Al Gore and to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Prize for its work to alert the world to the threat of global warming, The New York Times reports.
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, according to The Times. 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.
Gore plans to donate his half of the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of climate change was showcased in the Academy Award winning filrm “An Inconvenient Truth.”
In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the United Nations committee, said that the award was “not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams.”
The IPCC issued three reports on climate change this year.
The first report unanimously portrayed the science of global warming as an existing and worsening threat. The panel attributed global warming to man-made burning of fossil fuels and connected it to a recent increase in stronger hurricanes. In particular, the report said global warming was “very likely” man-made.
The second report said that that the earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being affected, for better and mostly for worse, by global warming.
The third report, issued in May, said the world must stabilize the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2015 at 445 parts per million to keep global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees over preindustrial levels.
