Entertainers support Nobel laureate Al Gore

Leading actors and singers performing to honor Nobel peace laureates Al Gore and the U.N. climate panel claimed they hoped they would draw attention to warnings on global warming.

Photo: Entertainers support Nobel laureate Al Gore

"The whole point is to raise awareness and communicate with everyone else in the world and share our concern for the planet," actress Uma Thurman said at a news conference ahead of the concert.

"What we are hearing is that everyone needs to get very much involved with climate. It's coming to us. It's coming to a theater near us, very, very near us."

Thurman will co-host the show with actor Kevin Spacey.

Gore shared the coveted Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at a ceremony in the Norwegian capital. They won the prize for their efforts to document and spread the word about what the former U.S. vice president calls the "planetary emergency" of global warming.

The traditional Nobel Peace concert, broadcast worldwide, this year has attracted such singers as Kylie Minogue, Alicia Keys and Annie Lennox. Melissa Etheridge, who won an Academy Award this year for the song "I Need to Wake Up," which was featured in Gore's environmental documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," is also performing.

Etheridge said Gore asked her to write that song.

"I was deeply honored, I was deeply moved and then I had to write a song about global warming, which is not easy," said Etheridge, adding that Gore's efforts gave her "a great amount of hope for our earth."

On the last day of the 2007 Nobel celebrations in Oslo, Gore met Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, opened an exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center, and then attending the concert.

"I think that showing up at an event like this is important because there are going to be so many young people tuning in to this concert," said Spacey.

Spacey said his theater in London, the Old Vic, is starting a project next year called "Go for Green" to create a play to teach children to be more environmentally aware.

However, Scottish singer Lennox said the question should really be about what the world's leaders can do.

"Can celebrities save the world? It rankles. What kind of place are we in when people are looking to Hollywood or celebrities to save the world?" she asked. "Where are the people who really should be stepping up to the plate and leading us? Where is the leadership? Red light. Emergency. Help. This is something that has been flashing for the past 40 years."

However, Keys said the Nobel Peace Price underscores how the efforts of one person, such as American civil rights leader and 1964 peace laureate Martin Luther King, can make a difference.

"For me, the Nobel Peace Prize is an extremely distinguished award for people who truly do serious work to make major change in the world," Keys said.

The Nobel Prizes were created in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite. The peace prize is awarded in Oslo and the others in Stockholm, Sweden.