In a letter to be emailed to Barack Obama’s supporters, Al Gore wrote, “From now through Election Day, I intend to do whatever I can to make sure he is elected president of the United States.” The former vice president plans to appear with Obama at a rally in Detroit tonight.

ADDENDUM: OK, so this may not be big “news,” but do you think Gore’s late arrival and “do whatever I can to make sure he is elected” support will be an asset or a liability for Obama? Will Gore jet around the country making speeches on Obama’s behalf? Hmm … better not; the carbon offsets might bankrupt the Obama campaign. Maybe he should borrow Jane Fonda’s anti-war bus that ran on vegetable oil.

Joe Klein in Time: “[I]f this race continues to slide downhill, the answer to the Democratic Party’s dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore.” Read Klein’s superdelegate scenario for drafting Mr. Green here.

Gore, by the way, will be featured on 60 Minutes this Sunday (coincidence?), where, according to the CBS News website, he tells Lesley Stahl that “those who still doubt that global warming is caused by man—among them, Vice President Dick Cheney—are acting like the fringe groups who think the 1969 moon landing never really happened, or who once believed the world is flat.”

Nobel speeches should be memorable events, and Al Gore just delivered his in Oslo.

It is time to make peace with the planet,” Gore said in the prepared remarks. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.”

Probably the most famous Nobel speech belongs to William Faulkner, who accepted his (for literature, of course) on this date in 1950.  Gore’s and Faulkner’s speeches can be compared rather easily.

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Al Gore finally made it to the Oval Office. As one of the 2007 Nobel Prize winners, he was invited to the White House for a reception with his old buddy President Bush. It was their first meeting in almost seven years. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during their private, 40-minute meeting.

As the world anxiously awaits the crowning of Al Gore as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, let’s not overlook last week’s recipients of Ig Nobels:

• Dan Meyer, for studying the side effects of sword swallowing.
• Brian Wansink, for a study on the potential of overeating from a bottomless bowl of soup.
• L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca, for their work on determining why bedsheets wrinkle.
• A group from Quilmes National University in Buenos Aires, for a jet-lag study involving hamsters and Viagra.
• Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk, for taking a census of visible and microscopic creatures who live in beds.
• Mayu Yamamoto, for coming up with a way to extract vanilla fragrance and flavoring from cow dung.
• Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, for research proving that rats cannot tell the difference between someone speaking Japanese backwards from someone speaking Dutch backwards.
• Glenda Browne, for studying the word “the” and the problems it causes in alphabetization.
• The Air Force Wright Laboratory, for researching a chemical weapon that would make the enemy sexually irresistible to one another.
• Kuo Cheng Hsieh, for coming up with a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

On Friday Al Gore will find out if he can add “Nobel Peace Prize Winner” to his list of accolades for his work as an environmental campaigner. Many think the award would be well-deserved:

“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel peace prize is making a difference and Al Gore has made a difference,” said Boerge Brende, a former Norwegian environment minister who nominated Gore and [Sheila] Watt-Cloutier.

But such a choice would also be controversial as it would “place saving the planet above saving people from war and conflict.” Is such a contribution worthy of a Nobel peace prize?

Over at Pajamas Media, Roger Simon argues that had Al Gore won the presidency in 2000, history would not be so different: “… he would be just as knee deep in the War on Terror as George Bush is right now and fighting it in more or less the same manner. He would be in Iraq.”

Yes, you read me correctly. Forget the Nobel Prize and the global warming Oscar, if Al Gore had been elected in ‘00, he’d be burning excess Air Force One fuel, jetting behind the lines to Anbar Province, dealing with an ornery (possibly antiwar) opposition party and doing his best to ignore wretched poll numbers, a hostile media and whacko Code Pink demonstrators (not to mention his quondam allies on the Moveon-Kos end of his party who by now would be calling for his impeachment).

You may not believe me, but I don’t even think it’s much of a stretch, certainly no grand fictional scheme à la Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America in which Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the election of 1940 and the U. S. opts out of World War II. The Clinton-Gore administration wasn’t the least bit afraid to use force. Erratic about it - maybe. Insecure about it - maybe. But pacifist? Ask Milosevic.

Continue reading here, and then weigh in: Would Gore have gone to war in Iraq?