2nd LD,Writethru: Al Gore, U.N. Climate Panel Win Nobel Peace Prize

Oct 19, 11:19 AM

Current Headlines: 2nd LD,Writethru: Al Gore, U.N. climate panel win Nobel Peace Prize

STOCKHOLM, Oct. 12 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to raise awareness of the threat of climate change, said reports from the Norwegian capital Oslo.

Gore, who has for a long time been one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians, is "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of themeasures that need to be adopted," said the Norwegian Nobel Committee in its citation.

Applauding its efforts over the past two decades, the committeesaid the IPCC "has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming."

The IPCC and Gore won "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," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in itscitation.

The IPCC was set up in 1988 by the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), to give policymakers a summary of the latest knowledge about climate change.

Gore won an Academy Award this year for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, and had beenwidely expected to win the prize.

"His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change," the citation said.

It cited Gore's awareness at an early stage "of the climatic challenges the world is facing."

This was the fifth of the prestigious Nobel Prizes handed out this year, with awards in literature, chemistry, physics and medicine made in the past four days in Stockholm, Sweden.

On Thursday, British female writer Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic "The Golden Notebook," won the Nobel Prize for literature.

On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces.

On Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg wonthe physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computersand digital music players store reams of data on ever- shrinking hard disks.

Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton SirMartin J. Evans, won the medicine prize Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

The prize for economics will be announced Monday.

Nobel Prizes have been awarded annually since 1901 to those who"conferred the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year."

The prizes are usually announced in October and are handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite.

Each prize consists of a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (1.53 million U.S. dollars).

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