…[T]o the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. — from the will of Alfred Nobel.

It was with the guidance of this simple sentence, written in November 19851895, that the Nobel Peace Prize was established. No long documents, contracts or legalese, merely a single sentence setting out the conditions for which the prize which was to carry his name be awarded. It’s unambiguous, the tense clearly specifying that winners be considered only for deeds already committed and the requirements tough enough to ensure that few candidates would be eligible each year. Unfortunately, this sentence is evidently no longer the guiding principle of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose committee has strayed so far from the original instructions and intentions of Alfred Nobel that it’s a wonder the prize retains his name.

It wasn’t always like this. For the first few decades of its existence, the prize was indeed awarded as intended, going only to true peacemakers and exceptional humanitarians. These were men and women who had dedicated their lives to ending war, or who had succeeded in turning enemies into partners through well-crafted peace treaties. This even included George C. Marshall, the American Secretary of State whose Marshall Plan was instrumental in transforming Europe from its dysfunctional and warring past into the peaceful and integrated region it is today. So seriously did the prize committee regard its task, that in many years it simply refused to award the prize altogether, on the basis that nobody sufficiently deserved it. This happened no less than seven times before 1930.

But it hasn’t happened in over thirty years, with the last occurrence being in 1972. Since then, the prize has been awarded to ever more unsuited people and organisations each year, with few exceptions. Surely it would have been better to abstain, rather than awarding the prize to Kim Dae-Jung, whose ‘Sunshine’ policy merely emboldened North Korea into being more aggressive, and to Yasser Arafat, Wangaari Mathaai and Muhammed el-Baradei?

But Friday’s award of the prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes even those dodgy awards look positively legitimate. It doesn’t matter how far you stretch your imagination; it’s simply impossible to rationally claim that either Al Gore or the IPCC have done anything at all to further international peace. Even the prize committee itself gave up searching for a link, as their given justification for the award contained no mention of the furtherance of peace: “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”.

I’m sorry, but regardless of how noble counteracting climate change might be, the simple fact is that the Nobel Peace Prize is spectacularly unsuited to lauding it. If there were proof, conclusive and incontrovertible, that Al Gore and the IPCC had somehow managed to reduce violence, end wars or similar, there wouldn’t be a problem. But there’s nothing.

So why exactly did the committee award the price to Gore and the IPCC, if neither had done anything to further peace? My belief is that the motivation was political, with the honour being bestowed upon Gore by supporters who see him as an antidote to the anti-Christ (Bush, in their case) in the hope that it would persuade him to run for president. The IPCC was tacked on for good measure, seeing as though it’s actually been doing all the work that Gore’s constantly been getting wrong.

But whatever the reason, it has marked the low-point of an award that has already strayed way too far from its founder’s intentions. They should just rename it to the ‘International Feel-Good Award’ and stop dishonouring a good man’s memory.