al gore presentation on climate change

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Truth in 10

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The climate crisis affects all of us. But together we can solve it.</h2>

That is why Al Gore created the “Truth in 10” slideshow, a 10-minute presentation anyone can use to share the truth of what’s happening to our planet and the solutions in our hands.

The presentation breaks down the science of global warming and how rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels lead to more and more extreme weather events and impacts from rising seas to fast-spreading disease.

Just as important, “Truth in 10” explains how we can solve this crisis and create a better future for all with a just transition to clean energy, using the tools and technology here today. All in simple and easy-to-understand terms any audience can follow.

Download the presentation and use it to get your friends, family, school, colleagues, and more talking about climate change and how we can solve it together.

We need to act on Climate change

We can solve climate change.

Scientists Agree

The overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists agree: man-made climate change is a reality. Unless we act now, temperatures will rise beyond our control.

We have the means

We know how to stop climate change, and we have the tools to do it. We start by ditching the dirty fossil fuels devastating our climate and our health and switching to clean, reliable, and affordable renewable energies like wind and solar.

There are real dangers

We're looking at a future of seas climbing up our shores; devastating floods, droughts, and storms becoming more frequent facts of life; seasons changing beyond recognition; and dangerous consequences for our health we’re only beginning to understand.

It makes economic sense

Changing technology means renewables keep getting cheaper, more accessible, and more widespread everywhere from rooftops to power plants. Renewable energy costs the same or less than energy from fossil fuels. In 2014, numerous countries' economies grew while their carbon emissions levels dropped.

It's our duty

We have a moral responsibility to each other and to our children to address this crisis. This is our one beautiful and deeply precious home.

we're doing it together

We’re bringing together people from all walks of life and corners of the earth to support a strong climate agreement in Paris that puts us on the path to zero carbon emissions and the healthy and prosperous future we want. When the world speaks with one voice, our leaders have to listen.

ABOUT THE FILM

A decade after  AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH  brought the climate crisis into the heart of popular culture, comes the riveting and rousing follow-up that shows just how close we are to a real energy revolution. Former Vice President Al Gore continues his tireless fight, traveling around the world training an army of climate champions and influencing international climate policy. Cameras follow him behind the scenes – in moments both private and public, funny and poignant – as he pursues the inspirational idea that while the stakes have never been higher, the perils of climate change can be overcome with human ingenuity and passion. Learn more about  An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power   here.

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Al Gore on Climate Crisis: 'We Have the Solutions, But We’ve Got to Move Faster'

Former vice president and climate activist Al Gore delivered a message of great concern, tempered with hope about climate change Tuesday night in a virtual event sponsored by the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. 

Gore was the inaugural speaker in the new Advancing Climate Solutions. Now. The Swain Climate Policy Series , honoring retired government, business, community, and University of Minnesota leader Tom Swain.

Gore discussed the challenges facing the world in addressing the widespread impact of climate change, while also expressing optimism about the growing momentum towards action, in the event attended by an online audience of more than 1,000 people. 

Watch video of the event

Tom Swain wanted to establish this initiative to mark his 100th birthday earlier this year, calling the climate crisis the biggest, most critical issue that humankind faces today. 

“We at the Humphrey School knew we could answer Tom’s call to help develop the Swain Climate Policy Series, backed by our expertise in public issues that emerge at the intersection of science, technology, the environment and society,” said Humphrey School Interim Dean Catherine Squires. “During this Climate Week and all throughout the year, we are partnering with the University’s Institute on the Environment to promote ways each of us can become part of the solution through policy and advocacy.” 

Gore has been an advocate of climate action for decades. Since leaving office in 2001, he has founded two organizations, written several books, and been the subject of two documentary films, all raising awareness of the climate crisis and proposing solutions. 

Here are excerpts from Gore’s presentation and conversation with moderator Jessica Hellmann, director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. His remarks have been edited for length.

On the deepening climate crisis:

The devastating impacts of the climate crisis continue to worsen faster than we have begun to implement the solutions. We have the solutions, but we’ve got to move faster. It can still be difficult for any of us to wrap our minds around the truly unprecedented nature of this very current and growing threat. 

For example, our sky—if you go outside and look up, it seems like a vast and seemingly limitless expanse. But in truth, the sky is an extremely thin shell surrounding our planet. Every single day we are spewing 162 million tons of manmade global warming pollution into that thin shell of atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer. And it accumulates there. 

The consequences are all around us. 2020 was the warmest year on record, according to NASA. The seven hottest years of all time have been the past seven years, rounding out the hottest decade that’s ever been recorded with instruments. 

We are seeing a litany of impacts: stronger storms, bigger downpours, rain bombs, more destructive floods and mudslides, deeper and longer droughts, crop failures, strengthening wildfires, spreading tropical diseases, melting ice and the consequent sea level rise, acidification of the oceans, loss of living species and so much more.  

On his optimism about the future:

While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at times, I have an enormous amount of hope about our future. Though the global approach to climate policy has been piecemeal at best over the past few decades, we’re seeing a significant shift in the market for decarbonization, thanks to advances in innovative new technologies and incentives for renewable energy in key markets. As a result, we’re now in the early stages of a sustainability revolution. 

It’s driven in part by machine learning, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and astonishing advances in biotechnology, all of which make up the potential to completely reshape our world for the better by transforming our relationship to businesses, the environment, and to one another.

This global sustainability revolution has the scale and impact of the industrial revolution, coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. 

This is what’s needed: a complete rethink of the relationships between business, investors, markets, governments, and all of us. Many people don’t realize or don’t believe that we can take action to deploy these solutions, without incredible costs. But the truth is we can, they save us money. They create good and green jobs, they make our environment cleaner, they give us hope. 

On the United Nations' climate conference : 

Nearly six years ago in Paris, the global community committed to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This year at COP26 [the UN’s climate change conference] in Glasgow, nations must commit to implementing the plans that will allow us to keep that goal within reach. 

Many nations have made pledges to reach net zero when the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are balanced by removal out of the atmosphere] by 2050, and that’s great. But it’s the actions we take in this decade right now that are the most critical if we want to avert the catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis. 

The attention to the climate crisis and the increase in activism in recent years has pushed us to a political tipping point. World leaders are finally beginning to put plans behind their words. [For example, the United Kingdom, Germany, the European Union, Japan, and China.]

President Biden has pledged to cut US emissions in half or more by 2030. And in doing so he has sent a strong signal to the global community that significant reductions in emissions are not only necessary, but they’re eminently achievable.

On e nvironmental justice: 

We cannot have climate justice without racial justice. They are intertwined. The pandemic has underscored just how interconnected these issues are. For example, we know that exposure to air pollution increases the death rate from COVID-19. And we know that low-income communities and communities of color have faced disproportionate impacts from both the pandemic and the legacy of environmental racism that has led to the location of some of the dirtiest fossil fuel facilities in or near communities of color. 

I’ve been incredibly inspired by the grassroots leadership of Indigenous communities in the US in standing up to oil and gas companies trying to build dangerous fossil fuel pipelines over sacred land and endangering vital water supplies.

One thing we must do is to ensure that Indigenous and local communities have prioritized access to decision-making spaces, legal rights to their territories, and protection from harmful extractive industries. The transition away from fossil fuels provides an incredible opportunity to deliver on the promise of environmental justice. As we invest in the solutions to the climate crisis, we must ensure that those solutions are deployed equitably. 

On the i mportance of activism, especially by students:

I’ve been working on this issue for a long time and I know that the challenge of solving the climate crisis can seem incredibly daunting. But as progress over the last few years has shown, things can change very quickly. When the culture shifts, when consciousness changes, everything else can change rapidly—faster than people think it can. 

I know many of you are here because you want to be part of something larger than yourselves. I challenge all of you to aim high. These are the times when it is a privilege to have the opportunity to do good and historic things—really big things. I believe that we are in a moment that future historians will look back on and see as a turning point for human civilization. But that’s only if we use all of the tools in our toolkit to drive the change that is so urgently needed. 

The global energy transformation is influenced by large public and private sector actors, and those actors are directly influenced by the passion and the power of your actions. So the future is in your hands. For anyone who doubts that we have the political will to meet this challenge, remember that political will is itself a renewable resource. 

About the Swain Climate Policy Series 

Answering Tom Swain’s call to action, Advancing Climate Solutions. Now. The Swain Climate Policy Series seeks to engage and energize students throughout the University of Minnesota, as well as residents across the state, to become part of the solution to climate change through policy and advocacy. 

The Humphrey School, in partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment , developed the series and the Swain Climate Policy Fund to bring public lectures featuring world-renowned climate experts and champions, policy-focused student internships and research initiatives, and opportunities for participants to learn how to be more effective climate stewards through both individual and collective action. 

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Climate Forward

Al gore on extreme heat and the fight against fossil fuels.

The past few weeks have him even more worried than usual.

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By David Gelles

It’s been 17 years since former Vice President Al Gore raised the alarm about climate change with his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, he’s been shouting from the rooftops about the risks of global warming more or less nonstop.

But the events of the past few weeks have Gore even more worried than usual.

“Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level,” he told me in an interview. “The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”

We can’t always say that a specific weather event was caused by climate change, but it is making certain extremes more likely. And this summer, the extreme weather chaos that Gore predicted in “An Inconvenient Truth” seems to have arrived all at once.

“Every night on the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” Gore said.

‘We know how to fix this’

Despite the apocalyptic weather news, Gore is also hopeful.

Clean energy is cheaper than ever, and electric vehicle sales are surging, turbocharged by government subsidies. Put that all together, and Gore thinks developed economies could draw down their emissions with surprising speed.

“If you sketch out what the potential curves take you to by 2030 or 2040, it becomes increasingly realistic to say, ‘Yes, these expansive goals definitely are achievable,’” he said.

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Changing climate: 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth

By thomas sumner april 8, 2016.

• CHANGING CLIMATE
• Ocean Circulation
• Drought Climate and Conflict

Antarctic Ice Sheet

Sea level rise, extreme temperatures, climate action.

By Thomas Sumner

M ore than 25 years before the star-studded Los Angeles premiere of An Inconvenient Truth , glaciologist Lonnie Thompson was about as far away from the red carpet as possible. It was 1978, and high in the rugged Andes, Thompson and fellow scientists were witnessing the first glimpses of a pending worldwide disaster. Rising temperatures were melting ancient titans of ice and snow. Mammoth glaciers were disappearing at unprecedented rates and withering to the smallest sizes in millennia. The delicate balance of Earth’s climate was upset.

As research mounted, scientists around the world from fields as diverse as chemistry and astronomy were coming to grips with a newfound truth: Carbon dioxide spewed by fossil fuel burning and other greenhouse gases were warming the world at an alarming rate, potentially threatening the health and livelihoods of millions of people. Despite the gravity and urgency of their findings, the scientists’ warnings fell mostly on deaf ears for years.

Until 2006. Six years after his unsuccessful presidential campaign, Al Gore reentered the national spotlight to release An Inconvenient Truth , which heavily featured Thompson’s mountaintop research. Thompson missed the premiere of the documentary because he was gearing up to return to South America’s vanishing ice. But the film did what he and other researchers had been unable to do: “It got climate change on the radar,” Thompson says. Last December, Gore was on hand in Paris as 195 nations committed to the most ambitious pledge yet to fight back against climate change and curb carbon emissions ( SN: 1/9/16, p. 6 ).

In the 10 years since the movie sparked increased public discussion, climate scientists have made major advances. More observations, faster climate-simulating computers and an improved understanding of the planet’s inner workings now provide a clearer window on how Earth’s climate will change.

Some of the bold forecasts of the 2006 movie are holding, and others are on an accelerated track. A few of the most dire warnings need revising, says Thompson, at Ohio State University in Columbus. And plenty of questions remain. In a controversial paper in March in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics , researchers argued that the effects of climate change could be even more severe and sudden than current predictions.

While a lot has changed, the fundamental understanding of climate change, dating back to the 19th century recognition that carbon dioxide warms the planet, has held strong, he says.

“The physics and chemistry that we’ve known about for over 200 years is bearing out,” Thompson says. “We’ve learned so much in the last 10 years, but the fact that the unprecedented climate change of the last 40 years is being driven by increased CO 2 hasn’t changed.”

The far-reaching effects of climate change — from ocean acidification to disrupted ecosystems — are too numerous to examine all at once. But below are a few of the areas where climate scientists have made significant progress since 2006.

Above, video: Warming is altering Earth’s landscape, such as via accelerated ice loss on this Norwegian glacier. Alternate photo: Scientists with NASA’s ICESCAPE mission investigate the effects of climate change on Arctic ecosystems.

Video: Incredible Arctic/Shutterstock; photo: Kathryn Hansen/NASA

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. The storm’s destruction, compounded by failed levees, sparked concerns that climate change could have been at least partially responsible. Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA

2006: The warming ocean could fuel more frequent and more intense Atlantic hurricanes.

2016: Hurricane frequency has dropped somewhat; hurricane intensities haven’t changed much — yet.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Floodwaters covered roughly 80 percent of New Orleans, 1,836 people died, hundreds of thousands became homeless and the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record was far from over. As the last storm fizzled, damages had reached $160 billion, meteorologists had run through the alphabet of preselected storm names and many people, including Gore, were indicting global warming as a probable culprit.

“Hurricanes were the poster child of global warming,” says Christopher Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. “In reality, it’s a lot more subtle than that.”

Tropical cyclones, such as Atlantic hurricanes, are stirred up where seawater is warmer than the overlying air. Because climate change raises ocean temperatures, it made sense that such storms could strike more often and with more ferocity. A closer look at hurricanes past and future suggests, however, that the relationship between warming and hurricanes is less clear-cut.

STEADY STORMS The record-smashing 2005 hurricane season raised concerns that storms were becoming stronger and more frequent. Yet, a closer look at the long-term trends revealed that Atlantic hurricane frequency has not significantly changed since 1878. Source: C. Landsea/NHC/NOAA

Several studies in the mid-2000s examining the history of Atlantic hurricanes pointed to an overall rise in the number of 20th century storms in step with warming sea surface temperatures. Scrutinizing those numbers, Landsea uncovered a problem: Hurricane-spotting satellites date back only to 1961’s Hurricane Esther. Before then, storm watchers probably missed many weaker, shorter-lived storms. Taking this into account, Landsea and colleagues reported in 2010 that the number of annual storms has actually decreased somewhat over the last century.

That decrease could be explained by climate factors other than rising sea surface temperatures. Changes in atmospheric heating can increase the variation in wind speed at different elevations, known as wind shear. The shearing winds rip apart burgeoning storms and decrease the number of fully formed hurricanes, researchers reported in 2007 in Geophysical Research Letters .

The overall frequency of storms, however, is less important than the number of Katrina-scale events, says Gabriel Vecchi, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. Category 4 and 5 storms, the most violent, make up only 6 percent of U.S. hurricane landfalls, but they cause nearly half of all damage. Vecchi and colleagues used the latest understanding of how hurricanes form and intensify to forecast how the storms will behave under future climate conditions.

LANDFALL Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana in August 2004. The storm devastated the state and flooded much of New Orleans. Radar data from NWS New Orleans and processed by the National Climatic Data Center

The work, published in 2010 in Science , predicted that the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms could nearly double by 2100 due to ocean warming, even if the overall number of hurricanes doesn’t rise. At present, however, climate change’s influence on hurricanes is probably too small to detect, Vecchi says, adding that Katrina’s wrath can’t be blamed on global warming.

Future hurricanes will cause more damage, Landsea predicts, whether or not there’s any change in storm intensity. Rising sea levels mean floodwaters will climb higher and reach farther inland. Hurricane Sandy, which stormed over New Jersey and New York in October 2012, had weakened by the time it reached the coast. But it drove a catastrophic storm surge into the coastline that caused about $50 billion in damages. If sea levels were higher, Sandy’s surge would have reached even farther inland and damage could have been much worse.

Many vulnerable areas such as St. Petersburg, Fla., are woefully underprepared for threats posed by storms at current sea levels, Landsea warns. Higher sea levels won’t help. “We don’t need to invoke climate change decades down the line — we’ve got a big problem now,” he says.

“Hurricanes were the poster child of global warming. In reality it’s a lot more subtle than that.” Christopher Landsea

Researchers have directly monitored Atlantic circulation, which includes the Gulf Stream, since the 2004 deployment of the RAPID array (shown). Direct measurements suggest that the circulation may be slowing down. National Oceanography Centre (UK)

Ocean circulation

2006: Freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic could shut down the ocean conveyor belt that shuttles warm water toward Western Europe.

2016: The ocean conveyor belt may already be slowing, but it’s not much of a conveyor belt at that.

Last year may have been Earth’s hottest on record ( SN: 2/20/16, p. 13 ). But for one small corner of the globe, 2015 was one of the coldest . Surface temperatures in the subpolar North Atlantic have chilled in recent years and, oddly enough, some research suggests global warming is partly responsible.

An influx of freshwater from melting glaciers and increasing rainfall can slow — and possibly even shut down — the ocean currents that ferry warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic. About 10 years ago, scientists warned of a possible abrupt shutdown of this “ocean conveyor belt.” After years of closely monitoring Earth’s flowing oceans, researchers say a sudden slowdown isn’t in the cards. Some researchers report that they may now be seeing a more gradual slowing of the ocean currents. Others, meanwhile, have discovered that Earth’s ocean conveyor belt may be less of a sea superhighway and more of a twisted network of side roads.

The consequences of a sea current slowdown won’t be anywhere near as catastrophic as the over-the-top weather disasters envisioned in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow , says Stephen Griffies, a physical oceanographer at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. “The doomsday scenario is overblown, but the possibility of a slowing down of the circulation is real and will have important impacts on Atlantic climates,” Griffies says.

EVERY WHICH WAY Tracking the motion of floating markers dropped into the northwest Atlantic (white-rimmed circles), researchers found that the idea of an ocean conveyor belt is overly simplistic. The markers quickly split up, ending up in many different destinations (solid circles). Amy S. Bower et al / Nature 2009

The Atlantic mixing that feeds the currents is powered by differences in the density of seawater. In the simple ocean conveyor-belt model, warm, less-dense surface water flows northward into the North Atlantic. Off Greenland, cold, denser water sinks into the deep ocean and flows southward. This heat exchange, known as the Atlantic overturning circulation, helps keep European cities warmer than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

Ten years ago, scientists knew from past changes in Earth’s climate that temperature shifts can disrupt this density balance. Freshwater from the shrinking Greenland ice sheet and increased rainfall make the North Atlantic waters less dense and therefore less likely to sink. Investigations into Earth’s ancient climates show that the overturning circulation weakened around 12,800 years ago, probably causing cooling in Europe and sea level rise along North America’s East Coast, as piled-up water in the north sloshed southward.

Tracking sea surface temperatures, researchers reported last year that the Atlantic overturning circulation significantly slowed during the 20th century, particularly after 1970. Comparing the recent slowdown with past events, the researchers reported in March in Nature Climate Change that the rapid weakening of the circulation is unprecedented in the last 1,000 years .

That result isn’t the final word, though, says Duke University physical oceanographer Susan Lozier. Scientists have directly measured the speed of the ocean circulation only since the deployment of a network of ocean sensors in 2004. Earlier Atlantic circulation speed changes have to be gleaned from less reliable indirect sources such as sea surface temperature changes. “If you look at the most recent results, there’s a decline, yes,” she says. “But we can’t say that’s part of a long-term trend right now.” And effects on Europe’s climate could be masked by other factors.

Another challenge is that over the last 10 years, “the ocean conveyor-belt model broke,” Lozier said in February at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans. From 2003 through 2005, she and colleagues tracked the movements of 76 floating markers dropped into the North Atlantic and pulled around by ocean waters. If the model was right, these markers should have traveled along the southward-flowing part of the conveyor belt. Instead, the markers moved every which way , the researchers reported in 2009 in Nature .

“We went from this simple ribbon of a conveyor belt to a complex flow field with multiple pathways,” Lozier says. Determining past and possible future effects of climate change on ocean currents will require more measurements and a better understanding of how the ocean truly flows, she says.

Even if the overturning circulation cuts out completely, the resulting cooling effect will probably be short-lived, Griffies says. “At some point, even if the circulation collapses, it would only be 10 or 20 years before the global warming signal would overwhelm that cooling” in Europe, he says. “This is not going to save us from a warmer planet.”

Drought conditions worsened by climate change helped fuel the civil unrest that led to 2011’s Syrian civil war. Global security experts worry that continuing climate change will help spark more conflicts. Christiaan Triebert/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Drought, Climate and Conflict

2006: Climate change exacerbated droughts that contributed to regional conflicts, such as the war in Darfur.

2016: Drought conditions worsened by climate change helped spark the Syrian civil war.

Following escalating unrest and a wave of demonstrations across the Arab world, a bloody civil war broke out in Syria in 2011. The ongoing conflict sparked an international crisis and has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions more displaced. While the root cause of the conflict centered on clashes between the Syrian government and its people, multiple studies argue that climate change helped stoke the flames of rebellion.

Mounting evidence from around the world has indicted climate change in several recent severe droughts from Syria to California. Computer simulations and direct measurements of weather patterns show that climate change can redirect the paths of rainstorms and cause higher temperatures that dry out soil.

The recent Eastern Mediterranean drought was the most extreme in 900 years, new research suggests. Continuing drought conditions (red) may have contributed to the unrest that preceded the Syrian Civil War. Conditions shown here are for late 2015. NASA

In March 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers estimated that decades-long shifts in Syria’s rainfall and temperatures doubled or even tripled the severity of the three-year drought that preceded the Syrian civil war. Using tree rings, a separate group reported this March in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres that 1998 through 2012 was the driest period in the Eastern Mediterranean since at least 1100.

The recent drought upset regional food security, prompted a mass migration into urban areas and emboldened anti-government forces , 11 retired U.S. admirals and generals wrote in a 2014 report published by CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization in Arlington, Va. The clash joins another conflict partly pinned on climate change: the war in Darfur, which broke out in 2003 following a decades-long drop in regional rainfall.

Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer and more severe across the globe, and scientists expect that trend to continue. Dwindling agricultural production in certain high-population areas such as parts of Africa could lead to food shortages that spark refugee crises, the report warned.

“We see more clearly now that while projected climate change should serve as a catalyst for change and cooperation, it can also be a catalyst for conflict,” the retired admirals and generals wrote.

Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer and more severe across the globe and scientists expect that trend to continue.

The minimum extent of Arctic sea ice has shrunk substantially since 1979. Shrinking sea ice can have both regional and global impacts for climate and ecosystems. NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

2006: The Arctic could see its first sea ice–free summers in the next 50 to 70 years.

2016: Arctic summer sea ice may disappear as early as 2052.

The top of the world could see its first iceless summer roughly a decade sooner than thought in 2006, according to a 2015 report ( SN Online: 8/3/15 ). Simulating how sea ice interacts with the ocean using the latest understanding of how sea ice and climate interact, scientists estimated that the North Pole will be ice-free around 2052 , nine years earlier than previous simulations suggested. Last year saw the fourth smallest footprint of summer sea ice in the Arctic on record. Ice-free Arctic summers would open the region to shipping and could affect climates elsewhere by redirecting the winds that circle the North Pole, the researchers wrote. The loss of reflective sea ice could also hasten warming as the dark ocean absorbs more sunlight. Newly open passages may also allow mingling of animals from formerly separated habitats ( SN: 1/23/16, p. 14 ).

OPEN WATER Rising temperatures in the Arctic have dwindled the extent of summer sea ice, like that seen at left, taken from the deck of a research ship in July 2011. Since 1979, the minimum summer sea ice extent has decreased more than 7.5 percent per decade. Source: NSDIC; Image: Kathryn Hansen/NASA

The top of the world could see its first iceless summer almost a decade sooner than thought a decade ago

Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf collapsed into hundreds of icebergs in 2002, speeding the melt of its tributary glaciers. Ted Scambos/National Snow and Ice Data Center

2006: Rising temperatures are warming the Antarctic and melting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

2016: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cross a point of no return.

In 2002, an ice behemoth crumbled. Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf, after 12,000 years of frozen stability, collapsed. The breakdown rapidly shattered 3,250 square kilometers of ice — an area about the size of Rhode Island ( SN: 10/18/14, p. 9 ).

“Larsen B was a real wake-up call,” says Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “It was like, ‘whoa, this ice shelf didn’t just slowly retreat on its edge — the whole thing just collapsed catastrophically over the course of two weeks.’ ”

FAREWELL, ICE As Antarctica’s ice melts, warm seawater will flow through low-lying channels currently filled with ice and accelerate further melting. An ice-free Antarctica (beige area) would leave less land above sea level (blue shows footprint of current continent). Mark Helper/Univ. of Texas at Austin

Now with 10 years of on-the-ice research, scientists warn that the rest of the West Antarctic ice could share a shockingly swift fate unimaginable a decade ago. The ice sheet’s collapse would raise global sea levels by about 3 meters ( SN: 6/14/14, p. 11 ).

Ice shelves line about 45 percent of the Antarctic coast and help slow the flow of the continent’s ice into the sea. For healthy ice shelves, the flow of ice from inland balances losses from melting and icebergs snapping off the shelf’s seaward edge. Rising temperatures below and above the ice can fracture and thin the ice, upsetting this balance.

The loss of just a few ice shelves in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could destabilize the whole region, according to new research by climate scientists Anders Levermann and Johannes Feldmann of the University of Potsdam in Germany. In a computer simulation, the researchers found that the loss of a few key ice shelves around Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea would trigger a domino effect. Seawater would flow into the flanks of other ice and expedite melting. Such a collapse would annihilate the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet within hundreds to thousands of years, they predict.

Once started, this chain reaction would be unstoppable , the researchers reported last November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Even if global temperatures return to normal, the ice sheet would still be doomed, according to the simulation. In 2014, researchers reported that one of those keystone ice shelves, the Thwaites Glacier, is on track to recede past an underwater ridge currently stalling its retreat and undergo catastrophic collapse in as few as two centuries.

Thousands of square kilometers of ice disintegrated from Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf in the Southern Hemisphere in summer 2002. In January, blue melt ponds crisscrossed the ice shelf’s surface. MODIS, NASA's Earth Observatory

By February 17, the leading edge of the shelf had retreated 10 kilometers and the ice began to splinter. MODIS, NASA's Earth Observatory

Several more massive icebergs fractured from the ice shelf by February 23. MODIS, NASA's Earth Observatory

A satellite image captured March 7 revealed a mixture of slush and icebergs. MODIS, NASA's Earth Observatory

Churned up ice from the shelf’s underside gave this debris a bright blue tinge. MODIS, NASA's Earth Observatory

As cold autumn temperatures arrived, white snow fell on the remnants of the ice shelf and, by April 13, fresh sea ice packed into the bay. MODIS, NASA's Earth Observatory

Exactly what magnitude of warming will push the West Antarctic Ice Sheet past the point of no return remains uncertain, says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State. “It’s hard to predict how the ice will fracture,” he says. “That’s why you don’t want to tiptoe up on the disaster point. The edge between ‘it’s still there’ and ‘it’s had a catastrophic failure’ is something to be completely avoided.”

The other half of the Antarctic continent has shown more resistance to climate change, and hasn’t kept up with the global warming trend of the last few decades. That’s good news, since the East Antarctic Ice Sheet holds more water than its sibling — enough to raise sea levels by about 60 meters if it fails.

Last year, however, researchers using radar to penetrate the Antarctic ice announced that East Antarctica’s largest glacier, Totten Glacier, is still vulnerable. It may be at risk from encroaching ice-melting seawater . Radar maps revealed two seafloor troughs that could allow warm ocean water to melt the glacier’s underside, the researchers reported in Nature Geoscience . The glacier alone holds enough water to raise global sea levels by at least 3.3 meters, though its collapse could take centuries, the researchers noted.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse would raise global sea levels by as much as 3 meters

Expanding seawater and melting ice threaten the very existence of many island nations, including the Maldives. As climate change continues, rising sea levels could reshape Earth’s coastlines. KlemenR/iStockphoto

2006: Melting ice and expanding seawater are raising global sea levels.

2016: Historical evidence suggests sea levels can rise more than 10 times as fast as they are now.

In the Indian Ocean, a city seems to rise out of the waves. The island of Malé, the capital of the Maldives and home to more than 150,000 people, sits just two or three meters above sea level ( SN: 2/28/09, p. 24 ). The residents of Malé are a small portion of the approximately 200 million people worldwide living along coastlines within five meters of sea level. By the end of the century, as sea levels reach inland and coastal communities grow, the population at risk of rising waters may balloon to as high as 500 million.

The global average sea level currently rises about three millimeters per year, with a meter of total sea level rise expected by 2100 if carbon emissions aren’t curtailed. Some areas, such as the U.S. East Coast, are experiencing even faster sea level rise. In February, researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that 20th century sea level rise was faster than any other century since Rome was founded ( SN: 4/2/16, p. 20 ).

RAISING THE STAKES Projections of future sea level rise vary, but scientists warn that even a small increase in sea level can worsen flooding and change coastlines. Sea level rise primarily stems from two sources: the thermal expansion of seawater and meltwater from land-based ice. Source: NOAA, Global Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States National Climate Assessment 2012

While sea levels are rising fast, they have the ability to climb even faster. Scientists are looking further into the future and investigating just how fast sea level rise could get, especially with a hypothetical collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets. Results gleaned from past warm periods suggest that sea levels can rise much faster than suggested just a few years ago — more than 10 times the present rate.

“Sea level is probably the biggest irreversible risk of global warming,” Columbia’s Raymo says. “I expect a hell of a lot more people are going to be personally impacted by a one-meter rise in sea level than by the extinction of the grand ladybug of something or other.”

Most records of ancient climates provide only a snapshot of how high sea levels have reached at a given time, not how quickly they moved up or down. But on a 2005 expedition to Tahiti, a research team caught a break. Because coral reefs require plenty of light to thrive, they typically take root in waters shallower than 10 meters deep. As sea levels rose in the past, corals moved higher up the newly submerged coastline. Off the coast of Tahiti, the researchers sampled fossils of ancient corals from the last 150,000 years buried in layers of ocean sediment. Dating the corals using the known decay rate of radioactive uranium into other elements, the researchers created an accurate, long-term sea level record.

Move slider at center to compare images

RISING TIDE A one-meter rise in sea levels would reshape many U.S. coastlines, including this section of North Carolina’s coast. Blue regions show areas submerged by water. Many scientists expect that sea levels will rise by a meter by 2100. Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts /NOAA

Around the end of Earth’s last glacial period, about 14,650 years ago, sea levels rose about 14 to 18 meters, the researchers reported in 2012 in Nature . What surprised those researchers is how quickly this rise happened: Sea levels rose at least 46 millimeters per year during that period. The scientists concluded that at least half of the 14 meters of sea level rise during this bout of warming originated from melting Antarctic ice.

“The scary thing, and this is why it’s kind of apocalyptic, is that once you start these things, they don’t stop,” Raymo says. “Everything we see shows that, if you look in the past, each increment of warmth seems to correlate with increasingly higher sea level.”

Approximate number of people worldwide living along coastlines within five meters of sea level.

Scorching temperatures killed hundreds of people last year in Pakistan. Continued global warming will increase the risk of heat-related deaths, researchers warn. Shakil Adil/AP Photo

2006: Warming temperatures will cause more frequent and more deadly heat waves.

2016: Humidity may make future heat waves deadlier; cold snaps are on the decline.

Last summer, sweltering heat waves scorched India and Pakistan. The extreme temperatures killed thousands of people and were two of the deadliest heat waves since 1900. Such lethal heat will become more common as the planet continues warming, climate scientist Ethan Coffel of Columbia University said last December at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.

LESS EXTREME COLD Since the early 1900s in the United States, climate change has increased the frequency of abnormally hot summer days. But an expected rise in cold snaps has not played out. Areas hit by unusually cold temperatures in winter are declining. Source: NOAA 2015

The problem, Coffel said, is that climate change will raise humidity in many places alongside temperature as hot air wicks up more moisture. The evaporation of sweat keeps people cool when it’s hot, but high humidity can slow or even shut off this skin-cooling evaporation. Rising humidity will make rising temperatures more deadly than previously feared , he said. By the 2060s, Coffel predicts, 250 million people worldwide could face deadly levels of heat and humidity at least once a year.

While heat waves worsen, researchers say that another killer weather phenomenon will become less common . The frequency of abnormally cold periods in North America will decrease by roughly 20 percent by the 2030s , researchers reported last year ( SN Online: 4/2/15 ). The work overturned previous projections of a rise in cold snaps over the coming decades as climate change redirects frigid Arctic winds. From 2006 through 2010, about twice as many people in the United States died from cold-related causes, such as hypothermia, than from excessive heat.

By the 2060s, Coffel predicts that 250 million people worldwide could face deadly levels of heat and humidity at least once a year.

China’s cities (Beijing’s Tiananmen Square shown) have suffered worsening air quality. Health risks posed by that pollution have motivated the country’s government to invest in low-emission alternatives to fossil fuels such as wind, solar and nuclear power. Spondylolithesis/iStockphoto

2006: The long-term effects of climate change deserve immediate action.

2016: Taking action comes with other, more immediate perks.

After decades of troubled negotiations and false starts, 195 nations from around the world gathered last December in Paris and agreed to take action on climate change ( SN: 1/9/16, p. 6 ). The new commitment, to reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. Delegates will meet in a few years to decide whether to target a more ambitious limit of 1.5 degrees.

What’s changed is motivation, says Andrew Jones, a system dynamics modeler at Climate Interactive, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that works in partnership with MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Rather than focus on global climate benefits of curtailing fossil fuel emissions, which will take years to pan out, climate action is now increasingly driven by more immediate benefits, he says, such as improving public health. In February, researchers estimated that ambitious climate action in the United States would improve air quality enough to prevent 295,000 premature deaths by 2030 and save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs.

Nearly 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth , 195 nations agreed to try to curb climate change. While Al Gore argued in the film that swift action was needed to prevent long-term problems, politicians are now increasingly motivated by immediate benefits. Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images

“Waiting for climate results is delayed gratification — it’s difficult to motivate continued action,” Jones says. “But if you reduce burning coal, air quality improves almost immediately.”

China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, backed the new climate deal after years of dragging its feet. The change of heart was chiefly driven by a desire to cut air pollution, not combat climate change, says MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel. Earlier in December, smog-filled Beijing issued the country’s first pollution red alert and shut down the city until conditions improved.

Scouring recent climate change pledges, Jones and colleagues found that 60 percent of commitments, including those made by the United States, Mexico and South Korea, were explicitly motivated by short-term public health and economic benefits. Jones helps maintain C-ROADS, a climate simulator that forecasts the long-term outcome of climate action plans. Understanding and embracing the benefits of climate action will be essential to paving a path forward, Jones says, because C-ROADS has demonstrated that there are “hundreds” of ways to meet the 2-degree warming goal.

“We’ve moved from whether we’re going to do this to how we’re going to do this,” he says. “And that is very encouraging.”

Meeting the challenges posed by climate change will be hard, but Lonnie Thompson remains optimistic. “Three-and-a-half years ago I had a heart transplant,” he says. “At any other time in human history, this would have been thought of as impossible — my father died at age 41 of a heart attack. As human beings we’ve made tremendous progress on so many fronts. There will always be this resistance to change, but as a species, we’re capable of dealing with those changes.”

“Waiting for climate results is delayed gratification.... But if you reduce burning coal, air quality improves almost immediately.” Andrew Jones

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Al gore sounds global warming alert.

Al Gore's standard lecture on climate change is the starting point for the new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth . Eric Lee/Paramount Classics hide caption

Al Gore's standard lecture on climate change is the starting point for the new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth .

For 30 years, Al Gore has been a student of the climate crisis and an advocate for change in environmental policies. He brings his message to the big screen in a new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth .

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Related npr stories, environment, al gore interview on 'fresh air', assessing the art, science of 'inconvenient truth', global warming: an uncontrolled experiment.

The film grew from a slideshow presentation about the problem of global warming that the former vice president has given over the years.

Gore also defends the movie's underlying science and says An Inconvenient Truth gives him a stronger platform on the issue of global warming than did his position as vice president or his presidential candidacy.

Gore and film producer Laurie David talk to Robert Siegel about the importance of An Inconvenient Truth as a counterbalance to the misinformation about global warming that they say is prevalent today.

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An Inconvenient Truth , American documentary film , released in 2006, featuring the multimedia presentation of former U.S. vice president Al Gore that formed the basis for his traveling lecture tour on the emerging human challenge of global warming and climate change .

From the stage of a small theatre in Los Angeles , Calif., Gore juxtaposes the science behind global warming with elements from his own personal and political life, mixing seriousness with humour to convey his message. His presentation uses a collection of graphs, photographs, and other imagery to describe the greenhouse effect , changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations throughout history, human energy use and population growth, and how all these forces contribute to global warming. In the second half of the film, Gore describes some of the projected effects of global warming, citing some of the early signs of changing conditions in the Arctic and Antarctic. The film concludes with Gore addressing common misconceptions surrounding global warming and challenging viewers to bring about needed changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The credits provide viewers with suggestions on how they can combat global warming in their own communities .

Gore’s descriptions of climatic processes and warming extrapolations have been criticized, particularly by skeptics of global warming. Many climate scientists agree that some of the statements made in the film exaggerate projections or gloss over the nuances associated with the science of climate change. However, they maintain that the science depicted in the film is largely accurate. An Inconvenient Truth won Academy Awards in 2006 for best feature-length documentary feature and best song. Since its release the film has been made part of the curricula of many schools around the world, but some local school districts voiced their disapproval of its use without the presentation of opposing views.

• Studios: Lawrence Bender Productions and Participant Media
• Director: Davis Guggenheim
• Producers: Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, and Scott Burns
• Writer: Al Gore
• Music: Michael Brook and Melissa Etheridge
• Running time: 100 minutes
• Documentary feature*
• Song* (“I Need to Wake Up”)

“ The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission. ”

Climate Leadership

For more than 40 years, former Vice President Al Gore has been at the forefront of the movement to solve the global climate crisis.

A longtime public servant, Vice President Gore prioritized the climate crisis and its solutions throughout his career as a Congressman, Senator, and as Vice President. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Gore organized the first hearing on man-made global warming in 1981. In the Senate, Gore held numerous hearings on the climate crisis and hosted an international conference to discuss his proposal for a Global Marshall Plan to focus on “a unified global response to the worldwide environmental crisis.” As Vice President, Gore continued his focus on solving the Climate Crisis, encouraged the development of low-carbon technologies through the Climate Change Technology Initiative and the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles to replace the internal combustion engine. In an effort to improve environmental education globally and encourage action, Vice President Gore established the GLOBE program, which continues to promote environmental awareness among children in tens of thousands of schools around the world. In 1998, Vice President Gore challenged NASA to build a satellite that could survey our planet from the LaGrangian 1 point and help humanity understand the climate crisis from a new perspective. Following a lengthy delay imposed in early 2001 by the incoming Bush-Cheney Administration, DSCOVR was successfully launched on February 11, 2015. Since leaving office, Vice President Gore has continued and intensified his efforts to urge action on climate.

On the international stage, Vice President Gore has played a crucial role in promoting global action on the climate crisis. In 1992, Vice President Gore led the U.S. Senate delegation to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—otherwise known as the Rio “Earth Summit”—that established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As Vice President, Gore helped to broker the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first major international agreement on the climate crisis. He has addressed numerous international summits including the Bali Climate Change Conference ( COP 13) in 2007, the United Nations Climate Summit in September 2014, the Lima Climate Change Conference ( COP 20) in December 2014 and the Paris Climate Change Conference (COP21) in 2015, the Glasgow Climate Change Conference (COP26), and the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference (COP27). To draw additional awareness to the climate crisis on the world stage, in 2007, Vice President Gore co-founded Live Earth, a groundbreaking series of concerts that brought together 150 world-famous acts on 7 continents. In total, the event reached over 2 billion people across 30 countries. In 2007, Vice President Gore was the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for, “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Today, Vice President Gore continues his work to help lead the global movement to solve the climate crisis. As chairman of the Climate Reality Project—the organization he founded in 2005—Vice President Gore has trained tens of thousands of committed activists to discuss the reality of the climate crisis and its solutions. As co-founder of Climate TRACE , Vice President Gore is working with scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, and industry analysts to create the first and only robust, independent inventory of global greenhouse gas emissions in every nation of the world, and their specific point sources, in order to better enable climate action.

A bestselling author, Vice President Gore has published five books on the climate crisis and its solutions, Earth in the Balance , An Inconvenient Truth , The Assault on Reason , Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis and The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

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Al Gore blasts COP28 climate chief and oil companies’ emissions pledges

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Don’t trust the oil and gas industry to report their actual carbon pollution, said former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who added that the man leading the United Nations climate talks runs one of the “dirtiest” oil companies out there.

“They’re much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions,” Gore told The Associated Press in a sit-down interview.

The Nobel Prize-winning climate activist, author and filmmaker blasted Sultan al-Jaber, the president of the United Nations climate talks, who is also president of the national oil company of the host nation, United Arab Emirates. Gore said al-Jaber’s Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. is “one of the largest and one of the dirtiest, by many measures, oil companies in the world.”

Gore can make these claims because he just released a massive update of the Climate TRACE  database of emissions  that he helped create. It tracks carbon pollution from every nation and city across the globe with 352 million pieces of information.

Looking at the data released Sunday, Gore said, “the No. 1 surprise was how far off the reporting from the oil and gas industry is. And we see it here in the United Arab Emirates, you know, nice folks. But the numbers they put out are just not right. And we can prove they’re not right.”

READ MORE: At COP28, nations finalize creation of fund to compensate developing nations hit by climate change disasters

In a one-hour data-heavy presentation at the U.N. conference, Gore said: “The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company still claims to have no emissions from methane or anything else from the transport of oil and gas. Well, actually, they do. We can see them from space.”

“Why can we see the leakage from space if there are no leakages? Well, these were self-reported emissions,” Gore said. Then showing his data: “And this is the actual emissions. And these are the emissions last year here.”

In his interview, Gore repeatedly took aim at al-Jaber being picked by the UAE to chair the climate conference. As summit host, the local government chooses the president of the talks.

“He’s a nice guy. He’s a smart guy. I’ve known him for years. But he has a direct conflict of interest,” Gore said. “And this isn’t some kind of nitpicking complaint. This goes to the heart of whether or not the world is going to have the ability to make intelligent decisions about humanity’s future.”

Gore said “his main job is the head of the oil company. And honestly, when I look at the massive expansion plan that they have to increase their production of oil, 50 percent, increase their production of gas” when the climate conference ends, he asked, “do you take us for his fools?”

In a rare, combative and brief press conference Monday, al-Jaber defended his record and the idea of bringing oil companies into the efforts to curb climate change.

“They’ve stepped up,” al-Jaber said of oil industry colleagues. “Is it enough? No.”

In previous comments, al-Jaber’s colleagues have dismissed media coverage detailing ADNOC’s expansion plans. The company in  2019 announced plans  to expand to 5 million barrels per day.

Al-Jaber made a splash in the beginning of the summit with an announcement that 50 oil companies had pledged to capture leaking and flaring methane emissions from gas production and pipelines. But the problem is that it’s voluntary, and when industry in general is asked to report its own emissions they underestimate it by about a third, and most of the worst methane emitters weren’t part of the deal, Gore said.

“I want to recall for you that two years ago there was the global methane pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Well, what’s happened? Well, since that pledge was made. Methane emissions have increased almost 2 percent,” Gore said in his public presentation.

READ MORE: How climate negotiators turn national self-interest into global collective action

“The final problem I have with (the pledge) is that the main issue is phasing out oil and gas production,” Gore said in the interview. “And they don’t do that. And whenever I see a bright, shiny object held up in front of the public and they say ‘look at this, don’t look at the actual emissions from oil and gas, look at the bright, shiny object’ then I think, you know, come on, we’ve been down this road before and it’s way too late to take us for fools.”

“Let’s get on with it. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, and we can solve the climate crisis, stop the temperatures going up, start the healing process by phasing out oil and gas,” Gore said. “And I know they don’t want to do it. And I know that it’s really tough. I mean, look, 80 percent of the energy we use in our global economy is from fossil fuels.”

The former vice president said he hopes he’s wrong about al-Jaber and that maybe he can deliver more than others have in the past. But he’s not betting on it.

And because world leaders can’t even agree where next year’s climate talks will be or who will run them, Gore said he has great hope for 2025. That’s because it will be in Brazil and run by leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who Gore said “is raring to go.”

Gore, who says that he is generally is an optimist, said between climate disasters and public pressure, the world is near a “political tipping point.” Climate scientists often use the term “tipping point” for when ecological systems like Arctic sea ice or coral reefs hit a point-of-no-return change.

Gore sees a political version of that approaching.

“We don’t have time to be depressed about it,” Gore said. “You just got to keep fighting. We’ll get there. The question is whether we get there in time, but I think we’ll get there.”

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The ‘most famous slideshow in the world’ — Al Gore presents his dramatic PowerPoint on climate change in Pittsburgh

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It took more than 90 minutes and several hundred slides, but Al Gore finally arrived at the part of the “most famous slideshow in the world,” as it was introduced, where he built a crescendo of hope for the roughly 1,400 people at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh Tuesday.

The audience came from all over the world not only to hear the former vice president speak but to also spend three days at the 36 th training led by the Climate Reality Project, the largest in its history. The group was founded by Gore after the surprising popularity of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary film based on his slideshow. The purpose of the Climate Reality Project’s annual training is to equip “climate reality leaders” to inform their communities about the climate crisis and organize action.

Gore forewarned the audience that they needed to remain hopeful — and then he clicked rapid-fire through images of disaster after disease after drought, each of which he said can be either directly or indirectly attributed to a warming climate. 

After 90 minutes of convincing the audience they had to act, he turned his attention to a question: Could they do anything to reverse course?

Environmental hope in Pittsburgh

The foundation for the hopeful ending to Gore’s story was laid a couple hours earlier by a short speech from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, who harkened back to Pittsburgh’s glory days: Pittsburgh steel built America, its skyscrapers and bridges, Peduto said. “We also created air dangerous to breathe, water poisonous to drink.”

“Then Pittsburgh died,” Peduto said. “We died. Our economic heart was ripped out of us.” The unemployment rate was greater than 20 percent, but “out of the ashes,”  he said, Pittsburgh built a prosperous, greener city.

“Whenever somebody says it can’t be done, it doesn’t work or it’s not a real approach, tell them to look at Pittsburgh,” Peduto said. “…with the worst air and water quality in the country. Let them see it can happen, so they know they can be a part of it.”

Earlier this month, Pittsburgh revealed a new city climate action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

Picking up where Peduto left off, the last 30 minutes of Gore’s speech was devoted to the exponential rise of the solar and wind energy, which Gore said has taken off much faster than anyone had predicted just 15 years ago.

The frequency of applause in the audience grew, as Gore introduced each new sign of environmental hope. The city of Beijing committed to electric taxis, and India committed to sell only electric cars by 2030. France, he said, would outlaw any gas or oil exploration on French soil. And Gore said he just heard about Tesla’s plans to build the biggest building in the world that would manufacture half the world’s batteries, which would power all those electric vehicles.

Fred Brown, the president and CEO of the Homewood Children’s Village, said he hadn’t seen Gore speak about climate change for more than a decade. He still remembers a video from then of people whose island homes had been submerged underwater.

But this time, he said, the crisis seemed more urgent. “The speed and velocity of change is much faster…” Brown said, “and despite that, there’s hope on the horizon that if we double down and get serious about being radical about change, then we can at least stop the bleeding.”

Brown thinks that Homewood could, with reinvestment, serve as a beacon of what’s possible. If the city decided to reinvest in the declining community of Homewood, he said, it could also choose “not to rebuild it traditionally.”

“We have to be intentional about including the most vulnerable people,” Brown said. “Pittsburgh struggles with that. They don’t struggle with the innovation; they struggle with the inclusion.”

People from all over

Maria Kendig runs a beer and wine distributor with her husband in Saline, Michigan. A few months ago, she watched Gore’s 2017 documentary, “An Inconvenient Sequel,” in which she learned about Gore’s climate organization.

Kendig called the youngest of her three sons because of his interest in green issues. She said she wanted him to know that their family would put their wallet and time behind what they said they believed in — so they applied for the Pittsburgh conference together and traveled more than 200 miles to attend.  

They had been grouped together by where they lived. Kendig and her husband, Eric, sat with others from Michigan: a professor of geriatric medicine who was worried about the elderly dying in the floods in the South; a community college student working  in community gardens; a realtor who wanted to learn to discuss climate change using facts and not emotions; a Michigan State student who introduced himself by saying his generation will be the first to see the worst impacts of climate change.

When they return home, Howard Mock, one of 75 “mentors” who had already been trained and who sat with the Michigan group, will be charged with keeping in touch with each of them to help and encourage them to take action.

They will join more than 12,000 others who have already been trained by the Climate Reality Project in 36 countries across the world. The group hopes that they would take Gore’s PowerPoint presentation and tailor the slides to their own communities.

It’s important to note that multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that at least 97 percent of climate scientists agree climate change is real and that climate-warming trends over the past century have been caused mainly by human activities.

Denise Kearns, a communications professional at the table from Ann Arbor, said her brother gave her a strange look when she told him she was attending a climate change training.

“He’s 40. He’s not the most progressive person, I get it,” she said. “People do feel helpless. What can they do, you know?”

What’s new?

Gore’s 2017 presentation started with the same two pictures of the Earth from outer space that started “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. But if part of the impact of his original movie was how surprising his images were, his latest presentation was also a symptom of a time in which we are inundated with images of natural disaster.

Gore included the now-famous photos of nursing home victims trapped by the floods of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, and a well-known picture from earlier this year of a Washington man continuing his golf game, ignoring the forest fire in the background.

His presentation now also makes ample use of video to dramatize the massive events in human terms. He showed footage of a woman and her dog rescued from a car during the Houston floods; a man in Oklahoma jumping out of his tractor before it was engulfed in flames; and a burning house floating down a West Virginia river.

All of this is climate change, he said, even if it’s not always a straightforward one-to-one cause. Climate change has changed the underlying weather in which storms are formed, so they all are in some sense caused by climate change, he said.

Gore still peppered his presentation with data and graphs: Not only is air pollution killing thousands every year, but those deaths led to a 2.4 percent drop in GDP [gross domestic product]. Gore became unexpectedly excited mid-sentence about “ Batteries! What an industry of the future!” as if, in the flood of information he was cycling through, he remembered brief nuggets of the excitement he had upon first learning it all.

In fact, some of the presentation he had just learned. A couple slides, about global weather patterns, were dated October 17, 2017, which he said he had added earlier in the morning. He added slides about Pittsburgh’s increasingly hot summers and how there are now twice as many clean energy jobs as fossil fuel jobs in Pennsylvania. He also cited Pittsburgh and Allegheny County’s persistent F grades for air pollution.

Gore included what he said were about 500 slides in this “ long version.” But the audience would have to wait until the next day to get the 10-minute condensed version of his talk, he said.

The secret battle

At the margins of the talk, Gore and several of the introductory speakers, emphasized that, in addition to fighting a war against climate emissions, there was another parallel war on truth.

“We are in a very difficult time with President Trump,” said Ken Berlin, the president/CEO of the Climate Reality Project. “He’s doing very difficult things with climate change.”

“We seem to inhabit a world where opinion, often misplaced and broadcast through social media, is mistaken as fact,” said Andre Heinz, the chairman of the board for The Heinz Endowments.

Gore said the issue wasn’t “political let alone partisan,” but then quoted a World War II scholar who said power had supplanted truth in Nazi Germany. “I’ve been reminded of that recently all too frequently. But we are not going to get into that,” Gore said to laughter. “ We may step into that a little bit, I can’t help it.”

With his presentation Gore had answered the question about whether change was necessary and whether it was possible, he said. And now the final question, he posed, is, “Will we? I’m sure we will. But the question is: Will we do it quickly enough?”

“After the final no, there comes a yes,” Gore quoted Wallace Stevens, “and on that yes the future world depends.”

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s environment and health reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ORMorrison .

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Oliver morrison.

Oliver Morrison is a general assignment reporter at WESA. He previously covered education, environment and health for PublicSource in Pittsburgh and, before that, breaking news and weekend features for... More by Oliver Morrison

We have had more than 50 years of scientific data, economic arguments, books, petitions, documentaries, global resolutions.

We know our planet’s ecosystem is breaking down…much of the destruction is irreparable. So, why haven’t things changed faster?

My name’s Ali Rae and I’m a journalist with Al Jazeera. While there is a lot of good journalism out there telling you how dire things are for the planet, I'm looking at the climate breakdown from a different perspective. I want to understand how power, money, sheer destructiveness and deception have shaped our response to the crisis we’re in.

This series is the result of dozens of interviews with climatologists, activists and specialists around the world.  At the centre of our conversations has been the principle of climate justice, because all too often it’s not prioritised in these kinds of discussions…and it should be.

I’ve learnt a lot - and the result is a series we’re calling All Hail The Planet.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to be releasing new episodes and visualising some of the key social, economic and political forces undermining meaningful global action on climate change.

Jump to a chapter:

With every report that comes out on the state of the climate, there's a slew of emission stats: industries spewing more, countries committing to emit less.

Understanding emissions can help us work out what needs to change but there's a big hole in the information we have - military emissions.

These are often poorly tracked and even more poorly reported. And what's worse, they're often a country's most significant emitters.​

There’s one military in particular - the biggest, in fact, with an $816bn budget in 2023 - that leads the pack on emissions: the United States Armed Forces.

“The US military is the single largest carbon emitter looking at it as an institution.” by  Neta Crawford, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War project

But, of course, the military’s impact on the environment does not stop with emissions. Military forces and wars have left a devastating environmental legacy around the world on people and the planet.

Over the past two decades, Western governments from Washington to Canberra have used the lens of national security to view and frame the climate crisis.

The assumption underlying this framing is simple and seems obvious: Climate change will lead to increased instability, conflicts and migration that require military readiness.

“They broadened the agenda to say, well, the environment is also part of security. And that led to an assumption from the perspective of America, the West, Global North that climate change in the rest of the world will impact resources, creating scarcity, and will be a source of conflict and unrest for the Western countries,” said Marwa Daoudy, professor of political science and Middle East politics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Some of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are also spending much more on arming security forces at their borders than on climate finance.

For instance, in 2016 US law enforcement agents used tear gas and water cannons - despite below freezing temperatures - on unarmed demonstrators protesting the construction of the Keystone Oil Pipeline on Native American land at Standing Rock in North Dakota.

The power of the military-security framing is so great that those who question it can find themselves targeted with state and paramilitary violence.

Governments around the world have also been proposing and even passing laws that enable them to crack down on activists branded as "eco-terrorists".

The military-industrial complex has a firm grip on its messaging, throwing around words like "threat multipliers" and "national security imperatives". These terms should be taken seriously but not without a good dose of scepticism.

There are vested interests in the mix, and there is a lot of obfuscation about the climate damage inflicted by security forces.

Watch the full episode below:

Why are labels like "carbon neutral" and "net zero" so misleading?

Carbon offsetting is a carbon trading mechanism that enables entities such as governments or businesses to compensate for (i.e. "offset") their greenhouse gas emissions by investing in projects that either reduce, avoid, or remove emissions elsewhere.

Offsetting involves purchasing carbon credits. Typically, one credit permits the emission of one tonne of "carbon dioxide equivalent".

The reason climate scientists and activists seriously question carbon offsetting, "net zero" or "carbon neutral" programmes is because they just do not do what they claim. They can’t. Not when the fundamental premise on which these programmes are based is so deeply flawed.

“There is no such thing as offsetting pollution by planting a tree. Even the scientists agree with this. But the market system doesn’t differentiate that. They package it up together. So we're being scammed,” said Tom Goldtooth, leader of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

“It’s like a stock market. You buy a stock from a company, and then you can resell it to somebody else, ... so the market can become a monster itself because the final goal of the market is to make profit, not really to mitigate climate change.” by  Britaldo Silveira Soares Filho, scientist and cartographer

Despite decades of international agreements and programmes aimed at curbing emissions through mechanisms like carbon trading, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise.

“After 25-plus years of fighting the carbon markets, I think we can reasonably claim that carbon trading offsets, carbon pricing and all of the iterations of REDD [reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation - a UN based programme], "nature-based solutions", "net zero emissions targets" - it's all the same thing. It is the biggest distraction and scam on Mother Earth, on the planet,” Goldtooth said.

Without reducing the structural demand for fossil fuels, we are not just doing nothing - we’re making things worse.

“Instead of talking about fossil fuels, we are talking about CO2 molecules. And while doing so, it actually conceals all the violence and the abuse of power that the fossil fuel industry is built upon.” by  Joanna Cabello, environmental justice researcher

Can technology "solve" climate change?

The concept of techno-optimism was created by Marc Andreessen - an American billionaire who made his fortune by co-founding the web browser ‘Netscape Navigator’ in the 1990s.

Andreessen, defining his own concept, wrote, “We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology."

Techno-optimism is espoused by many other billionaires like Andreessen, many of them are tech billionaires themselves. While a lot of money is made available for many different causes, billionaire climate philanthropy is controversial for a number of reasons.

Not only is the world’s richest one percent responsible for double the emissions of the poorest 50 percent of society, but some of the biggest inconsistencies are in the businesses that billionaires are involved with - as owners or consultants.

Take this for instance: In 2020 when Jeff Bezos, then the CEO of Amazon, announced the $10bn Bezos Earth Fund, his company emitted more than 60 million tonnes of carbon emissions, 15 percent more than in 2019.

Then there’s the technological spectacles driven by billionaires that suck up media attention to the detriment of so much else. An analysis by US-based Media Matters found that Jeff Bezos’ space flight in 2021 got as much morning show coverage in the United States in one day, as the climate crisis in all of 2020.

In all of the media blitz, one key point hardly got discussed: the reality that innovation, which has its value, cannot be a substitute for the fundamental change humanity needs to make by cutting consumption and slashing dependence on fossil fuels.

One tech solution being bankrolled by billionaires is carbon capture and storage (CCS).

However, like so much of the climate tech solutionism that gets bandied about, CCS has been promoted with outsized promises of being transformative but has delivered barely a fraction of its purported benefits.

“I think this technical optimism is less about technology and more about how can we avoid making the profound changes that are necessary to the lifestyles of those of us who are responsible for the lion's share of the problems that we face,” said Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change.

All these complex and expensive technologies are framed as being essential to avoid making the climate catastrophe worse. This is despite the fact that in 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet - in fact, the cheapest way there’s ever been.

There are realistic ways to approach technology. A lot has changed for the better and that would be one of the strongest reasons for some level of techno-optimism.

“There's a real reason for a certain kind of technological optimism. I mean, scientists and engineers have dropped the price of solar panels and wind turbines 90% in the last decade, and now the batteries to store that energy are going in the same curve.” by  Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org

The fundamental change the planet needs is a brake on fossil fuel extraction and use. And until that happens, no amount of carbon capture, solar geoengineering or whatever else is going to amount to the change we need at the speed we need it.

From fast fashion to flights, smartphones to skincare, our consumer-based societies today are gobbling up the planet’s resources at a rate that’s 1.75 times faster than it can regenerate.

How do we know?

Well, there’s an international NGO called the Global Footprint Network, which for many years has been tracking something called Earth Overshoot Day. It’s the date on the calendar every year when, according to the available data, more of the Earth’s ecological resources have been used than can naturally be replenished in 12 months.

There are variations, though, depending on where you live.

But are individual consumers really the main problem?

“There are people who think it's all just about consumers and if consumers could just change we could stop the climate crisis - and I think that's not the right way to look at it. It's much more that production drives the system. And although consumers are a key part of it and they have to play their part to keep the system going, the sort of power in the system is located much more on the production side,” said Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College.

If you have money, then being a consumer has never been easier. Products are cheaper than ever - even the ones that have to travel across the world to get to us. However, the more we're able to buy, the less we know about how our stuff gets made - what goes into it, what it demands of those who make it and what impact this manufacturing has.

“For goods to be consumed by average people in the Global North, the goods in the Global South have to be produced with lower and lower costs, ... and that means that the prosperity in the Global North is somehow dependent on maintaining workers in the Global South in the permanent state of deprivation.” by  Ndongo Samba Sylla, development economist

There's a question that becomes quite hard to avoid when you talk about the incredibly high cost the planet is paying for human consumption: How do we keep economies growing without people buying?

There is a theory that says we're looking at this the wrong way. It's called "de-growth".

"Until we are able to break free from these growth imperatives, then we're going to be in a situation where we watch continued failure over the coming decades, even as climate breakdown worsens before our very eyes,”  said Jason Hickle, economic anthropologist and author of the book Less is More.

Plastics are the lifeblood of a modern culture of speed, convenience and disposability, but we rarely stop to ask where does it all come from.

What a lot of people don't realise is that 98 percent of the inputs of plastics are fossil fuels - mostly oil or fracked natural gas. Extracting these fossil fuels is just the start of a long chain of toxic processes involved in the life cycle of plastics.

In the United States, a stretch along the Mississippi River has gained a notorious nickname that is as frightening as it is controversial - "Cancer Alley".

For decades, oil, gas, chemical and plastics plants have filled this 140km (85-mile) corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. There are roughly 200 chemical plants and oil refineries here - and living among them are communities - mostly poor, largely Black - who are experiencing high rates of sickness like respiratory diseases and cancer.

Plastics production has increased almost continuously since 1950 from 1.8 million tonnes globally to 465 million tonnes in 2018. If current production trends continue, by 2050, annual plastics production will be 26 billion tonnes. That’s four times more than the world has produced to date.

While recycling our waste has become a habit for many of us, even that’s something the plastics industry came up with.

“It's not actually technically possible to recycle plastic in perpetuity because every time that you heat plastic, the chemical chains degrade. They break down, so it becomes a lower and lower quality plastic,” said Annie Leonard, co-executive director of Greenpeace USA.

Alongside the recycling system came the iconic ‘chasing arrows’ triangle. It was meant to indicate recyclability, but the complex process of resin identification was established alongside it. ​

The problem is, the presence of a code on a plastic product doesn’t actually mean it is recyclable. It is generally only those products labelled 1 or 2 that can actually be recycled.​

“It doesn't mean that when we understand the type of resin, it helps the recycling rate because every product has only one sign. But actually, it's a mix of everything. You can't mix one type of plastics with another type of plastics because the chemicals are different. And when you mix it, it will create a cocktail of toxics,” said Yuyun Ismawati, an environmental engineer.

For too long, the industries that are intertwined and invested in plastics have been obstructing the world's efforts to tackle plastics pollution.

The reality is that throwing things away more smartly or efficiently is nowhere close to a solution. Fundamentally, the world needs to radically reduce the production of plastics.

The steady flow of humanity from rural to urban centres has given us the phenomenon of the megacity, a city with a population of 10 million people or more.

In 1950, only New York and Tokyo qualified for the title. By 1980, they were joined by Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Osaka.

In 2010, their number grew to more than 20 megacities, which were dotted across almost every continent.

Today, there are 33 megacities, and by 2030, it is predicted 9 percent of the global population will live in one of 43 megacities.

The push for decarbonisation and green spaces in cities is growing, creating a widely shared template of what "green cities" should look like - shiny residential towers, waterfront parks and primarily wealthy residents.

But the "parks, cafes and a riverwalk" model of sustainability has been critiqued for "green gentrification", a process whereby new green spaces are provided to attract wealthier residents.

​"It's a push towards capturing the 'nouveau riche' emerging middle class, as they say in Africa, ... who are able to access assets, have spending power and aspire to global indicators of status," said Taibat Lawanson, professor of urban planning at the University of Lagos. ​​

Over the past decade, multiple African countries have tried to untangle some of the knots of how their big cities have developed by proposing urban utopias, often called "smart cities" or "tech cities".

However, when you investigate beyond the snappily written marketing spiel, there is often a gap between ambitions for ecofriendly cities and the complications of building ideal urban spaces within existing structures and systems.

It isn't enough for our "green cities" to simply be low carbon or sustainable.

Climate justice, which makes equity and fairness equally as important as low emissions and low waste, needs to be central to modern urban planning as well.

Presenter/senior producer: Ali Rae Animator: Pomona Pictures (Pierangelo Pirak) Camera/editing: Ali Rae Camera/production assistance: Ben Walker Commissioned by: Salah A A Khadr Executive producer: Meenakshi Ravi Landing page developed by @AJLabs

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This is the moment to take on the climate crisis

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