Al Gore is not the least worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace – that title, perhaps, belongs to Yassir Arafat. Nor is his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, quite as riddled with questionable statements as the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan activist and 1992 peace laureate, which has since been exposed as a work of fiction. But for an independent assessment of the former US Vice-President’s contribution to world peace and understanding, I am inclined to favour Mr Justice Barton over the Nobel committee.

In the High Court on Wednesday, the judge ruled that schools must not show An Inconvenient Truth without using material to balance Mr Gore’s “one-sided views” on the issue. The film is political rather than scientific, he added, because it contains nine statements that are either untrue or are unsubstantiated. It mistakenly attributes the drying-up of Lake Chad to global warming and falsely claims that polar bears have drowned because they can’t find enough ice.

Most brazen of all, Gore claims that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” – vividly illustrated in the film with a simulation of Manhattan disappearing beneath the waves. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yesterday named as co-recipient of the peace prize with Mr Gore, believes that sea levels will rise by less than 18in over the next 100 years, and that it would take several millennia for sea levels to rise by 20ft.

Far from “disseminating greater knowledge about man-made climate change”, as the Nobel committee put it, what Mr Gore has done is tantamount to crying “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. He has taken a serious debate and twisted it to fit a Hollywood-style narrative: that mankind is facing destruction as a result of his own hubris, unless it listens to the environmental prophet warning of imminent doom – Al Gore – and mends its ways.

The narrative, of course, does not allow Mr Gore room to acknowledge that a significant minority of climate scientists do not accept the theory of global warming. But there is another serious issue raised by Mr Gore’s peace prize. Where, exactly, does his message fit in with promoting world peace? According to the Nobel committee, climate change “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.” Cut greenhouse emissions, in other words, and climate change will be averted and peace will be preserved.

There is a problem with this thesis, in that the process of cutting greenhouse emissions itself has the potential to burden the world’s most vulnerable countries and to induce violent conflicts and wars. Nothing would be so damaging for world peace than if developing nations were hindered in their efforts to industrialise, thereby reducing their ability to cope with natural disaster.

Sadly, this is the all-too-likely outcome of the Gore approach. When the Kyoto treaty was signed a decade ago it was accepted that the onus was on Western nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions as their per capita emissions were much greater than those of the developing world. Now, Gore is among those advocating that the developing world, too, be made part of a global carbon-trading scheme, whereby those exceeding agreed emissions targets would have to buy permits from those who undershoot their targets.

But the European carbon-trading system, introduced in 2005, has shown the problem with carbon trading: it quickly becomes a means by which companies good at negotiating generous carbon allowances can extract payments from those who are less good at playing the system.

One perverse effect was that NHS hospitals ended up buying carbon credits from oil companies. Expand it to a global scale and it is not hard to see what will happen. Shrinking industries in the West will negotiate generous emissions targets. Expanding industries in the developing world will then be forced to buy permits from them, with carbon traders in the West taking a handsome cut.

Mr Gore advocates that the world unite in its efforts towards “reducing deforestation in Amazonia”. But why shouldn’t heavily forested South American countries aspire to grow their agriculture and compete with subsidised Western farmers who cleared their forests for farming long ago? I don’t feel qualified to say for sure whether cutting greenhouse emissions will reduce global temperatures, but I am pretty sure that Mr Gore’s manifesto to suppress Third World development is no recipe for world peace.

Not that peace much bothers the Nobel committee any more. For some years the peace prize has been overtly political, occasionally expressed in less-than-peaceful terms. Awarding the prize to Jimmy Carter in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel chairman, described it as a “kick in the leg” for George W. Bush. Perhaps this is how the world should view the award to Mr Gore: as yet another flying tackle on the Nobel committee’s bête noire. My only hope is that serious debate on climate change, and what to do about it, has not been undermined in the process.

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