Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Climate crisis advocacy earns world's highest humanitarian honor


An Inconvenient Truth crowned a career raising issues about global climate change

The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided today that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice-President (and future Presidential candidate?) Al Gore.

As the Nobel Committee announced today:

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.

While Al Gore hasn’t faced the trials in his work that previous winners such as Wangari Maathai or Riboberta Menchú have had to encounter (both of whom risked their lives to promote social justice), there’s no doubt that he deserves tremendous credit for bringing this issue into the mainstream. The concerns over global climate change need to be continually emphasized so people will finally awaken from their comas and make the necessary changes in their lives to affect real change.

As I’ve highlighted in previous posts (for examples see Climate Change and the Causes of War and African Exodus Linked to Global Climate Change) the disruption of the global temperature is likely to initiate a social crisis and could well lead to an extinction event unprecedented in 65 million years. This, I think, would be a bad thing. So while conservatives continue to underplay the seriousness of this issue it’s refreshing to find the Nobel Committee behaving as genuine conservatives and emphasizing the side of caution.