Al Gore, Nobel Laureate

By Aziz P. -
As expected, Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize for Peace:

Climate change campaigner Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The committee cited "their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change".

Mr Gore, US vice-president under Bill Clinton, said he was "deeply honoured".

Mr Gore, 59, won an Oscar for his climate change film An Inconvenient Truth while the IPCC is the top authority on global warming.
[...]
He said he would donate his half of the $1.5m prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, reported the news agency Reuters.


The Prize was jointly awarded to Gore (an individual) and to the entire UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, whose chairman is Rajendra Pachauri. The work that the IPCC did in establishing and validating the scientific concensus should not be underestimated, and they deserve the prize as much as Gore. From the article,

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said he was "overwhelmed" by the award.

He told a cheering crowd of colleagues and journalists outside his office in Delhi that he hoped the award would bring a "greater awareness and a sense of urgency" to the fight against global warming.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised the recipients' efforts to "lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract [climate] change".
[...]
It highlighted a series of scientific reports issued over the last two decades by the IPCC, which comprises more than 2,000 leading climate change scientists and experts.

The reports had "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming", the committee said.

Speaking in Washington, Mr Gore praised the IPCC, "whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years".
[...]
The IPCC, established in 1988, is tasked with providing policymakers with neutral summaries of the latest expertise on climate change.

The organisation involves hundreds of scientists working to collate and evaluate the work of thousands more.


The big question of course is whether winning the award will induce Gore to run for President. Obviously, my feeling on this is clear: Run, Al, Run!

(also: official press release from the Nobel Committee)

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