He might have made a couple of mistakes in his Inconvenient Truth documentary, but we suspect Al Gore will consider his shiny new Nobel Peace Prize a winning blow in the PR war on climate change.

Gore is to share the gong with the IPCC, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change", the awarding committee says.

Yesterday, a UK judge said the government couldn't show Gore's documentary in schools without guidance highlighting a few sections not supported by mainstream science. Today, the same documentary has garnered him probably the highest honour our society is capable of bestowing.

The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body set up in 1988 to provide policymakers with impartial summaries of the latest research in the area.

Al Gore, for anyone not paying attention, didn't win the US presidential election in 2000 after being vice-president to the cigar toting Bill Clinton. Since then, he has spent time raising awareness of climate change and denying claims that he plans to run for president again. ®

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