I predicted in February that Al Gore’s Academy Award, summer rock festival and other triumphs were just a “warm-up” for bigger things to come. “Oscars are for mere mortals from tinsel town,” I wrote:

Gore has got a shot at dizzier heights”a Nobel Peace Prize nomination that could elevate him to international sainthood, with the likes of Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat.

Sure enough, Gore has grabbed the big one. But “sainthood” has proven too modest a characterization. Even saints are human, and therefore occasionally sin. Gore may be of a different order entirely, says Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill), who suggested to the New York Times that Gore “now towers over all of us because he’s pure.”

Let’s not get too carried away by this latest bout of Gore fever. Gore joins a company of Peace Prize recipients that includes some unsavory characters, whose award now appears embarrassingly inappropriate.

Take Le Duc Tho. Tho”along with his American counterpart, Henry Kissinger”engineered the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the Vietnam War. Tho and Kissenger received the Peace Prize that year, in the midst of euphoria over their apparent diplomatic triumph.

The next chapter in Tho’s “peaceful” legacy? He supervised the North Vietnamese offensive that overthrew the South Vietnamese government in 1975, producing horrific suffering and death and the end of democratic hopes.

Yasser Arafat is cut from the same cloth. Arafat’s work on the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords produced a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Thereafter, Arafat”who helped write the book on modern terrorism”returned to his murderous ways.

Gore is no Tho or Arafat. But a similar embarrassment may await those who gave him the prize. The Nobel Peace Prize panel is composed of politicians, who”unlike their counterparts in the sciences and the arts”tend to make the award based on current headlines. They don’t wait to see whether an awardee’s legacy will live up to initial enthusiasm.

Gore’s legacy may already be unraveling. In his film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore claimed that ocean levels will rise 20 feet in the near term as a result of global warming. This claim has now disintegrated. Recently, a British high court judge ruled that the film is so “alarmist,” “exaggerated” and “one-sided” that it must carry a warning when school kids see it. The judge cited numerous additional errors, including Gore’s tear-jerking claim that polar bears have drowned while searching for disappearing ice flows. The judge found that only four polar bears have been found drowned — because of a storm.

Likewise, Gore claimed that inhabitants of low-lying Pacific atolls have abandoned them for fear of rising sea levels. The judge found no evidence of this. The list goes on.

The hypocrisy factor has also dogged Gore. Not long ago, we learned that his “carbon footprint” dwarfs those of ordinary mortals. His massive Tennessee mansion and jet-setting ways are to blame.

Even Gore’s friends at the New York Times regard him an odd Peace Prize recipient:

In contrast to other Nobel Peace Prize winners in recent years, Mr. Gore is a multimillionaire who has built a media and high-tech empire around himself and his environmental work. He is an adviser to Google, sits on the board of Apple and is the chairman and co-founder of Current TV, a cable network with 38 million subscribers. He receives up to $175,000 per speaking appearance, although he waives or reduces his fee for some nonprofit companies and schools. Fast Company magazine has estimated his net worth at more than $100 million.

Gore’s competitors for the Peace Prize were people who have actually put their lives on the line for peace and justice. The Wall Street Journal listed some of them: the Burmese monks who are being gunned down or imprisoned for their work on behalf of democracy, the Zimbabwean opposition leaders arrested by dictator Robert Mugabe’s thugs.

The Journal concludes its list this way:

These men and women put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression. Let us hope they survive the coming year so that the Nobel Prize Committee might consider them for the 2008 award.

Al Gore’s an environmental superstar. And like every star, he knows you’ve got to come up with a second smash hit, or you’ll be history in no time.

So Gore’s followed his recent Academy Award with a push for “carbon neutrality” — which means buying carbon offsets to counteract your “carbon footprint.” True, the campaign’s launch hit a snag when we learned that Gore’s Tennessee mansion has a Paul Bunyan-sized carbon footprint. But what the heck, it’s the thought that counts, right?

The idea behind the carbon-neutrality movement is superficially attractive. First, you admit your guilt for contributing to global warming. Then you expiate your sins by giving compensatory bucks to organizations that claim to gobble up the emissions you’ve produced. One company, for example, purports to use your “offset” dollars to fertilize the ocean so algae can pull the gas out of the air.

But even liberal media like the New York Times are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about Gore’s latest crusade. Last Sunday, reporter Andrew Revkin speculated that carbon-neutrality may be big on glitz, but light on substance. (”Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?”)

Revkin notes first that politicans and celebrities are scrambling onto the carbon-neutral bandwagon — cause in itself for skepticism. John Edwards’ and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns are now carbon-neutral, and movie stars like “Leo (DaCaprio), Brad (Pitt) and George (Clooney)” are big fans too.

But is carbon-neutrality just a feel-good pose? While some environmentalists find merit in the movement, says Revkin,

others argue that these purchases don’t accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on sacrifice and big on consumerism.

But the movement’s greatest attraction may be the resemblance it bears to a substitute religion. In the graphic that accompanies Revkin’s article, a penitent sinner kneels tearfully outside a confessional, begging “Forgive me, for I have S.U.V.’d,” while his carbon-neutral confessor intones, “Go thy way. Thy sins are offset.” The graphic captures the “sin on Saturday, pray on Sunday” quality of carbon offsets:

‘The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,’ said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullit Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. ‘Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.’

And as in pre-Reformation days, it sure helps to be rich to get to heaven.

Last week, our state was abuzz about the University of Minnesota’s apparent plans to bestow an honorary doctorate on Al Gore. The Minnesota Daily spilled the beans.

“I just learned that … two of our colleges are working with Vice President Gore and his staff to provide, we hope, an honorary doctorate to him,” said university President Robert Bruininks at a February Board of Regents meeting, according to a follow-up story in the Star Tribune. Which colleges are working with Gore and his staff? “We have not heard from the university,” said Gore’s spokeswoman by e-mail.

So is Bruininks fibbing? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He probably just lost his head — a symptom of the Al Gore fever that has infected all but about nine people on the planet.

And who can blame Bruininks? Since Gore invented the Internet as a U.S. senator, he’s gone from triumph to triumph. Gore has ceased to be a mere ex-vice president, almost president and political preacher. He’s a movie star. He convinced audiences that his “shock and awe” docudrama, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was worth eight bucks a head. Today, he’s basking in the afterglow of an Academy Award (no recount necessary).

He’s up there in the Hollywood firmament with Bogart and Brando.

Still, Oscars are for mere mortals from tinsel town. Gore has got a shot at dizzier heights — a Nobel Peace Prize nomination that could elevate him to international sainthood, with the likes of Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat.

Even the status of Nobel laureate, however, pales compared with the most momentous role for which Gore has been tapped: rock impresario. On 7/07/07, 2 billion earthlings will rock with Al at his mammoth 100-band 24-hour “Live Earth” concert, if you believe the hype.

I can see it now: Gore will make a grand entrance from a windmill-powered crane, high above the ecstatic crowd, as rapper Nelly belts out his hit, “[It’s Getting] Hot in Herre.”

So Gore’s got it all. He’s a celebrity “scientist” with the air of a fire and brimstone evangelist — a guy who shouts that we’re headed for perdition and has bar graphs and time lapse satellite images to prove it.

Imagine the invitations you must get when you’re an ex-VP of the U.S., Oscar winner, Nobel Prize nominee, pop scientist and rock MC-extraordinaire to boot! How can a backwater like Minnesota hope to land an afternoon with this latter day Leonardo, this Elvis, this king of every fashionable hill?

Dangling an honorary degree may be the best we can do.

But why has the U of M clammed up about the details of its plan? Here’s my guess.

Every year, the university gives out honorary degrees in three categories: sciences, laws and humane letters. I’ll wager that right now U bigwigs are locked in a bare-knuckle, backroom debate over which kind of doctorate to confer on Gore.

Early on, the doctorate in science had an edge. But the recently released summary of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change changed all that. It made clear that a centerpiece of Gore’s sky-is-falling claim — ocean levels rising 20 feet as a near term prospect — is wildly off base. The panel projects that by 2100, sea level will rise a mere 7 to 23 inches.

So how about an honorary doctorate of laws, based on Gore’s efforts on behalf of the Kyoto global warming treaty? Unfortunately, skeptics might point out that Gore couldn’t even talk Bill Clinton into submitting the treaty to Congress, after the Senate voted 95-0 for a resolution discouraging it, and that compliance has been poor among countries that did sign the treaty.

Humane letters? Naw, that’s not for real men like Al.

Which degree will it be? The Daily article contains a clue. It quoted Ingrid Scantlebury, a precocious U of M freshman not yet caught up in the Gore glow. According to the Daily, Scantlebury “agrees with Gore’s work but doesn’t feel the university should award him a degree for it. ‘It’s mainly a publicity thing,’ she said.”

You guessed it — Gore’s going to get a special honorary doctorate in marketing.