Al Gore will share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They were awarded the prize for “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 prize committee declared Al Gore “one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians” and said the IPCC had “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming”.

“Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control,” says the committee (press release).

This may take some of the sting out of the UK court ruling Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth movie will have to carry caveats when shown in schools – a ruling based in part on perceived differences between Gore’s stance and the scientific consensus outlined by … the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (see the updated bog posting on the ruling)

This is not the first time a prize has been won by an institution. In 2005 the International Atomic Energy Agency took half a prize, and other winners include the UN in 2001 and Médecins Sans Frontières in 1999. The real question is who will get the money at the IPCC?

The question for Gore is slightly different. The impressive Fiona Harvey at the FT has a very good piece up already, noting that the prize was perhaps unsurprising but “reinforced his reputation as the world’s foremost champion of environmental issues.” It “also added to speculation that Mr Gore would be persuaded to have another attempt at the US presidency”.

UPDATE

“It’s every scientist’s dream to win a Nobel Prize, so this is great for myself and the hundreds that worked on their reports over the years. It is perhaps a little deflating though – that one man and his PowerPoint show has as much influence as the decades of dedicated work by so many scientists,” said Piers Forster, of the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment (via the Science Media Centre).

According to the NY Times Gore will donate his prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection. “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity,” he said.

Gore will not be joining George Bernard Shaw, who is the only person to have won both a Nobel and an Oscar. Shaw won the 1925 Nobel for literature and a 1938 Oscar for his Pygmalion screenplay. While Gore now has a Nobel, the Oscar awarded for An Inconvenient Truth is listed for best documentary under the name of Davis Guggenheim, its director.

Gore says:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis — a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency.

Controversial economist and ‘skeptical environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg has also weighed in: “The IPCC engages in meticulous research where facts rule over everything else. Gore has a very different approach.”