The announcement, widely predicted, is just in.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly, to the UN Panel on Climate Change and to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
The Associated Press reports that in its announcement, the Nobel Committee said global warming, “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 … Climate change has moved high on the international agenda this year. The UN climate panel has been releasing reports, talks on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate are set to resume and on Europe’s northern fringe, where the awards committee works, there is growing concern about the melting Arctic”.
Yes, and during the transition period between his election as UN SG, and his taking the oath of office, BAN Ki-Moon seized on Climate Change and warnings about Global Warming as a safe and politically-correct but high-profile issue that he would like to make the banner of his administration — safely betting that this is a cause that could make him a hero.
There is hardly a safer or surer issue — even Israel’s President Shimon Peres is saying that climate change is a major security issue for Israel. Peres is a Nobel Peace Prize winner himself — he shared the prize in 1994 with the late Yitzhak Rabin and the late Yasser Arafat after they all affixed their signatures in September 1993 to the Oslo Accords’ Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn. And, later on Friday, Peres called Gore to congratulate him for winning this year.
The AP adds in its report that “Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, also called climate change more than an environmental issue. ‘It is a question of war and peace’, said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. ‘We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa’. He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands … ”
The AP report on the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize is posted here.
See our previous post on the UN Panel on Climate Change here.
Gore, the former U.S. Vice President under Bill Clinton, is considering a run, again, for the U.S. Presidency — against Bill’s wronged wife, Hillary.
The American television network ABC TV is running a report this evening entitled “An Inconvenient Verdict”, about a court case involving Gore’s award-winning but contested film about climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth.
ABC News says that a British High Court judge ruled on Friday that “Gore’s global warming film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, while ‘broadly accurate’, contained nine significant errors. The ruling came on a challenge from a UK school official who did not want to show the film to students. High Court Judge Michael Burton said that the film is ‘substantially founded upon scientific research and fact’, but that the errors were made in ‘the context of alarmism and exaggeration’. Burton found that screening the film in British secondary schools violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom. But he allowed the film to be shown on the condition that it is accompanied by guidance notes to balance Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views, saying that the film’s ‘apocalyptic vision’ was not an impartial analysis of climate change …
[Here are] the Alleged Errors Highlighted by High Court Judge Michael Burton [according to ABC News:]
“1.) The sea level will rise up to 20 feet because of the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland in the near future. (This ‘Armageddon scenario’ would only take place over thousands of years, the judge wrote.)
“2.) Some low-lying Pacific islands have been so inundated with water that their citizens have all had to evacuate to New Zealand. (‘There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened’.)
“3.) Global warming will shut down the ‘ocean conveyor’, by which the Gulf Stream moves across the North Atlantic to Western Europe. (According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘it is very unlikely that the Ocean Conveyor will shut down in the future…’)
“4.) There is a direct coincidence between the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the rise in temperature over the last 650,000 years. (‘Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts’.)
“5.) The disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming. (‘However, it is common ground that, the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mount. Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change’.)
“6.) The drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming. (‘It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution’ and may be more likely the effect of population increase, overgrazing and regional climate variability.)
“7.) Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is because of global warming. (‘It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that’.)
“8.) Polar bears are drowning because they have to swim long distances to find ice. (‘The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one, which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm’.)
“9.) Coral reefs all over the world are bleaching because of global warming and other factors. (‘Separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as overfishing and pollution, was difficult’.)