Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore, left, his wife Tipper, second from left, Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, right, Chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and his wife Saroj, second from right, greet members of the public Monday from the balcony of the Grand Hotel in Oslo. Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday and called on humanity to mobilize at once against the dangers of a changing climate.

Oslo, Norway ? Saying it’s “time to make peace with the planet,” Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday with a call for humanity to rise up against a looming climate crisis and stop waging war on the environment.

The United States and China – the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases – will stand accountable before history if they don’t take the lead in that global challenge, the former vice president said.

“Without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the Earth itself,” Gore said in his acceptance speech. “Now, we and the Earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: ‘Mutually assured destruction.’ It is time to make peace with the planet.”

Gore was awarded the prize for sounding the alarm over global warming and spreading awareness on how to counteract it. His co-winner, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was represented by the panel’s leader, Rajendra Pachauri.

They received their Nobel gold medals and diplomas at a gala ceremony at Oslo’s city hall, while the Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and economics were presented in a separate ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.

Gore urged government officials at a U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to prepare the ground for quick negotiations on an emissions-limitation treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Gore and Pachauri will leave for the U.N. meeting Wednesday. “I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty,” Gore said.

In a speech that quoted Churchill, Gandhi and the Bible, Gore said the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – the United States and China – must stop blaming each other for the stalemate over warming.

Instead, they should take the lead in solving a problem for which they bear a large responsibility, he said, or be “accountable before history for their failure to act.”

He drew a parallel between leaders who ignore the climate crisis and those who didn’t act as Nazi Germany rearmed before World War II.

“Too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent,”‘ Gore said.

He likened the current “planetary emergency” to wartime. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war,” he said.

Although Pachauri described the threat largely in measured, scientific terms, he warned of a grim fate if greenhouse gases emissions are not limited. A warming climate could lead to swamped coastlines, disruptions to food supply, spread of disease and loss of biodiversity, he said.

“Neglect in protecting our heritage of natural resources could prove extremely harmful for the human race and for all species that share common space on Planet Earth,” Pachauri said in his acceptance speech. “It is within the reach of human society to meet these threats.”