Applause for Gore, U.N. Nobel Peace Prize
Efforts on Global Warming Set Stage for Progress
WASHINGTON, DC (October 12, 2007) – News that former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is a fitting recognition of their roles in elevating climate change to one of the world’s greatest areas of concern, according to Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
“Al Gore made it okay to talk about global warming over breakfast and dinner tables all across America. He made this unprecedented challenge understandable and the solutions accessible for millions of people. Breaking down the fear, the confusion and the misplaced hopelessness is the key to progress. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ has helped unlock doors from Washington to Sacramento, and all the way to Wall Street. Standing on the shoulders of thousands of hard-working scientists laboring to understand and explain the science, he cracked the popular culture code and put global warming at the center of a global spotlight,” Beinecke said.
Beinecke also credited the IPCC with finally ending the ability of global warming deniers to cast doubt on the crisis and the need to solve it.
“The IPCC proved once and for all that the catastrophic results of global warming will be upon us soon if we don’t take decisive action now to reduce our heat-trapping carbon pollution. We have the dedicated scientists of the IPCC, who were able to rise above politics and other pressures, to thank for providing us with indisputable scientific proof,” Beinecke said.
NRDC's David Hawkins served on the IPCC as a review editor for the panel's 'Fourth Assessment' report.