The Melting Ice Man Cometh (Guardian.co.uk) He believes his support for Kyoto lost him the coal states of Kentucky and West Virginia - and the 2000 race for the presidency. But Hurricane Katrina and his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, changed all that. Now, on the eve of his Live Earth global concerts, climate change could put Al Gore back in the White House

James Traub
Sunday June 24, 2007
The Observer

One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of An Inconvenient Truth, his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, in which Gore would really immerse himself if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, 'Isn't that AL GORE?!' There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. 'I'll move them,' I said; and Gore, before he could think, said: 'No, don't.'

Six years after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential race that seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only call prophetic status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would not, as a candidate - saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with clarity, passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit. Everywhere he goes, people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the American presidency. He probably won't - though he might. ('It's complicated,' he told me, 'but it's not mysterious.') He says he thinks he'd be better at it this time than he was last time. And he probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 people in a room. But sometimes one person is one person too much for him.

Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the past three decades he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone in America wanted to hear - that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument - the smoking-causes-cancer part - is only the beginning. Gore and the US's major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort to persuade the American people of the need for drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. 'The central challenge,' he said to me later that evening as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, 'is to expand the limits of what's now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what's considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.

(More ... Guardian > The Observer Magazine)

Labels: Climate Change, Gore, Guardian

  ¶ 20:24