Prize since 1906 when Theodore Roosevelt, who by that time had become president, was awarded. Sitting Vice President Charles Gates Dawes won the prize in 1925. Former Presidents Jimmy Carter won it in 2002 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

Gore, who learned of his award from watching the live TV announcement -hearing his name amid the Norwegian - was not celebratory on Friday. His tone was somber. He spoke beside his wife, Tipper, and four Stanford University climate scientists who were co-authors of the international climate report. Outside the building, schoolchildren held a sign saying, "Thank you Al."

- SAPA