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Al Gore and IPCC Nobel Peace Prize
Category: History & Politics Key figures: Al Gore (former U.S. Vice President); Rajendra K. Pachauri (IPCC Chair); Ole Danbolt Mjøs (Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair)
Summary
On October 12, 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 would be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. The Committee cited their joint 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.”
The prize was awarded at a ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2007, where Nobel lectures were delivered by IPCC Chair Rajendra K. Pachauri and Al Gore. The announcement coincided with the year in which the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), a landmark synthesis of climate science produced by more than 800 contributing authors and reviewed by 2,500 scientific reviewers across three working groups. The AR4 concluded with greater certainty than any previous report that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that human activities are very likely (more than 90 percent probability) the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th century.
Al Gore’s profile in climate advocacy had been dramatically elevated in 2006 by the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, which presented Gore’s slide-show lecture on global warming evidence to a wide public audience. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in February 2007. The Nobel Committee specifically cited Gore as “probably the single individual who has done most to rouse the public and the governments that action had to be taken to meet the climate challenge,” describing him as “the great communicator.”
The IPCC, established jointly by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988, had by 2007 produced four comprehensive assessment cycles that formed the scientific basis for international climate negotiations, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Committee noted that the IPCC had “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”
Significance
The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize represented one of the most prominent international endorsements of climate science and the urgency of action on climate change at a pivotal moment in global policy. The award arrived as negotiations toward a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol were underway; the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP13) opened in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007 and produced the Bali Road Map, setting a two-year timeline for reaching a comprehensive new climate agreement.
Awarding a Peace Prize — rather than a science prize — to climate advocates underscored the Committee’s view that environmental degradation and climate change pose direct threats to global security, human welfare, and the conditions for peace. This framing helped legitimize a “climate-security” discourse that became increasingly prominent in subsequent international policy discussions.
For Al Gore personally, the prize confirmed a political and cultural rehabilitation following his narrow and contested loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. It intensified speculation, ultimately unfulfilled, about a potential 2008 presidential run. The combination of the Oscar and the Nobel in a single calendar year made Gore among the very few individuals to win both distinctions, and it cemented his status as the leading public voice on climate change entering the critical decade of the 2010s.
Related
- Virginia Tech Shooting — Major domestic crisis of 2007.
- Assassination of Benazir Bhutto — Another major History & Politics event of 2007.
- iPhone Launch — Contemporaneous landmark technology milestone of 2007.