OSLO - Climate campaigner Al Gore collected the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday and said it was time to stop waging war on the earth and make peace with the planet.
The former U.S. vice president shared the 2007 peace prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose head, Rajendra Pachauri, urged leaders at a U.N. climate conference in Indonesia to heed the wisdom of science.
"Without realising it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself," Gore said in the prepared text of his speech. "It is time to make peace with the planet."
"The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed," Gore said at Oslo's City Hall.
"The earth has a fever," he said, adding that the world every day pumps 70 million tonnes of global-warming pollution -- above all, carbon dioxide -- into the atmosphere.
Instead of a "nuclear winter" warned of by scientists a few decades ago, the planet now faces a "carbon summer", he said.
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.
Gore said he was deeply moved to be the second man from the tiny town of Carthage, Tennessee, to win the peace prize. The first was U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull who got it in 1945 for his role fostering the United Nations.
