 The Nobel Peace Prize has occasionally affected world events, but it is more of a microphone to broadcast the views of the winner than a magic wand to change things, a senior Nobel official said. Geir Lundestad, head of the Nobel Institute in Oslo and secretary to the Norwegian committee that selects the laureates, said the peace prize could open many doors, but it only rarely enabled the winners to change the world. "The prize is primarily a high honour," Lundestad told reporters during a recent visit to the Institute. "It also acts as a loudspeaker and a microphone for the lesser-known laureates." "It can obviously not produce peace. It is no magic wand -- that goes without saying," he said. Former US Vice President Al Gore will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in the Norwegian capital on Monday with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Announced in October, the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.55 million) award went to them for spreading public awareness and furthering the science of climate change. Gore and IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri will receive the prize while governments are convened at a UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to try to launch negotiations for a treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Gore said upon arriving in Oslo on Friday, that if the prize helped further those talks, it would be a good thing. The peace prize has sometimes offered protection to the winners against their countries' rulers, as noted by the 1983 laureate Lech Walesa of Poland and the Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov who got the prize in 1975. "It also opens virtually all doors," Lundestad said, citing the example of South African Bishop Desmond Tutu who was invited to Ronald Reagan's White House to delivery his message about the evils of apartheid only after he won the prize in 1984. "And very occasionally, but only very occasionally, it can influence politics on the ground," Lundestad said. Perhaps the best example, he said, was the 1996 prize to Bishop Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos Horta. The prize-winners themselves said the award was influential in helping East Timor break away from Indonesia in 1999 and gain independence in 2002. Before winning the prize, Ramos Horta travelled the world seeking support, but no one wanted to see him or finance his movement, so he slept in railway stations, Lundestad said. Lundestad said East Timor gained independence mainly because of economic, social and political collapse in Indonesia at the end of the 1990s. "But the prize certainly contributed. The world certainly cared about what was happening on that tiny half of that tiny island," he said.