He has said it again and again, with increasing urgency, to anyone who will listen. And on Monday, former US vice president Al Gore used the occasion of his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize lecture here to tell the world in powerful, stark language: Climate change is a "real, rising, imminent and universal" threat to the future of the Earth.
Saying that "our world is spinning out of kilter" and that "the very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed," Gore warned that "we, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency -- a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here."
But "there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst -- not all -- of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly," Gore said.
PHOTO: EPA
The ceremony marking the 2007 prize, given to Gore and to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comes as representatives of the world's governments are meeting in Bali to negotiate a new international pact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto protocol.
At the ceremony in Oslo's City Hall, Gore called on the negotiators to establish a universal global cap on emissions and to ratify and enact a new treaty by the beginning of 2010, two years early. And he singled out the US and China for failing to meet their obligations in mitigating emissions.
They should "stop using each other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate," he said.
In his speech, Gore said his loss in the bitter 2000 presidential election had forced him to "read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken, if not premature."
But the "unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift," he said -- the chance to focus on the environment.
In related news, the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize got his award for economics in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Monday because he was unable to make the trip to Sweden.
Swedish Ambassador Jonas Hafstrom presented Leonid Hurwicz, 90, with the prize in a concert hall on the University of Minnesota campus moments after the two other Americans to share the economics prize -- Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson -- received their awards in Stockholm.
He was not the only winner to miss the ceremony in Stockholm. The literature prize winner, 88-year-old British writer Doris Lessing, was to receive her award in London.
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