One cannot help but conjure images of the (now somewhat) infamous South Park episode in which a caped-Al Gore battles the mythical “man-bear-big” (an allegory for climate change). He is a lone warrior out there in the trenches saving the world, yet no one seems to care or take him seriously.
So often does life imitate art that former Vice President Al Gore is now grooming armies of “mini-Gores” to carry the torch and fight climate change with the one fail-proof weapon they’ve got: a slideshow.
Legions of true believers come from near and far to attend the “Climate Reality trainings” and hear Gore lecture on our impending doom in his trademark monotone. Politico provides details:
In a Miami conference center the size of a football field, 1,200 climate activists are getting ready to watch a slide show. “Wow,” says Mario Molina, the director of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, by way of introduction. “This is a big room.” The activists have come to this room from all over the nation and all over the world—Bangladesh, Mexico, Nigeria, 80 countries in all—so that they can learn to present the same slide show back in their own communities. And when Al Gore walks on stage to teach them how to do it, they leap to their feet and cheer.
[…] Yes, it’s that slide show, the one that thrust climate change into popular culture, generating the 2007 Academy Award and Nobel Prize in the process. Gore is still doing it, and training a global cadre of mini-Gores to do it as well; there have been 30 Climate Reality trainings, from South Africa to Australia to India […] The big difference in the updated version of the slide show is that a decade ago, Gore mostly warned about what could happen. Now he shows what’s already happening.
Some of the content of Gore’s slideshow is, as Politico puts it, "visually scary," offering mostly "apocalyptic extreme-weather" images of torrential downpours, mudslides, floods, wildfires, search and rescue missions, body bags and charts illustrating how “extremely hot days” have become the norm, rather than the exception.
In classic Gore-fashion, the former presidential candidate even blames drought for the refugee crisis in Syria and attributes general climate-change woes to catalyzing the Arab Spring.
“I’ve got thousands of these slides, from all over the world,” Gore proclaimed to the transfixed audience.
“It’s like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.”
But all is not lost. The inventor of the Internet deviates from his gloom-and-doom persona to offer the audience words of hope. After all, solar and wind installations are skyrocketing.
“You know when you’re at a football game and the momentum shifts, and you can just feel it in the stadium?” the Inconvenient Truth director asked one audience rhetorically. “Well, the momentum is shifting! We’re winning! We’ve got to win faster, but we’re winning!”
Gore insists that despite his generally dour demeanor he is indeed every bit the optimist.
"Anyone who works on the climate issue has an internal dialogue, the struggle between hope and despair," he told Politico. "All my colleagues struggle with that. But I’ve always come down on the side of hope."
Gore truly believes the world has reached a tipping point in its transition away from fossil fuels, a transition he describes as the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. He says that carbon-polluting industries can delay that transition, but they can’t stop it any more than King Canute could stop the tides. Meanwhile, though, he’s still leading his audiences on that nature hike through Revelations, a tour he still completes with the blue marble portrait of the earth from space.
Gore also offered words of caution, warning: "Don’t let anyone tell you we can escape to Mars."
"The earth is the only planet habitable for human beings. We’re going to have to make our stand right here."
Lucky for us we've got someone to lead us in that fight.
