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Gore, a vice-president to Bill Clinton and failed
candidate for the White House in 2000, has reinvented himself in
recent years as a champion of climate change with his 2006
Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The intergovernmental panel—a
UN body comprised of about 3,000 atmospheric scientists,
oceanographers, ice specialists, economists and other experts—is
the world’s top scientific authority on global warming and its
impact.
The Nobel committee’s decision
to award the peace prize to a climate campaigner continues the trend
of broadening its scope beyond the traditional fields of conflict
prevention and resolution and disarmament.
Over the years, winners have been
honored for humanitarian aid work and human rights, and more
recently, for environmental work—Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai
won in 2002—and the fight against poverty, with Bangladeshi microcredit
pioneer Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank winning last year.
The peace laureates will receive
a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.53
million), to be shared between them.
The formal prize ceremony will be
held in Oslo as tradition dictates on December 10, the anniversary
of the death in 1896 of the prize’s creator, Swedish industrialist
and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel.
The Nobel prizes were first
awarded in 1901.
Earlier this week, the prizes for
medicin
e, physics and chemistry were
announced.
On Thursday, British writer Doris
Lessing won the Nobel Literature Prize for five decades of epic
novels that have covered feminism and politics, as well her youth in
Africa.
The economics prize will wrap up
the 2007 Nobel season on Monday.
--AFP
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