Al Gore: Optimist?
In a Miami conference center the size of a football field, 1,200 climate activists are getting ready to watch a slide show. “Wow,” says Mario Molina, the director of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, by way of introduction. “This is a big room.” The activists have come to this room from all over the nation and all over the world—Bangladesh, Mexico, Nigeria, 80 countries in all—so that they can learn to present the same slide show back in their own communities. And when Al Gore walks on stage to teach them how to do it, they leap to their feet and cheer.
“OK, sit down,” he says in that familiar professorial tone. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
Yes, it’s that slide show, the one that thrust climate change into popular culture, generating the 2007 Academy Award and Nobel Prize in the process. Gore is still doing it, and training a global cadre of mini-Gores to do it as well; there have been 30 Climate Reality trainings, from South Africa to Australia to India. Fifteen years after he missed out on the White House by the narrowest of conceivable margins, Gore is still schlepping around the world to try to save it, spreading his unique brand of alarmism backed by data leavened with hope.
The former vice president still begins and ends his presentation with photos of the earth from space, iconic reminders of what’s at stake. He still lectures in that much-mocked wooden style, with sporadic flashes of passion detectable more by changes in volume than delivery. The big difference in the updated version of the slide show is that a decade ago, Gore mostly warned about what could happen. Now he shows what’s already happening.
Click here to read the full transcript of Michael Grunwald’s interview with Al Gore.
It’s scary stuff, and it’s supposed to be. Some of it is visually scary, like a downpour that looks like an airborne tidal wave descending on Tucson, Arizona, or a helicopter rescuing residents of an apartment complex floating down a Japanese street. Some of it is intellectually scary, like charts illustrating how 14 of the 15 hottest years ever recorded have been recorded since 2000, how extremely hot days have become 100 times more common in just three decades, how climate change is driving unprecedented droughts, floods, wildfires and mudslides. Gore constantly updates his presentation: At least a dozen of his slides in Miami were from the previous few months, including news footage of Biscayne Bay flooding local streets the previous night.
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