 The White House on Friday praised former US Vice President Al Gore and the UN climate panel for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to raise awareness of the threat of global warming. "Of course we're happy for Vice President Gore and the IPCC for receiving this recognition," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, referring to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the award with Gore. Gore, a Democrat, has been a vocal critic of the environmental policies of President George W Bush, a Republican who beat him narrowly in a disputed presidential election result in 2000. At a White House-convened summit last month, some of the world's biggest greenhouse polluters called Bush "isolated" and questioned his leadership on the problem of global warming. Bush has rejected the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that sets limits on industrial nations' greenhouse gas emissions, and instead favors voluntary targets to curb emissions. Since leaving office in 2001, Gore has lectured extensively on the threat of global warming. In a statement on Friday, he said the climate crisis was "our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."