WASHINGTON (AFP) - Al Gore, the nearly man of US politics, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, after reinvented himself as an Oscar-winning seer on climate change after his White House dreams were blown away.

Bill Clinton's former vice president won the prize, alongside a body of international climate experts, after helping propel global warming to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth," which received the Academy Award for best documentary the same year.

The Nobel prize was awarded "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change", the Norwegian Nobel committee said Friday.

After narrowly losing the 2000 US presidential election, Gore emerged from political hibernation with little bitterness, joking in his climate change film: "I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America."

Such one-liners came from a new-found store of wit that was not always apparent when Gore served in White House, working in the large shadow thrown by Clinton.

Once skewered by the press for being humorless and stodgy, crucified for apparently claiming to have invented the Internet (one of several notorious misquotations), the "Goracle" of climate change is now feted worldwide.

Shedding his image as a brainy but dull policy wonk, Gore oversaw the Live Earth concert in July, which elevated him to Bono-like coolness in some quarters.

"If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over," his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff told October's Vanity Fair magazine.