Inconvenient Truth in Person: Al Gore Finds the Human Touch Eight Years Late

Al Gore brought his global warming message to Saskatchewan today, with superb presentation skills and a rousing finish.

The rousing part is important.  One of the biggest challenges facing environmental advocates is the sense of despair that sets in after you spend a few days reading about the devastation that awaits us.

 It’s a rare day when I’ll part good money for a public speaker, but I couldn’t resist seeing Gore in action, with the presentation seen in An Inconvenient Truth.

He does a masterful job mixing humility with pride, science with personal experience, to get his message across.

Particularly classy is the occasional photo credit he gave, acknowledging the specific  photographers and scientists behind some of the images he showed.

Some speakers get sloppy when they’ve given the same talk dozens of times. Maybe  trying to pronounce Saskatchewan kept him on his toes. (No, he never did say it like a local: su-SKATCH-uh-wan.)

In his talk, Gore does the slow build. He constructs the scientific and anecdotal narrative of a world growing gradually warmer as CO2 levels increase. He presents evidence, explains it, personalizes it, and even jokes about it.

Gone is the wooden, humourless politician, as presented by the media in his presidential fight against George W. Bush. In its place is a voice of confidence, a man willing to poke fun at himself and his cause if it will win support for the fight against global warming.

The much-maligned audio-video presentation takes on a whole new look with Gore (he uses Apple’s Keynote 3.  Since he’s on the Apple board of directors, that’s not surprising).

The talk he gave today was about 10 minutes short of two hours, but it didn’t seem overly long. The blend of beautiful photography, scary scientific graphs and occasional animated images was the perfect accompaniment to Gore’s fatherly voice, weaving a narrative that is both complex and incredibly simple.

And the rousing finish. What can you say? Many professional speakers live their whole lives without coming close to the call to action Gore delivered in the last 12 minutes of his talk.

After showing how serious the situation is, he made the case for action over inaction, hope over despair, ingenuity and hard work over greed.

His closer (as best I could write it down in the darkened arena):

"Here in Sask-atchewan, you can see energy industries and energy efficient solutions.

"We are capable of rising to a challenge to do what’s right (with references to world action against apartheid, racism, communist dictatorships and fascism).

"Do we as human beings have the ability to do different things? Of course we do…. We can do this if we set our minds to it.

"When we faced another scare – the hole in the ozone layer – Canada led the way. They said nothing could be done about it, because it would need every country to agree to a solution. Canada hosted and negotiated a treaty to ban the chemicals that were causing the damage. And it worked.

"We have to have a sustainable economy.  But we must have a different perspective.  It is our obligation to those who come after us.

"The earth. It’s our home. This is our home!  This is where we make our stand!"

The crowd loved it, not just because it was a polished presentation.

They responded to the respect Gore showed – such as when he apologized that a map referenced Fargo, North Dakota, but not Regina. They also responded to his call for reasonable people to fight back against public relations lies crafted by industry apologists and politicians. They responded to his humility. And they especially responded to his common sense hopefulness for the future.

File photos by Heschong and NASA.

Note: the presentation was partly underwritten by my employer, the government of Saskatchewan, but I took time off work and paid personally for my family’s tickets.

Tags: al gore, an inconvenient truth, regina, saskatchewan, speech, environment, climate change, global warming, nasa, earth, humility