I've had my (political) differences with Al Gore over the years, but a Nobel Peace Prize is a well-deserved honor.
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.
"We face a true planetary emergency," Mr Gore warned. "It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." He said he would donate his half of the $1.5m prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, reported the news agency Reuters.
Correspondents say Mr Gore's selection has prompted supporters to renew calls for him to stand in next year's US presidential race. Until now, Mr Gore has said he will not run.
[From BBC NEWS | Europe | Gore and UN panel win Nobel prize]
and for the record, there were not nine errors discovered in An Inconvenient Truth, as Tim Lambert writes:
A UK High Court judge has rejected a lawsuit by political activist Stuart Dimmock to ban the showing of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in British schools. Justice Burton agreed thatClick here to read discussion of each of the nine "errors".
"Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate."
There were nine points where Burton decided that AIT differed from the IPCC and that this should be addressed in the Guidance Notes for teachers to be sent out with the movie.
Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific errors. Let me name some of the journalists who got it wrong: Sally Peck in the Daily Telegraph, Nico Hines in the Times, Mike Nizza in the New York Times, James McIntyre in the Independent, PA in Melbourne's Herald Sun, David Adam in the Guardian, Daniel Cressey in Nature, the BBC, Mary Jordan in the Washington Post, Marcus Baram for ABC News, and (of course) Matthew Warren in the Australian.
