The ‘Earth Has a Fever. And the Fever Is Rising,’ Says Al Gore
In His Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
By M.P. Prabhakaran
The “earth has a fever. And the fever is rising.” The ominous warning came from former U.S. Vice President Al Gore during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 2007. The Nobel Prize, awarded to him jointly with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a well-deserved recognition of the tireless work he has been doing to alert the world to the danger posed by global warming.
As the Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who headed the U.N. panel and accepted the award on its behalf, said at a meeting after the award ceremony, Al Gore did “an extraordinary job of awakening public awareness” about the problem. We all know that his widely-acclaimed, Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was an important part of that extraordinary job.
Reciprocating the compliment, Mr. Gore said, at the same meeting, that whatever success he had achieved owed a great deal to the remarkable work thousands of scientists led by Mr. Pachauri had done in providing the “defining knowledge” on greenhouse gas emissions. That knowledge silenced most of those who questioned the validity of Gore’s warnings. The meeting, at which Gore and Pachauri answered questions from viewers around the world and from the audience, was sponsored by the American television news network CNN.
Among those who have been challenging, even ridiculing, Mr. Gore's campaign on climate change are the Bush administration and its neocon and paleocon supporters in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal even wrote an editorial saying that Mr. Gore did not deserve the Nobel Prize and gave a long list of those who did. The Journal editorial page and other conservative (primitive?) media outlets in the country and apologists for big business around the world have been pooh-poohing Mr. Gore’s warnings on the hazardous consequence of environmental pollution. Former president George H.W. Bush, the present president’s father, even ridiculed him as “ozone man.” It is to Mr. Gore’s credit that he refused to be deterred by such juvenile taunts. He kept voicing his concern. He even provided scientific data on the quantity of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere everyday by unregulated industries. Though the leading industrial nations are the main culprits, those who suffer the greatest from greenhouse gas emissions will be the most vulnerable countries in the world. The latter don’t have the means to solve the problem.
Thanks to Mr. Gore’s relentless campaign, the world at large, barring the few mentioned above, has now come around to appreciating the gravity of the problem. As the Norwegian Nobel Committee said on October 12, 2007, in its citation declaring him the winner of this year’s Peace Prize, Al Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”
Mr. Gore is now past the stage of blaming anyone for the problem. He has decided to enlist the support of all in exploring ways of solving it. “We are what is wrong,” he said in his prize acceptance speech, “and we must make it right.” He ended the speech with this exhortation:
“The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: ‘What were you thinking; why didn't you act?’
“Or they will ask instead: ‘How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?’
“We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.
“So let us renew it, and say together: ‘We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.’”
(For a full text of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, visit www.algore.com.)
(First published on December 12, 2007. It has since been slightly edited.)
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