Al Gore was the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore also served in the U. S. House of Representatives (1977-85) and the U. S. Senate (1985-93), representing Tennessee. Gore was the Democratic nominee for president in the 2000 election.
"New York Times - May 23, 2006
Books of The Times - 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Al Gore Revisits Global Warming, With Passionate Warnings and
Pictures
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Lately, global warming seems to be tiptoeing toward a tipping point
in the public consciousness. There has been broad agreement over
the fundamentals of global warming in mainstream scientific circles
for some time now. And despite efforts by the Bush administration
to shrug it off as an incremental threat best dealt with through
voluntary emissions controls and technological innovation, the
issue has been making inroads in the collective imagination,
spurred by new scientific reports pointing to rising temperatures
around the world and melting ice fields in Greenland and
Antarctica. A year ago, the National Academy of Sciences joined
similar groups from other countries in calling for prompt action to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A Time magazine cover story in
April declared that "the climate is crashing and global warming is
to blame," noting that a new Time/ABC News/Stanford University poll
showed that 87 percent of respondents believe the government should
encourage or require a lowering of power-plant emissions. That same
month, a U.S. News & World Report article noted that dozens of
evangelical leaders had called for federal legislation to reduce
carbon dioxide emissions, and that "a growing number of investors
are pushing for change from the business community" as well. And
even Hollywood movies like the kiddie cartoon "Ice Age: The
Meltdown" and the much sillier disaster epic "The Day After
Tomorrow" take climate change as a narrative premise. Enter "or
rather, re-enter" Al Gore, former vice president, former Democratic
candidate for president and longtime champion of the environment,
who helped to organize the first Congressional hearings on global
warming several decades ago.Fourteen years ago, during the 1992
campaign, the current president's father, George Herbert Walker
Bush, dismissed Mr. Gore as "Ozone Man" -- if the Clinton-Gore
ticket were elected, he suggested, "we'll be up to our neck in owls
and out of work for every American" -- but with the emerging
consensus on global warming today, Mr. Gore's passionate warnings
about climate change seem increasingly prescient. He has revived
the slide presentation about global warming that he first began
giving in 1990 and taken that slide show on the road, and he has
now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film,
both called "An Inconvenient Truth." The movie (which opens in New
York and Los Angeles on Wednesday) shows a focused and accessible
Gore "a funnier, more relaxed and sympathetic character" than he
was as a candidate, said The Observer, the British newspaper " and
has revived talk in some circles of another possible Gore run for
the White House.As for the book, its roots as a slide show are very
much in evidence. It does not pretend to grapple with climate
change with the sort of minute detail and analysis displayed by
three books on the subject that came out earlier this spring ("The
Winds of Change" by Eugene Linden, "The Weather Makers" by Tim
Flannery and "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" by Elizabeth
Kolbert), and yet as a user-friendly introduction to global warming
and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in
those other volumes, "An Inconvenient Truth" is lucid, harrowing
and bluntly effective. Like Mr. Gore's 1992 book "Earth in the
Balance," this volume displays an earnest, teacherly tone, but it's
largely free of the New Age psychobabble and A-student grandiosity
that rumbled through that earlier book. The author's wonky
fascination with policy minutiae has been tamed in these pages, and
his love of charts and graphs has been put to good use. Whereas the
charts in "Earth in the Balance" tended to make the reader's eyes
glaze over, the ones here clearly illustrate the human-caused rise
in carbon dioxide levels in recent years, the simultaneous rise in
Northern Hemisphere temperatures and the correlation between the
two. Mr. Gore points out that 20 of the 21 hottest years measured
"have occurred within the last 25 years," adding that the hottest
year yet was 2005" a year in which "more than 200 cities and towns"
in the Western United States set all-time heat records. As for the
volume's copious photos, they too serve to underscore important
points. We see Mount Kilimanjaro in the process of losing its
famous snows over three and a half decades, and Glacier National
Park its glaciers in a similar period of time. There are satellite
images of an ice shelf in Antarctica (previously thought to be
stable for another 100 years) breaking up within the astonishing
period of 35 days, and photos that show a healthy,
Kodachrome-bright coral reef, juxtaposed with photos of a dying
coral reef that has been bleached by hotter ocean waters. Pausing
now and then to offer personal asides, Mr. Gore methodically lays
out the probable consequences of rising temperatures: powerful and
more destructive hurricanes fueled by warmer ocean waters (2005,
the year of Katrina, was not just a record year for hurricanes but
also saw unusual flooding in places like Europe and China);
increased soil moisture evaporation, which means drier land, less
productive agriculture and more fires; and melting ice sheets in
Antarctica and Greenland, which would lead to rising ocean levels,
which in turn would endanger low-lying regions of the world from
southern Florida to large portions of the Netherlands. Mr. Gore
does a cogent job of explaining how global warming can disrupt
delicate ecological balances, resulting in the spread of pests
(like the pine beetle, whose migration used to be slowed by colder
winters), increases in the range of disease vectors (including
mosquitoes, ticks and fleas), and the extinction of a growing
number of species. Already, he claims, a study shows that "polar
bears have been drowning in significant numbers" as melting Arctic
ice forces them to swim longer and longer distances, while other
studies indicate that the population of Emperor penguins "has
declined by an estimated 70 percent over the past 50 years." The
book contains some oversimplifications. While Mr. Gore observes
that the United States is currently responsible for more greenhouse
gas pollution than South America, Africa, the Middle East,
Australia, Japan and Asia combined, he underplays the daunting
increase in emissions that a rapidly growing China will produce in
the next several decades. And in an effort to communicate the
message that something can still be done about global warming, he
resorts, in the book's closing pages, to some corny invocations of
America's can-do, put-a-man-on-the-moon spirit.For the most part,
however, Mr. Gore's stripped-down narrative emphasizes facts over
emotion, common sense over portentous predictions" an approach that
proves considerably more persuasive than the more alarmist one
assumed, say, by Tim Flannery in "The Weather Makers." Mr. Gore
shows why environmental health and a healthy economy do not
constitute mutually exclusive choices, and he enumerates practical
steps that can be taken to reduce carbon emissions to a point below
1970's levels. Mr. Gore, who once wrote an introduction to an
edition of Rachel Carson's classic "Silent Spring" (the 1962 book
that not only alerted readers to the dangers of pesticides, but is
also credited with spurring the modern environmental movement),
isn't a scientist like Carson and doesn't possess her literary
gifts; he writes, rather, as a popularizer of other people's
research and ideas. But in this multimedia day of shorter attention
spans and high-profile authors, "An Inconvenient Truth" (the book
and the movie) could play a similar role in galvanizing public
opinion about a real and present danger. It could goad the public
into reading more scholarly books on the subject, and it might even
push awareness of global warming to a real tipping point-and
beyond." --MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times
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