10.12.2007 - 06:30pm ET

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

"I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize," Gore said. "We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.

In awarding him the prize, the Nobel Committee citation said that Gore "is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is less well known. It's a global network of 2,000 scientists who have labored for years on reports and plans to counter global warming.

Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that the IPCC released its first report on the global environment in 1990, after being formed in the late '80s.

Since then, the group has published comprehensive reports every five years or so — its latest came out this year.

The IPCC is broken into three main groups, Cicerone said: one on the scientific basis of climate change; a second on the impact, adaptation and vulnerability of climate; and another on mitigation and adaptation to changes.


Click here to continue...