Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore delivers a speech during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at the City Hall in Oslo, Monday, Dec. 10, 2007. (AP Photo/John McConnico)
Posted on 12/10/2007 2:55:46 PM PST by NormsRevenge
OSLO, Norway - Saying it's "time to make peace with the planet," Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday with a call for humanity to rise up against a looming climate crisis and stop waging war on the environment.
The United States and China — the world's leading emitters of greenhouse gases — will stand accountable before history if they don't take the lead in that global challenge, the former vice president said.
"Without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the Earth itself," Gore said in his acceptance speech. "Now, we and the Earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: 'Mutually assured destruction.' It is time to make peace with the planet."
Gore was awarded the prize for sounding the alarm over global warming and spreading awareness on how to counteract it. His co-winner, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was represented by the panel's leader, Rajendra Pachauri.
They received their Nobel gold medals and diplomas at a gala ceremony at Oslo's city hall, while the Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and economics were presented in a separate ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.
Gore urged government officials at a U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to prepare the ground for quick negotiations on an emissions-limitation treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Gore and Pachauri will leave for the U.N. meeting Wednesday. "I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty," Gore said.
In a speech that quoted Churchill, Gandhi and the Bible, Gore said the world's biggest producers of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — the United States and China — must stop blaming each other for the stalemate over warming.
Instead, they should take the lead in solving a problem for which they bear a large responsibility, he said, or be "accountable before history for their failure to act."
He drew a parallel between leaders who ignore the climate crisis and those who didn't act as Nazi Germany rearmed before World War II.
"Too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: 'They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent,'" Gore said.
He likened the current "planetary emergency" to wartime. "We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war," he said.
Although Pachauri described the threat largely in measured, scientific terms, he warned of a grim fate if greenhouse gases emissions are not limited. A warming climate could lead to swamped coastlines, disruptions to food supply, spread of disease and loss of biodiversity, he said.
"Neglect in protecting our heritage of natural resources could prove extremely harmful for the human race and for all species that share common space on Planet Earth," Pachauri said in his acceptance speech. "It is within the reach of human society to meet these threats."
Before presenting the award to Gore and Pachauri, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel awards committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, praised them for moving climate to the top of the world agenda.
"We thank you for what you have done for Mother Earth," Mjoes said.
Gore's wife, Tipper, in the audience with their four children, smiled broadly when he accepted the award, which includes a $1.6 million stipend to be shared equally between the two winners. The audience, including Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja, rose for sustained applause.
Gore urged world leaders to put a new climate treaty in place by 2010 — two years earlier than planned. Heads of state should meet every three months to negotiate the treaty because global warming must be slowed, he said.
"The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions," said Gore. "Either they will ask: 'What were you thinking; why didn't you act? Or they will ask instead: 'How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?'"
In an appearance on British Broadcasting Corp.'s "Hard Talk" program, Gore said he hoped the new climate treaty will impose a global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, and he said businesses should be taxed on the amount of gases they emit.
Gore also called on wealthy nations to build "a constructive partnership" with poorer countries to spread the availability of technology being designed to reduce gas emissions and improve energy efficiency.
He noted climate change has not been a big issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, but he said he was "far more optimistic now than I've ever been before" because he felt more and more people are coming to adopt his view of global warming's threat.
"We're close to it, we're not there yet, but we're getting closer and closer to it," Gore said.
The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, are presented each year on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of their creator, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.
In Stockholm, the winners of the other Nobel prizes received their awards from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf and were feted at a white-tie banquet in city hall.
The 2007 awards in medicine, chemistry and physics honored breakthroughs in stem cell research on mice, solid-surface chemistry and the discovery of a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.
Three U.S. economists shared the economics award for their work on how people's knowledge and self-interest affect their behavior in the market or in social situations such as voting and labor negotiations.
One of the economics winners, Leonid Hurwicz, 90, and the literature prize winner, 88-year-old British author Doris Lessing, were unable to attend. They will receive their awards at later ceremonies in Minnesota and Britain.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore delivers a speech during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at the City Hall in Oslo, Monday, Dec. 10, 2007. (AP Photo/John McConnico)
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BUT I UNDERSTATE!!!!
What a handsome man, and he has blue tie; he must be telling the truth!
Again, he slams the United States. Why doesn’t he just leave and live some place else if he doesn’t like our country. We will be accountable to history? Accountable to who.........Al Gore? I don’t think so. Follow the money, follow the money. Gore has made about $50 Million on global warming..........and he wants more.
Gore recommended that we all “make peace with the planet”...then he hopped in his SUV...to get on his private plane...to head back to his 20,000 sq ft house.
What else is he going to do for attention?
Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, right, places his hand
over his heart as the audience applauds his speech at City
Hall in Oslo, Norway, Monday, Dec. 10, 2007.
Co-winner Rajendra Pachauri, centre, and Nobel
Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes look on.
(AP Photo/John McConnico)
The planet’s five billion years old. It has evolved trememdously over the eons and will probably still be here long after we are gone. I don’t think we need to make peace with it.
He wouldn’t know what to do if he had to face a real enemy of the US. What a pathetic weakling.
OMG, what a douchebag.
I don’t think the barf alert is necessary for this item. The title makes it obvious.
ALL Freepers, and virtually all climatologists, know that NO ONE KNOWS.
Even Gore's chief flunky at NOAA agrees that no one knows the temperatures well enough in Africa or South America to include them anymore in the world climate models.
Whatever the temperatures are in that vast percentage of the Earth's land surface will simply be "proxied in" for the future.
If you don't know the temperature you don't know if it's changed.
Someone please, please post the graph comparing how much carbon this gasbag uses compared to ALL US LITTLE PEOPLE.
Please.
Al Gore may yet prove that it’s possible to be at one and the same time a total screaming loon and the most beady-eyed money-grubbing charlatan on “Mother Earth”.
OMG...this guy is truly a Liberal dork.
Any "war" is met with a surrender strategy, INCLUDING this PHONY War on Global Climate...
It's so funny, it's pathetic....
Without facts, they just admit defeat and surrender, so common to every issue.
Aaaarrrggghhhhh! I read this right before supper.
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