The award of a Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and climate change scientists illustrates just how far the environmental movement has come in winning the global warming argument.

Ten years ago the idea that the world was warming up, with potentially disastrous consequences, was still hugely contested.

People who installed energy-saving lightbulbs or put on another jumper instead of turning up the thermostat were dismissed as part of the tree-hugging fringe movement.

But the science of climate change has advanced enormously in the past decade and gradually the sceptics have been silenced as their objections were answered.

Sceptics still exist, and many of them have good points to make, but it is they who have been pushed to the fringe of political and scientific debate.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations scientific body which shares the Nobel prize with Mr Gore, can justly claim much of the credit for bringing climate change science in from the cold.

It publishes assessments of the body of evidence for climate change every few years. This year it published its fourth comprehensive assessments.

Each time the IPCC sits down to consider the solidity of hundreds of pieces of research its conclusions are subjected to bot scientific and political scrutiny before they can be published.

Many scientists find this a frustrating process and several briefly walked out this year when political delegates objected to some of what they wanted to say.

But in many ways it is this process of scrutiny that has allowed the IPCC’s pronouncements to have such an impact. Every piece of evidence it presents publicly, every statement it makes has been assessed rigorously.

If it errs at all, it errs on the side of caution and by being able so convincingly to shrug off accusations of exaggeration that it has won credibility for itself and its findings.

Mr Gore isn’t quite so constrained. In An Inconvenient Truth he was able to present a pont of view, just as the makers of The Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4 did to the delight of sceptics.

But his point of view was broadly sustained by the science as the High Court in London recognised this week despite a judge identifying nine errors within the Oscar-winning documentary. Entertaining though the judge’s criticisms were, Mr Justice Burton made it clear that the essential message of An Inconvenient Truth was backed up by a wealth of science.

It is that reliance on science that has made the documentary such a worldwide success and made Mr Gore a hero of the environmental movement.

Where scientists have endeavoured to understand the nature, extent and likely consequences of climate change, Mr Gore has brought their conclusions into everyday conversation.