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 on February 25, 2007 — the same year as the Nobel announcement. 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.”
The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was the scientific centerpiece of the 2007 Nobel award. Released in four parts across 2007 — Working Group I (The Physical Science Basis, February 2), Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, April 6), Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change, May 4), and the Synthesis Report (November 17) — the AR4 represented the most comprehensive review of climate science to date.
Key conclusions of AR4 included:
- Temperature trends: Global mean surface temperature had increased by approximately 0.74°C (±0.18°C) over the 1906–2005 period. Eleven of the twelve years between 1995 and 2006 ranked among the 12 warmest years since instrumental records began in 1850.
- Attribution: It is “very likely” (greater than 90 percent probability) that most of the observed increase in global average temperature since the mid-20th century is due to observed increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. This was a stronger confidence statement than the AR3 (2001) conclusion of “likely” (greater than 66 percent probability).
- Sea level rise: Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year from 1961 to 2003, and 3.1 mm per year from 1993 to 2003; the total rise over the 20th century was estimated at 0.17 m.
- Future projections: Under the highest-emission scenarios, global temperatures were projected to rise 1.8–4.0°C by 2100, with sea level rising 0.18–0.59 m. The AR4 acknowledged substantial uncertainty in sea level projections because it did not model potential dynamic ice sheet contributions from Greenland and Antarctica.
- Arctic: Arctic temperatures had increased at almost twice the global average rate over the previous 100 years — a projection supported that same year by the September 2007 Arctic sea ice record low, which fell about 24 percent below the previous satellite-era record minimum.
The AR4 was notable for its explicit language about human causation, which was hedged in AR3 and affirmed confidently in AR4. It made the IPCC the authoritative scientific voice on climate change and gave the Nobel Committee a specific scientific milestone to recognize alongside Gore’s advocacy work.
Al Gore’s Climate Advocacy Campaign
Gore’s 2007 Nobel came as the culmination of more than two decades of climate advocacy. As a U.S. Senator from Tennessee (1985–1993), he organized the first congressional hearings on the greenhouse effect in 1981 and authored Earth in the Balance (1992), among the first books by a major American political figure to make climate change a central policy concern. As Vice President (1993–2001), he played a central role in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997.
After his 2000 presidential defeat, Gore built a presentation on climate science that eventually incorporated more than 1,000 slides of data and images. Davis Guggenheim’s documentary filmed that presentation and the logistics around it; An Inconvenient Truth opened in limited release on May 24, 2006, grossing $24 million domestically and $25 million internationally on a $1 million production budget. The film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, in high schools and universities worldwide, and at science conferences. By the time of the Nobel announcement, it had been seen by an estimated 5 million people in theaters alone, with millions more watching subsequent television broadcasts and DVD releases.
Concurrent with his film, Gore co-founded the Alliance for Climate Protection, which managed a $300 million advertising campaign (“We Can Solve It”) over three years. He also co-produced the Live Earth concerts on July 7, 2007, which brought climate messaging to a global concert audience across 12 venues and all seven continents. The Nobel Committee announcement on October 12 came less than three months after Live Earth, and the same week as the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s all-time peak — a juxtaposition that symbolized the competing priorities of the autumn of 2007.
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 (eventually realized as the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 and the Paris Agreement in 2015).
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, including U.S. Department of Defense assessments of climate as a national security threat beginning in 2010.
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 (February 25, 2007) and the Nobel (announced October 12, awarded December 10, 2007) 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.
The prize’s selection of a Peace Prize rather than a science award was itself significant: it communicated that the Nobel Committee viewed climate change not as a scientific abstraction but as a concrete threat to human security — a framing that shaped subsequent climate policy discourse worldwide.
Sources
- 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — Wikipedia
- The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 — NobelPrize.org
- Al Gore wins Nobel Prize in the wake of “An Inconvenient Truth” — History.com
- 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — United Nations
- An Inconvenient Truth — Wikipedia — box office figures, production budget, and Academy Award details.
- IPCC Fourth Assessment Report — IPCC — Working Group release dates and key AR4 scientific conclusions.