One college class set Al Gore on the road to a Nobel Peace Prize
In his final year at Harvard, a mediocre science student named Al Gore took a course with the oceanographer Roger Revelle, an early theorist of global warming. The spark lasted. Decades later, after two terms as vice president and a razor-thin presidential defeat, Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for climate work.
Gore was born in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1948, the son of a Tennessee congressman who became a long-serving senator and of one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt's law school. School years were spent in a Washington hotel, summers on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, raising cattle and growing tobacco and hay. At Harvard he roomed with the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, drifted through his first two years near the bottom fifth of the class, and then buckled down.
He opposed the Vietnam War but enlisted in the Army in 1969 anyway. Part of his reasoning was political, since dodging service would have handed an issue to his father's opponent, and part was personal: he told friends that if he found a clever way out, someone with fewer options would go instead. Classmates jeered him when he returned to campus in uniform. He served as an Army journalist, reaching Vietnam in January 1971, one of only about a dozen of Harvard's 1,115 graduates of 1969 to go there.
Back home he entered Congress for Tennessee in 1977 and the Senate in 1985, known as a moderate and one of the tech-minded Atari Democrats. As Bill Clinton's vice president from 1993 to 2001 he became the first Democrat since John Nance Garner to serve two full terms in the job. In 2000 he won the popular vote by 543,895 but lost the Electoral College by five votes after a 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling ended the Florida recount.
He then turned full time to climate advocacy. The documentary An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award, and the Nobel was shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also founded The Climate Reality Project and co-founded Generation Investment Management.
Source: Al Gore
