Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore

Was there really ever any doubt about how this was going to play out?

First, the Oscar. Then, the Emmy. Now, the Nobel Peace Prize.

OSLO, Norway -- Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s climate change panel won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for counteracting it.

Gore, whose film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award earlier this year, had been widely tipped to win Friday's prize, which expanded the Norwegian committee's interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts that have traditionally been the award's foundations.

"We face a true planetary emergency," Gore said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

The Nobel committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, asserted that the prize was not aimed at the Bush administration, which rejected Kyoto and was widely criticized outside the U.S. for not taking global warming seriously enough.

"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," Mjoes said. "The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this."

Gore was expected to take advantage of the global stage the prize will give him to push for a resolution over climate change, instead.

The question: What does climate change have to do with peace?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee explains:

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.

Oslo, 12 October 2007

This press release is more sappy and silly than those fraudlent photos of the polar bears stranded on an iceberg, doomed to die because, to quote Al Gore, "The planet has a fever."

This paragraph officially marks the moment the Norwegian Nobel Committee has jumped the shark, or jumped the polar bear if you prefer:

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.

Imagine how difficult it must have been for the Committee members to come up with some justification for linking global warming and Al Gore to peace.

I'm sure they must have struggled.

It's as if they decided Al Gore was the winner before they came up with reasons why.

The Committee has to cook out potential "increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" to make a connection between global warming and peace.

So, Al Gore joins that illustrious list of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, including:
JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America, for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.

KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General, for ?

YASSER ARAFAT, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority, for his efforts to create peace in the Middle East.

MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH GORBACHEV, President of the USSR, helped to bring the Cold War to an end.

THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES

BETTY WILLIAMS, co-founder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later renamed Community of Peace People).



I bet Bono is ticked off.