Al Gore and UN Panel Win Nobel Peace Prize

Posted on October 12, 2007

Former U.S. President Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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.
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.

There are great concerns climate change will result in wars fought over dwindling resources. This is part of the reason the Nobel Peace Prize was given for climate change. The Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted to make more people aware of the "increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" that could result because of global warming. Water shortages could certainly lead to water wars in some countries. The situation in Darfur has been blamed in part on shortages in resources caused by climate change. The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about how climate change is escalating the Darfur conflict.

The official entry from the Nobel Foundation can be found here.

EARTH
CLIMATE CHANGE