Al Gore is going to Oslo.
The former vice-president has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. He shares the prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Nobel committee calls Gore “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding” of climate change and the measures needed to combat it.
The prize is a very nice gold medal, plus 10 million Swedish kroner (US$1,543,590, according to Google’s converter). Gore says he’ll donate his share of the dough to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection.
The prize will be awarded on December 10th in a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. Curiously, the peace prize is the only Nobel prize awarded in Norway; the other four original prizes (for physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature) are awarded in Sweden. The Nobel site blames Nobel for the quirk.
The peace prize also gets a different-looking gold medal from the others.
In case you’re wondering when the last time was that someone won an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year: the answer is, it still hasn’t happened. The documentary about Gore and climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, did indeed win an Oscar in 2007 for best documentary, but the Oscar went to director Davis Guggenheim, not to Gore.
Gore will just have to settle for the Nobel Peace Prize — and the company of former winners Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, and Martin Luther King.
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