Sunday, June 05, 2005
AL’S PEOPLE
Former presidential novelty candidate Al Gore has materialised in San Francisco:
When former Vice President Al Gore gave a long list of doom-and-gloom statistics Saturday about global warming—warning people that rising sea levels could drown out parts of Florida, Louisiana and Manhattan—there were no loud gasps or headshakes of disbelief from a roomful of Bay Area environmentalists.
You’d have needed a bank of supercomputers to count all the tilted compassion heads, though. (Don’t know how to do the compassion tilt? Here’s a guide: “Softly and slowly breathe in and out, in and out. Lower your head and tilt it to the right as you cast your eyes down toward your nose. As the Great Mother, regard the pain and suffering of your lost children.”)
Gore, who has made environmental activism a key component of his life since running for president in 2000, delivered an hourlong speech about climate change and global warming, which he called a “planetary emergency.”
“We can’t ignore it,” he told the packed audience at the Fort Mason Center. “We can’t put our heads in the sand.”
Because you’d drown, what with the sand being underwater and all. Due to the warming.
When he wasn’t presenting charts about rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere or speaking about the ways global warming rapidly sucks moisture out of the Earth’s soil at high levels ...
“Sucking at high levels”. Could be the title of Gore’s autobiography.
The world’s population explosion, which by 2050 will reach 9.1 billion, has increased the demand for energy, water and food, he said, and has contributed to the problem of global warming.
Imagine the Gore family’s contribution.
He showed photos of rapidly melting glaciers in Antarctica and said that if half of Greenland and half of west Antarctica melted away, it would have a devastating effect on rising sea levels. Parts of Florida would be covered in water, he said.
Drain the Everglades, environmentalists complain. Add to the Everglades, environmentalists complain ...
“Is it only terrorists that we’re worried about? Is that the only threat that is worth our attention?” Gore said. “We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth.”
And then he bicycled all the way home.