Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize on Monday at Oslo's city hall, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said the United States and China would be held accountable if they fail to move boldly against climate change.

Nobel Peace Prize winners Al Gore, left and Rajendra Pachauri, the UN climate panel's chief scientist, receive their medals and diplomas at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo Monday.
(Odd Anderson/Associated Press)

"We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency — a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here," Gore said in picking up his prize, which he shared with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The former U.S. presidential candidate, who lost to George W. Bush in 2000,  likened the fight against climate change to a war.

"It is time to make peace with the planet. We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war," he said.

Gore urged China and the U.S. — the world's biggest carbon emitters — to "make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act."

He called on governments meeting in Bali, Indonesia, for climate change talks to establish a global cap on greenhouse gas emissions by 2010.

"We have everything we need to get started, save political will," he said.

Gore has made headlines as a vocal environmentalist in recent years, spreading the word about climate change through his public lectures, his book and his Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned the impact of climate change could have "disastrous" effects on the world's poorest and most vulnerable.

"However, it is within the reach of human society to meet these threats. The impacts of climate change can be limited by suitable adaptation measures and stringent mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

Gore has said he'll donate his half of the $1.5-million US prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit organization devoted to conveying the urgency of solving the climate crisis.