Is obviously Al Gore, according to the creators of www.algore2008.de, a German web site endeavoring to draft Mr. Gore as the next US President, whom they proclaim as Man of the Century. Sure he's repeatedly denied any intentions to run, but that doesn't bother the site's organizers, who according to the DW Election blog Across The Pond is run by a lawyer, a historian, a business economist, a sociologist and a computer scientist who are very enthusiastic about getting Gore in the White House.

Why is this important now? Could it be that the Germans, like the Americans, are fatigued by a slog of a campaign many feel should have ended already? Certainly a third Democrat entering the race at this juncture would spice things up.

Interestingly, a study from Germany predicting a cooler upcoming decade published in Nature last week threatens to tarnish Gore's halo as the environmental Messiah, maybe. Climate scientists at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, using real world data and a new climate model, believe that surface temperatures of the North Atlantic will actually drop slightly over the next ten years. Experts stress, however, that such a change would be cyclical and consistent with the larger warming trend in global temperatures. Prometheus, blogging for the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, sees something amiss with tweaking climate models every few years to better match real world data, "I am sure that some model somewhere has foretold how the next 20 years will evolve (and please ask me in 20 years which one!). And if none get it right, it won't mean that any were actually wrong. If there is no future over the next few decades that models rule out, then anything is possible. And of course, no one needed a model to know that."