Unit9 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.docx

1、Unit9 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance SpeechUnit 9Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance SpeechAl GoreDelivered on 10 December, 2007Additional Background InformationAl GoreAlbert Arnold Gore, Jr.(1948- ) served as the 45thVice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was

2、the Democratic Party nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Gore is an environmental activist and author. He represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1985, and later in the U.S. Senate from 1985 to 1993, finally becoming Vice President in 1993. I

3、n the 2000 presidential election, Gore won the popular vote, but he ultimately lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush. Gores father was a former U.S. Senator. He had a great influence on his son. During the school years, Gore lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in Washington D.C., and d

4、uring the summer months, he worked on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where the Gores grew tobacco and hay and raised cattle. His life moved between city and countryside, and this unique experience enabled him to learn to appreciate nature and provided him with an insightful view about the r

5、elationships between human beings and nature.In 1965, Gore enrolled in Harvard University. In his senior year, he took a class with oceanographer and global warming theorist Roger Revelle. In his book An Inconvenient Truth, Gore calls Professor Revelle a “scientific hero” because he was “the first p

6、erson to propose measuring CO in the earths atmosphere.” Professor Revelle sparked Gores interest in global warming and other environmental issues.After graduation from Harvard, Gore served in the Army from 1969 to 1971. From 1971 to 1972, he attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He began

7、to work the night shift for The Tennessean as an investigative reporter in 1971.His investigations of corruption among members of Nashvilles Metro Council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses. He took a leave of absence from The Tennessean to attend Vanderbi

8、lt University Law School in 1974. As a freshman congressman, he held the first congressional hearings on climate change, and co-sponsored hearings on toxic waste and global warming. In 1990, Senator Gore presided over a three-day conference which sought to create a Global Marshall Plan, “under which

9、 industrial nations would help less developed countries grow economically while still protecting the environment”; legislators from over 42 countries attended. He was involved with a number of other programs and activities that revolved around the environment and climate change. On Earth Day, 1995,

10、he launched the GLOBE program, whose aim it was to promote the learning of science among young students and to enhance environmental literacy and stewardship. In the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but he

11、 was opposed by the Senate. Gore served as Vice President during the Clinton Administration. He was initially hesitant to accept the position as Bill Clintons running mate in the 1992 presidential election, but after clashing with the George W. Bush Administration over global warming issues, he deci

12、ded to accept the offer. He led the Clinton-Gore Administrations efforts to protect the environment in a way that would also strengthen the economy.Since then, Gore has founded several non-profit organizations, including the Alliance for Climate Protection and the Climate Reality Project. He has tra

13、veled around the world conducting research and giving countless lectures on global warming. He cofounded and was chairman of Current TV, an independently owned cable and satellite television network for young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism. A member of the Board of Dir

14、ectors of Apple Computer, Inc. and a Senior Advisor to Google, Inc., Gore has also served as Visiting Professor at a number of American universities. Gore wrote three books. His first was Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992). In 2006, he wrote An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetar

15、y Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do about It, on the threat of and solutions to global warming. It was published in conjunction with the release of a documentary film by the same title and elaborated on the points made in the film. The film and the book were both based on a slide show h

16、e developed and presented to accompany the lectures on his worldwide tours. The film has had a great impact on viewers attitude toward global warming. According to the producers of the film, Participant Media, the proportion of Americans who thought global warming was a real issue before the movies

17、release was 30%, and after it was 87%. Gores most recent book is The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013).Gore has received a number of awards including the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2007), the Academy Award for Best Documentary Featur

18、e Film(2007) for An Inconvenient Truth, and a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth.At the end of his famous film Gore says, “Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electr

19、icity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen.”Basic Knowledge about Global Warming/Climate Change Undisturbed by human action, the earths atmosphere has

20、been able to maintain a delicate balance for thousands of years. The radiation from sunlight (solar energy) penetrates the atmosphere, a thin layer that encompasses the earth. Carbon dioxide (CO) and other gases trap some of this energy, which makes the earth warm and habitable. The atmosphere of th

21、e earth serves as a kind of greenhouse that uses some of the heat from the sun to warm the planet. The remainder of the solar energy bounces back into space. The heat that remains has sustained life as we know it. However, the Industrial Revolution, which saw the use of fossil fuels (coal, oil and g

22、as) in huge and ever-growing quantities, has been largely responsible for changing this delicate balance. When burnedin factories, houses, automobiles, generating stations, etc.fossil fuels emit CO and certain other gases (called greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere. These, in turn, trap more solar

23、 energy than is needed. The accumulated CO and other greenhouse gases have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, enough to cause serious warming of the planet, upsetting the balance. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the worlds most authoritative voice on

24、global warming/climate change. It engages the services of thousands of scientists worldwide to review vast amounts of scientific information on the subject. Their 2013 “Fifth Assessment Report” points out that the concentrations of CO and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased to le

25、vels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Since the early 20th century, the earths average surface temperature has increased by 0.8 C, with most of the increase occurring in the last three decades. This does not sound like very much, but the warming is not uniform in all parts of the pl

26、anet. It is much greater in the Polar Regions. Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have been decreasing to a significant extent. Ice and snow keep the Polar Regions cool and help moderat

27、e the climate worldwide. They have a bright surface so that most of the sunlight that strikes them is reflected back into space. As ice and snow melt in the summer, the dark ocean and land surfaces absorb most of the solar energy, with the result that the polar temperature rises. A small temperature

28、 increase at the poles means that less snow and ice will form and they will melt more quickly. A cycle is created: as the ice and snow melt, the sea and land absorb an increasing amount of heat, causing even more melting, leading to still greater warming over time, and making the poles the most sens

29、itive regions to climate change on earth. Scientific measurements show that both the thickness and extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic have declined dramatically over the past thirty years, with huge chunks of polar ice caps breaking off. In addition to accelerating global warming, the loss of gr

30、eat amounts of ice and snow also results in rising sea levels. This is already creating severe and frequent flooding in some South Pacific islands. The situation has reached serious enough proportions to force people to migrate to Australia and other areas. The prediction is that, in the absence of

31、an immediate and large-scale reduction in greenhouse gases, there will be a great deal more rising of sea levels, such that very large parts of low-lying countries like the Netherlands, and coastal cities like New York, Calcutta, Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, and dozens of others will be

32、 under water. Glaciers all around the world are also melting. With huge quantities of snow and ice melting rapidly, we can expect first too much water, and then not enough, leading to floods and droughts, which are already becoming more commonplace. As most of us have noticed, in addition to floods

33、and droughts, we are also experiencing other forms of extreme weather to an extent greater than ever before. The IPCC report states that the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years was from 1983 to 2012. Thus, heat waves have become common in many parts of the world. Warm ocean water fuels typhoons (also known as cyclones