Gene Lyons on Al Gore

[mooseandsquirrel]

Friends who knew Al Gore in college still talk about their surprise that he ever went into politics. The son of a U. S. senator, he seemed to know too much about the personal costs of public life to find it appealing, particularly the loss of privacy, the playacting and the constant pandering to uninformed opinion. Intellectually curious, irreverent and funny, Gore struck them as more likely to follow a career in which speaking one’s mind brought rewards, not penalties. Somebody less like the losing party in Bush vs. Gore, the most absurd Supreme Court decision in U. S. history, and more like the rueful protagonist of the documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” who introduces himself to audiences around the world by saying, “I’m Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States.” It always gets a laugh. Which isn’t to say that “An Inconvenient Truth” lacks a political edge. Nobody who followed the Washington press corps ’ “War on Gore” during the 2000 campaign could fail to notice that the film opens and closes with beautifully evocative shots of the Caney Fork River meandering past his family’s Tennessee farm.


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http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

m&s

[Larkspur]

1. Al Gore is the only Democrat who can unify both sides of the Party

A progressive friend of mine, who almost voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, saw Gore's film and told me that he want's Gore to be our next President.

Gore already has experience in the White House, so if we can get him elected President, he won't waste time learning the ropes.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Thanks for posting mooseandsquirrel, here is a little more

"There’s no longer any serious scientific dispute. Gore cleverly dramatizes the reality with a computerized graph illustrating how precisely the cyclical rise and fall in world temperatures over 650, 000 years (as measured by studying Antarctic ice cores ) track CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Then he climbs aboard a hydraulic lifter to illustrate where CO 2 levels are today. Then he raises himself higher still to show where they’ll be in 30 years unless mankind adapts. It’s visually stunning.

It’s also basic physics. Add X amount of CO 2 to the atmosphere, and the global temperature will rise in direct proportion. Less clear, given the huge complexities of the world climate system and our imperfect understanding, are the exact outcomes for any given location. But the overall prospects are catastrophic: drought, flood, stronger storms, more frequent tornadoes. Mass extinctions of plant and animal species are a near certainty."



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