I'm normally reticent about United Nations agencies picking up Nobel Peace Prizes. Having said that, I thought the award this year jointly to the IPCC and to Al Gore was spot on - or, more to the point, given for the right reasons.

Whether Gore's overall track record justifies his award is more open to conjecture (and I'll defer to Chaya Kada for more on this subject). Suffice to say that he now joins the pantheon of Nobel Prize Laureates that includes Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Oh, and that 1910 winner the Permanent International Peace Bureau.

Let's see more peace prize awards in future to the Wangari Maathais of the world.

But worthy of mention this weekend are the remarks on the Gore/IPCC award by that Noted Climate Change Convert, John Winston Howard. The Sunday Age and Australian Associated Press pick up the story.

Could anyone other than Howard possibly even think of discussing Channel 4's much-debunked "The Great Climate Change Swindle" while reflecting on Gore's prize?