Brace yourself for a hurricane of heated rhetoric. The Lede confidently forecasts that everybody and his cousin Ermintrude will be weighing in today on Al Gore and his Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the United Nations’s International Panel on Climate Change. Talk radio and television, print punditry, and especially the blogosphere will be in Category Five mode over a development that lands right in the sweet spot linking the two hyperpolarized worlds of partisan politics and climate science.

An equally easy prediction: The great majority of the commentary will follow the familiar ruts, touch the same touchstones, roast the usual chestnuts and jerk the same knees. It’s already well underway. Within an hour of the announcement you could already find exactly the right-wing jeering and left-wing cheering you’d expect.

Early samples include this from Kathy Shaidle’s Five Feet of Fury blog:

If Al Gore is a decent man, thirty years from now, having finally admitted he was wrong about global warming, he will endow a new prize, to be presented annually to a man or woman who tried to undo the incalculable damage done by An Inconvenient Truth.

Meanwhile, commenters on the left are impatient for Mr. Gore to take his prize and run with it, including this rapid post on the lefty warhorse Daily Kos, which had already accumulated 230-plus comments by 7:30 a.m. Eastern time:

No more excuses!!!!!!!!! Al Gore should finally jump into the 2008 presidential race. Next big victory for Gore — in November of 2008.

Pajamas Media rounds up much of the early reaction, pro and con, along with a bit of art imposing Mr. Gore’s head on a Superman poster.

This year’s prize, like the last few, shows that the Nobel committee continues to use an expansive notion of “peace” and who and what make the most significant contributions to it. Some of the conservative reaction scoffs at the notion that global warnings about global warming are within its scope (especially false warnings, as the right sees them), while those who agree with Mr. Gore wonder how anyone could fail to make the connection between carbon emissions and global conflict.

Which makes The Lede wonder whether there are many people left undecided on the issue for either side to sway. Or is it all just preaching to the choir?

There’s a long precedent for thinking of “peace” broadly at prize time: as far back as 1970, the committee honored not some diplomatic breakthrough but the development of robust hybrid grains that sharply improved farm yields in poor countries.

It’s not hard to see why. Peace has not exactly been the world’s prevalent condition in the 106 years since the prize was first awarded. In fact, the committee has often found it impossible to award the prize to anyone — in four of the five World War I years, five of the seven World War II years, and ten other occasions between and since, most recently in 1972.

Interestingly, though, almost half of all past Nobel Peace Prize laureates now living — 14 of the 29, by The Lede’s count — were born in wartime, including the oldest (the “green revolution” agronomist Norman Borlaug, born in 1914 and honored in 1970) and the youngest (Rigoberta Menchu Tum, advocate for indigenous people, born in 1959 as a civil war was brewing in her native Guatemala and honored in 1992). World War II alone accounts for nine, including the three most recent laureates. Mr. Gore was born a few years after World War II, in 1948.

An odd bit of trivia about this least trivial of awards: Three of the living laureates began life within months of one another in 1931 — Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Argentine architect and human rights advocate. The peace prize in that bumper year was given to two outspoken American idealists and peace activists, the social worker Jane Addams and the educator Nicholas Murray Butler.

A complete list of laureates with biographical sketches is available on the official Nobel site.

The New York Times has set up a reader forum where you can share your comments and see what others are thinking about this year’s prize and Mr. Gore.

The Lede’s comment space might be a good place to step back a bit from all that and discuss the politicization of the climate issue and the broader question of just what it means to contribute to world peace.