The announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore for their efforts to disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and for laying the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change, was very welcome news to many.
The Nobel Selection Committee praised the IPCC for creating an “ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” by involving thousands of scientists and officials from more than 100 countries. The prize was given to IPCC as an institution, rather than a group of individuals.
One of those social scientists involved in the IPCC is Philippe Crabbé, professor emeritus of economics and the first director of the University of Ottawa's Institute of the Environment. Crabbé has been a member of Working Group III of the IPCC since 1997 and one of the authors of the IPCC’s third (2001) and fourth (2007) draft reports, which asserts it would be possible to reduce global greenhouse emissions in half by 2030 by imposing a carbon tax of less than $100 per tonne of gas.
“I am but a small link in a very long chain,” said Crabbé in an interview with Radio-Canada, where he praised the IPCC as the “scientific conscience for humanity.”
