Friday, October 12, 2007

IPCC gets Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.

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.

Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.

Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe that Nobel Prize is so cheap these days?? 'This is really an inconvenient truth'

More to go....

http://blog.case.edu/jeffrey.quick/2007/10/12/its_the_nobel_peace_prize

Its not me but somebody else ...but I like his/her words

"Al won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in scaring the hell out of people about Global Warming while lining his pockets selling useless carbon credits"

Anonymous said...

The author of this article post on the blog seems to be educated in this field. I'm really interested to know if the author believes in this statement :

"There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states"

(1) The so-called /claimed outcome of the global warming in statement above is already existing on this very planet in this very era .... Are you sure that the present day wars in the middle-east are due to global warming? The nobel prize committee is seriously kidding ...

(2) Even if all the greenhouse emissions were made ZERO as of today, the damage has been done for the coming 100 years. You can't do ANYTHING about it now!!

On the contrary - At the rate at which present day wars are happening - it doesn't look like the world's civilization has to wait for a 100 years to get into "violent conflicts and wars, within and between states"

I stress again ... such wars are already happening and THEY CAN ARE STOPABLE!

(3) I think there should've been absolutely NO peace prize awarded this year with so much violence going around in the world with ZERO efforts to stop the killing of innocent people

When the world itself is not at peace ...who says someone must get a nobel peace prize !!!! Why wasn't it dedicated to millions of innocent people who have been devasted from war with US in the past 6 years???


(4) Last but to me MOST IMPORTANTLY, is this "violent conflicts and wars, within and between states" a bigger function of hunger, unemployement, poverty, marred infra-structures in countries affected in war and many such IMMEDIATE concerns OR a function of the GLOBAL WARMING that caused a change of 0.6 C in one century ???????

Yes, I agree with the first comment : The Nobel Prize is indeed cheap these days ...the meaning of NOBEL is lost ...Sir Alfred Nobel's cause is lost ... it no longer is the benchmark and unfortunately many educated people fail to recognize the impending damage this year's prize will cause ...

Unknown said...

There can be seen many responses to the awarding Nobel Prize to IPCC and Al Gore, however the best I saw was Editorial of Nature. Let me quote a couple of sentences here, which will be relevant for any student of this field

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the climate-research community over the next five years will be to use new scenarios of mitigation and adaptation to generate predictions about how climate change will affect specific regions. Climate modellers are already gearing up to address the problem of predicting regional climate change out to 2030 or so. The results of their increasingly detailed projections are likely to become the core of a fifth IPCC assessment in five or six years.

Nature, 449, 755, 2007