This is one prize the supreme court won't be able to take away from him. The five votes of a committee in Oslo yesterday awarded Al Gore the world's most exalted award, the Nobel peace prize, finally putting to rest the votes of the five judges who stripped him of Florida in 2000 and kept him from the White House.
It was the last laugh for a man who has, until recently, trod a lonely path to engage American opinion with the looming crisis of climate change and who was ridiculed by the beneficiary of that supreme court judgment in 2000, George Bush, as "ozone man". If seven years ago Mr Gore suffered his annus horribilis, this year is undoubtedly his annus miraculous - February: Oscar for his film An Inconvenient Truth; September: Emmy for his Current TV channel; October: Nobel peace prize.
The accolade was established in 1901 with the remit that it should reward the "person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
This year's choice risked controversy by widening the remit to include climate change, arguing that the crisis had the potential to increase the risk of violent conflicts and wars. The committee split the prize between Mr Gore and the UN team of scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Of Mr Gore, it said: "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."
Bill Clinton's former vice-president said he was deeply honoured to receive the prize and seized the moment to renew his plea for the world's attention: "The climate crisis is not a political issue - it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." The little dig at politics spoke volumes about Mr Gore's long struggle to put the hurt of his failed presidential bid behind him. In recent months he has teased the American people, neither confirming nor stamping out rumours that he would stand for president once again.
Inevitably, the Nobel award has prompted a renewed flurry of that conjecture. Even before yesterday's announcement, the drumbeat had grown audibly louder: the nationwide coalition of his supporters, Draft Gore, this week took out a full-page advert in the New York Times that exhorted him to stand with the warning that if he did not "rise to this challenge, you and millions of us will live forever wondering what might have been".
Other influential figures added their voices to the chorus. Jimmy Carter, former president and a fellow Nobel peace laureate (his 2002 award was famously cast as a "kick in the legs" to Mr Bush over the build-up to the invasion of Iraq), said in a TV interview that he hoped this might encourage Mr Gore to "consider another political event". Mr Carter added: "I don't think anyone is better qualified to be president of the United States."
Mr Gore himself was studiously avoiding talk of a presidential bid. He maintained the ambivalent stance he has all year - neither in, nor out - in a way that has merely stoked the speculation and aroused further curiosity.
As a man with stakeholdings in both Google and Apple and a reputed $100m fortune, he could fairly easily raise the $100m needed to self-finance a primary race. But if he is to stand he has to move within the next couple of weeks to meet deadlines in several key states. And with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all proving serious contenders, observers of the 2008 race say there is no political oxygen left for Mr Gore to breathe.
"The man's not running. Even if he won the Nobel prize for curing cancer, he still wouldn't run," said Charlie Cook of the respected website the Cook Report. "I don't know a single serious person in America who thinks he will stand."
Even Mr Gore's advisers were seeking to dampen down expectations of a dramatic announcement. "He's spending all his time on the climate crisis. My sense is that this won't affect that calculation," his adviser Michael Feldman said.
In the last analysis, the long and arduous journey he has travelled, not only to pull himself back up from the fall of 2000 but also to persuade the American people about the urgency of the climate crisis, has been reward enough even without gaining the keys to the White House.
Laurie David, who produced Mr Gore's wildly successful film An Inconvenient Truth, said the lesson of the Nobel was that he had found another way to make his mark. "Al Gore has proven very eloquently that you don't have to be president to change the world."
· This article was amended on Tuesday October 16 2007. George Bush was not the benefactor of the US supreme court ruling that gave him victory in the 2000 election, but the beneficiary. This has been corrected.