The climate campaigner said this after collecting the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday. The former US vice president shared the 2007 peace prize with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose head, Rajendra Pachauri, urged leaders at a UN climate conference in Indonesia to heed the wisdom of science.
At Oslo’s City Hall, Gore said: “The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.” “The earth has a fever,” he said, adding that the world pumps every day 70 million tonnes of global-warming pollution — above all, carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere.
Gore, who lost the presidential election to George W Bush in 2000, said earlier generations had the courage to save civilisation when leaders found the right words in the 11th hour. “Once again it is the 11th hour,” he said.
“We must quickly mobilise our civilisation with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilised for war,” he said, crediting the generation that defeated fascism around the world in the 1940s. He said saving the global environment must become “the central organising principle of the world community”.
Al Gore said he would urge the UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and that uses the market in emissions trading to bring about speedy reductions. He also urged a moratorium on building new power plants that burn coal without trapping and storing carbon dioxide (CO2).
Gore pointed that the outcome of the battle to save the planet would depend decisively on the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, the United States and China, making “the boldest moves.”
‘Impact on III World’
Pachauri, an Indian scientist, warned that the impact of climate change on some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people could prove “extremely unsettling.”
He said warming could lead to widespread extinctions of species and a sharp rise in temperatures of 4.5 degrees Celsius from 1980-99 levels would be grave and disastrous.
