Peace prize for Gore stirs hope and speculation

Former Vice President Al Gore, who has waged a decades-long fight against global warming, on Friday shared the Nobel Peace Prize with a Geneva-based United Nations climate group. The choice of Gore delivered a symbolic rebuke to the Bush administration, which has opposed calls for mandatory greenhouse gas reductions, and fueled speculation that the former Democratic presidential candidate might yet enter the 2008 race.

In its citation, the Nobel committee said Gore's commitment "has strengthened the struggle against climate change" and called him "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

The 2006 Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which captured Gore's crusade, has been credited with helping push global warming into the public consciousness.

Gore, 59 -- who has insisted he does not plan to run for office again -- said Friday that he was deeply honored to receive the peace prize and that he and his wife, Tipper, would donate his half of the $1.5-million award money to the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection, which he founded.

"We face a true planetary emergency," Gore said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."

If Gore made global warming a cause celebre, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of more than 2,000 scientists from 130 countries, has provided the scientific heft. Its series of reports released this year definitively blamed humans for global warming and said that rising temperatures, if left unchecked, would lead to widespread coastal flooding, starvation and species extinction.

"This prize belongs to the international U.N. community and the states that support us," the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said from his offices in New Delhi. By bestowing the honor on those sounding the alarm against global warming, he said, the Nobel panel elevated a problem that has "the potential to disrupt stability and peace all over the world."

When the U.N. climate group was formed nearly two decades ago, scientists were divided over whether human activities were causing climate change. But as evidence mounted, a broad consensus began to emerge that the connection was real.