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10 Climate Change, a Game Changer On December 10, 2007, former vice president Al Gore stopped briefly on the long red carpet leading up the steps to Oslo’s city hall. He nodded, smiled, then waved to the cheering crowd gathered on the streets circling the building. Gore—who had won the popular vote for the U.S. presidency in 2000 but lost to George W. Bush in the electoral college after a controversial Supreme Court decision halted a recount of votes in Florida—was in Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the second American in a decade to do so, having been preceded five years earlier by Jimmy Carter, who had won this prize for his postpresidential work promoting democracy and human rights. The Nobel Prize Committee had announced on October 12 that Gore would split the 2007 award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 2,500 scientists from more than 130 nations established in 1988 by the United Nations to study climate change and report what it found to the public. The Nobel Prize Committee praised the IPCC for creating “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming” and Al Gore as “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.” Together, the IPCC and Gore, the committee said, had illuminated “the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby reduce the future threat to the security of mankind.” Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian who as chairman of the IPCC was there to accept that organization’s award, said that the prize represented a victory for science over skepticism. Al Gore, who had been involved with environmental issues since he first came to Congress in the 1970s, had publicized the dangers of global 156 Chapter 10 climate change from emissions of greenhouse gases most successfully in his Academy Award–winning 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth and its best-selling companion book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergence of Global Warming and What We Can Do about It. The movie consists mostly of Al Gore’s “slide show” on the causes and dangers of global warming—which Gore calls “the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.” It grossed about $50 million in theaters, an extraordinarily large amount for a documentary film, and was seen by millions of people worldwide. His companion book hit number one on the New York Times best-seller list in the summer of 2006. According to a 2007 Nielsen survey, two-thirds of the people who saw Gore’s film said they had “changed their mind” about global warming. Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club, has called Gore the “indispensable player in the drama of mankind’s encounter with the possibility of destroying the climactic balance within which our civilization emerged and developed.” From the stage in Oslo’s City Hall, Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that we need to act “boldly, decisively, and quickly” to respond to “a planetary emergency—a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential.” Comparing the climate change threat to the global threat posed by Adolf Hitler, Gore described a world now “spinning out of kilter,” facing an unprecedented catastrophe. He said, “we must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.” What is required, he said, is a “mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.” Gore called for a worldwide moratorium on the construction of any new coal-generating facility that does not have the capacity to capture and store carbon dioxide as well as for a tax on carbon and an alliance of energy-consuming nations to make “solving the climate crisis its first priority.” Making clear that he viewed climate change as a moral issue and offering a prayer that we make the right choices, Gore said that we “have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.” After nearly a two-minute ovation, with many in the audience standing, Al Gore placed his open hand on his heart, nodded to his appreciative audience, and took his seat. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, the successes of political leaders such as...

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