Gore widely tipped for Nobel Peace Prize Friday

By John Acher

OSLO (Reuters) - Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and other climate campaigners appear front-runners to win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their drive for tougher action to combat global warming.

Finland's former president Martti Ahtisaari is also tipped by experts and odds-makers as a possible winner.

The winner of the 2007 peace prize will be announced in the Norwegian capital on Friday at 11 a.m. (0900 GMT) from 181 candidates. The committee that awards the $1.5 million prize often confounds the pundits.

Gore, who has urged action to slow warming with his book and Oscar-winning documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth", could win alone or share the award with the U.N. climate panel or Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Norway's NRK television said.

"Such an award would fall under the expanded concept of peace but the activity can be linked to the climate-conflict combination and is highly timely," said NRK veteran journalist Geir Helljesen who has a solid record of tipping prize winners.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize, reached its decision on Monday, unusually close to the announcement which Helljesen said might be a sign that the five members from five political parties found it a difficult choice.

The U.N. climate panel, officially called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), groups 2,500 scientists and issued a series of reports this year blaming mankind for global warming and outlining solutions.

Watt-Cloutier, 53, is a representative of indigenous Arctic people whose lives are altered by the melting of the polar ice.