'The carbon dioxide and other pollutants we have already let out of the bag ensure that no matter what we do, the problem will get worse before it gets better."

That warning about the threat posed by global warming appeared in this space in 1988, during Al Gore's first run for president.

Gore was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of climate change and to call for a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases. He held the first congressional hearings on the subject in the late 1970s.

On Sunday, Gore and his crew won the 2007 Oscar for Best Documentary for An Inconvenient Truth, a film built around the slide show Gore has given hundreds of times all over the world.

The documentary deserved to win. It is no mean feat to make a film about a man talking and showing charts and graphs that's informative and entertaining enough to be the third-highest grossing documentary of all time.

Earlier this month, Gore was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work calling attention to climate change. He just might win that award, too.

There is a Forrest Gump feel to Gore's life. Gump, the fictional character portrayed by actor Tom Hanks in the movie of the same name, had an uncanny ability to be present when history was being made and to influence, albeit unwittingly, its course. Gore has often done the same thing knowingly.

His college roommate was actor Tommy Lee Jones, who played the lead in the movie Love Story. Gore, according to author Erich Segal, was one of two people who inspired his book's main character.

Much was made of Gore's alleged attempt, in a November 2000 speech to students at Concord High School, to take credit for discovering the environmental horrors of New York's Love Canal, but the then-vice president was badly misquoted. What Gore did do, as he said, was hold Congress's first hearing into toxic dumping at Love Canal and other sites and give the pollution problem national attention.

Gore has great foresight in matters of technology. To watch Congress in action, political junkies turn to C-Span. In 1979 Gore became the first person to appear on the network.

In 1986 he sponsored the Supercomputer Network Study Act and in 1991 the National High Performance Computer Technology Act. Those bills, computer scientists say, contributed to the growth of the internet in the United States and ultimately of the worldwide web. Gore's early recognition of the commercial value of the internet led to relationships with Google and Apple that made him very wealthy.

In An Inconvenient Truth Gore jokingly calls himself the man "who used to be known as the next president of the United States." There are some who still hope that he will be. But Gore has told his New Hampshire supporters, among others, he has no intention of running, and he's believable.

Gore has persuaded millions of people to take the climate change problem seriously not because he's been prescient but because he's been persistent. He's been at it for three decades.

Winning an Oscar is nice, but the real prize for Gore will come when nations agree to act to limit the pollution that could wreak havoc on the planet.

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