WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work publicizing global warming, an honor that plays the green card even more in presidential politics and increases the probability Gore will enter the 2008 presidential race.

The former vice president ? who won the popular vote in the 2000 campaign against now president George W. Bush, but lost the electoral college tally ? shares the prize with the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize committee announced in Norway.

The prize caps a remarkable stretch for Gore who has almost singled handedly raised the profile of the climate-change debate. Earlier he wrote a book on the climate change issues, won an Academy Award for his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

The announcement immediately set off a flurry of debate about whether Gore will get into the 2008 presidential campaign. Even before the announcement, Gore fans had launched petition drives urging him to run, and one group published an open letter to Gore with the same plea in the New York Times this week..

Still, it seems unlikely Gore will reverse his earlier and oft-repeated decision not to get into the race. Democrats seem generally satisfied with the field of candidates they have now, and entering the race now would not only involve catching up with candidates who have been working at the campaign for a year or more, but also would involve going head-to-head in a fight with front-runner Hillary Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, with whom Gore worked in the White House.

More broadly, the additional attention Gore has brought to his cause also will make it harder for other politicians, the Bush administration and skeptics in the business community to avoid the global warming issue.

Gore will have a platform to raise the profile of the issue later today, when he gives a press conference. In his own statement after the prize was announced, he declared: “We face a true planetary emergency?The climate crisis is not a political issue …”

The Wall Street Journal contributed to this article.

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