The surprise award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama just nine months into his presidency on Friday may put pressure on him to visit a 190-nation meeting on a new U.N. climate treaty in Copenhagen.

The prize will be handed over in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of the award's founder Alfred Nobel, and the U.N. talks will run in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18. It takes about an hour to fly between the two Scandinavian capitals.

And the Norwegian Nobel Committee heaped praise on Obama, including his climate policies, in its citation.

"Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," the secretive five-member committee said.

 Some Norwegian politicians said they hoped the award would stiffen Obama's resolve to push the U.S. Senate to pass early legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the years to 2020.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush dropped efforts to get the Senate to ratify the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, a pact adopted by all other industrialised nations for curbing greenhouse gas emissions until 2012. Obama wants the United States to have a bigger role in a new global treaty to be agreed in Copenhagen.

Environmental group Greenpeace said Obama should visit Copenhagen.

"In accepting the award in Oslo on 10th December President Obama has an incredible opportunity, and responsibility, to then travel to the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit to help avert climate chaos and conflict," Greenpeace's International Executive Director Gerd Leipold said in a statement.

And Denmark's Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard also expressed hopes that Obama would come to Copenhagen: "It's hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10th and then come empty-handed to Copenhagen a week later." 

And what a difference a week makes -- the award of one of the world's top accolades in Oslo is a stunning turnaround just a week after Obama went to Copenhagen and suffered a defeat by unsuccessfully lobbying for Chicago to get the 2016 Olympic Games.

But a problem is that the first week of the Copenhagen talks will be run only by senior government bureaucrats -- environment ministers from around the world are due to turn up only from Dec. 16 to decide on a new pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. 

So, to have the most impact on the negotiations, should Obama go for a few days' vacation skiing in Scandinavia after collecting the Nobel Prize before travelling to Copenhagen?

(Picture credits: top - U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and first lady Michelle Obama arrive for an event to look at the stars with local middle school students and astronomers from across the country on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, October 7, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young. Right: The Nobel Peace Prize medal awarded to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu)

Will the guardians of the Nobel Peace Prize make another green award in 2009 to encourage sluggish talks on new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen?

Or is it too early after environmental prizes in both 2004 and 2007?

The five-member Nobel panel likes to make topical awards to try to influence the world -- a prize announcement on Oct. 9 linked to climate change could hardly be better timed since 190 nations will meet in Copenhagen in December to agree a new pact for fighting global warming.

And the Nobel prize will be formally handed over at a ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10 -- the anniversary of the death of founder Alfred Nobel -- giving any winner a global loudspeaker during the the Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen.

But any would-be green laureate has a big problem -- former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and the U.N. Climate Panel shared the 2007 prize and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai won in 2004 for her campaign to plant trees across Africa.

Three prizes so fast might well be one too many.

Bookmakers don't rate green candidates very highly this year -- one has Chinese dissident Hu Jia at 5-1 followed by Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai at 11/2. Greenpeace is an outsider at 40/1.

And the environment is still a controversial new area for the committee -- some critics said that it had nothing to do with peace when Maathai won.

Geir Lundestad, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, defends the green choices and says there's no rotation of themes for peace -- disarmament one year, human rights the next, etc.

"When the ice melts in the Arctic, new territorial issues arise. When the waters rise in Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of people flee to India, creating difficulties. And when the desert spreads in the Sahara it leads to new difficult issues," he said.

"There will be many different roads to peace and there is no rotation (of themes), as there is no rotation as far as geography is concerned," he told Reuters.

Even if there is no green prize from a record field of 205 candidates in 2009, maybe concern about the environment could indirectly influence the choice in other ways?

Lundestad said several years ago that the committee should speak out sooner rather than later this century about the lack of democracy in China  -- so far it hasn't done so. But the committee might not want to irritate Beijing, for instance by awarding the prize a prize to a dissident, just when China is offering to do more to rein in its greenhouse gas emissions.

((Pictures - top: A large iceberg is seen on the edge of a morning fog over Frobisher Bay, Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic August 21, 2009. The picture was taken from a Canadian Forces Aurora patrol aircraft flying south of Iqaluit and taking part in military manoeuvers in the Canadian north. REUTERS/Andy Clark. Right: The Nobel Peace Prize medal awarded to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Soweto in 1984, recovered a few days after thieves broke into his home in June 2007. REUTERS/Stringer))

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 (A bushfire burns through a forest on the outskirts of Labertouche, east of Melbourne on Feb. 7 REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

    By Mark Bendeich

    No matter how clever we become at predicting disasters, or how quickly we can respond to them, your last and best defence against an Australian bushfire could still turn out to be a good plan and plenty of courage to stick with it.

   Anyone who has lived through a wild fire will understand why many Australian victims ignored advice at the weekend and tried to flee rather than stay with their homes as manyhad planned.  At least 173  people have been confirmed killed in the fires, although the Australian newspaper said the toll may reach 230.
     Bushfires don’t sneak up on you. They hurtle over the horizon like express trains from hell, throwing up mountains of smoke, blotting out the sun and driving waves of wildlife ahead of them.
     Birds fall from the sky, deadly snakes race past your feet and kangaroos appear from nowhere, some badly burnt and all of them bounding at full speed away from the smoke and heat.
     And then the front of the fire arrives, introduced by a terrifying roar, a deafening mixture of other-worldly howls and screams that would drown out the sound of a jumbo-jet taking off.
     Embers rain down from the sky, which glows orange and grey, and the heat sucks the moisture from your eyes and makes it hard to breath. The flames then bear down and you have a terrible
choice: try and escape in your car or take refuge in your house.  

  (Rosaline Dove walks dazedly around the grounds of her destroyed home in the town of Wandong, north of Melbourne on Feb 8. REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

     Not surprisingly, a lot of people caught in the country’s deadliest bushfires tried to escape. Tragically, many died.
    Bushfire experts insist, even as the death toll climbs past 170, that you should stay inside and keep trying to defend your home, as pitiful as those efforts might seem. 

     After more than 20 years, I remember well the last bushfire I covered as a journalist at close quarters.  At the time, before journalists had to undergo fire training and be accredited to go near a bushfire zone. I was watching an elderly woman throw buckets of water at burning embers as they
fell like missiles around her rural home outside Canberra.
    That’s when the fire front reared up close by and I panicked. 
    I ran for the car by the roadside, realising as I reached it that my colleague, a photographer, was not there. He had failed to react in time, deceived by the tunnel vision that comes with
looking down a camera lens. Suddenly aware of the peril, he sprinted to the car, chased by smoke and flame, and we tore off. 
    We got out of there in the nick of time. 
    Now, as I cover this disaster, this time at a safe distance, I realise the old woman who had been tossing thimble-fulls of water at the feet of an inferno was actually doing what all rural
folk are now trained to do: don’t panic, prepare your property well and defend your home to the last.
  

   (A firefighter inspects the remains of a pool destroyed by bushfires in Wandong. Some residents survived the raging inferno by submerging themselves in water tanks and pools at their homes. REUTERS Mick Tsikas)
  

     As we fled, she went inside her house and both she and her house survived. The real miracle, according to the current orthodoxy of bushfire safety, is that we survived.

     So why did so many people die in the latest fires, when two decades of fire-safety education told them to either evacuate at the first sign of danger or stay and fight to the end?
     Some politicians and residents believe these bushfires were so intense that staying and defending homes was not an option. Victoria state premier John Brumby, after seeing first-hand the
sea of destruction, wondered aloud if the policy of “leave early or stay and defend” was realistic in such an extreme case.
     “There were many people who had done all of the preparations, had the best fire plans in the world and tragically it didn’t save them,” he was quoted as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald 
     Bushfire experts are still not swayed, including “fire-behaviour specialist” Kevin Tolhurst who, while admitting there is no guarantee of survival in such extreme disasters, says the option of evacuating entire towns as fires race erratically across the landscape is no alternative to staying put.

(A vehicle drives through the ravaged landscape after bushfires engulfed the town of Kinglakes, northeast of Melbourne on Feb. 8, 2009. REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

     ”There’s no way you could have evacuated all of the people, even if you had had almost unlimited resources,” he said. “I think the general policy and direction is right, but I think we
need to make sure it works better.”
     Right now, police are looking for arsonists suspected of lighting some of the fires and survivors are grieving, not debating fire safety or the question of global warming.
     But as more city-dwellers shift to the countryside where housing is cheaper and the views are splendid, the question of whether to defend your home or try to outrun the flames will continue to burn for generations to come.

A Chinese campaigner has urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to prove his green credentials, asking him to offset the emissions generated by his inauguration by funding a forest in China.

A carbon fund named "Obama, future" could invest in increased forest coverage in another country and Obama himself could plant a tree there, Lin Hui said in an open letter, published on www.ditan360.com. Lin hopes that country will be China.

Lin's appeal is based on estimates by conservative U.S. think-tank, the Institute for Liberty, that people travelling to attend Tuesday's inauguration would generate 220,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

"Obama's presidency is a big opportunity. The whole world is pinning their hopes on him, even the greens, believing he'll be different than Bush," Lin told Reuters.

The website, run by a team of volunteers, contains news articles and information designed to educate Chinese about a low-carbon lifestyle.

The Chinese government, which has been active in encouraging Western firms to invest in carbon-offset projects in China, approved the website in April, Lin said.

Lin's posting in Chinese is illustrated with photos of Obama's "whistle-stop tour", his itinerary for Tuesday, and pictures from the inauguration of predecessor George W. Bush. He tried sending a copy of the open letter, which is in English, through Obama's public email address, "but I doubt he'll receive it."

Lin signed his congratulatory letter as "A Chinese citizen, also your friend in green career".