Gore and UN panel win Nobel prize

BBC

Climate change campaigner Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The committee cited "their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change".

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.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised the recipients' efforts to "lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract [climate] change".

The committee said it wanted to bring the "increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" posed by climate change into sharper focus.

It highlighted a series of scientific reports issued over the last two decades by the IPCC, which comprises more than 2,000 leading climate change scientists and experts.

The reports had "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming", the committee said.

Mr Gore was praised as "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted", through his lectures, films and books.

The choice of recipients continues a trend of the Nobel Peace Prize redefining the potential sources of conflict and threats to peace, says the BBC's world affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge.....