Al Gore has taken his message of the need to stop climate change around the world, starting with Australia and New Zealand. He has been training volunteers to continue to spread the word that we need to work together to stop the accelerating trend of climate change before it is too late and many parts of the world become too hot to live in.
Even one year later, Al Gore’s movie, Inconvenient Truth is still relevant today as a UN conference on climate change in Africa shows:
A sampling of other findings coming from the conference:
- The snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains on the Uganda border will be snowcapped no more in a decade or two, thanks to rising temperatures. The same with Mount Kilimanjaro. Gone would be the rivers these snowcaps feed, also.
- If climate conditions are unchanged, sea levels could rise 34 inches by 2100, displacing millions of coastal dwellers.
- Warming ocean waters are suspected of stoking the power of hurricanes.
- Carbon dioxide particles falling from the sky are raising the acidity of oceans, killing off major coral reefs.
Gore mentions the last two – hurricanes and coral reefs – in his video update. Which tells you he’s right on top of the latest findings and compiled his update remarkably close to the release date of this video.
Even the political right in New Zealand agrees on the need to stop global warming. And even here in this country, many fundamentalists and right-wingers are breaking with the GOP over their pandering to the Black Helicopter Crowd and keeping their heads in the sand over global warming. When Al Gore showed his film in NZ, even the right was persuaded by the facts that it presented.
And in Australia, he trained 85 different volunteers to spread the word about the dangers of Global Warming and the need to make changes to stop it. Among the people he trained was this singer:
IT’S going to be a very long weekend for Felix Riebl. Over the next three days Riebl, a lead singer with Melbourne band The Cat Empire, will be lucky to snatch a few hours sleep in between playing late night gigs and spending his days in intensive training to become one of Australia’s first “climate messengers”.
The training’s drawcard is former US vice-president Al Gore, who is running his climate workshop in Sydney, outside the US for the first time.
The Australian Conservation Foundation chose 85 people from 1700 applications to learn how to spread Mr Gore’s message, based on the “global warming slide show” that featured in An Inconvenient Truth.
Riebl is not the only well-known trainee, with FM radio hosts Merrick Watts and Tim Ross also taking part. All the trainees have promised to deliver at least 10 presentations on climate change in the next year.
Since reading Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers a year ago, Riebl has grown increasingly concerned about global warming, the slow political response to it, and his own contribution to the problem. “We’re on a tour bus constantly and catching an enormous number of flights, and as a band we can’t take that for granted any more,” Riebl said.
Links:
Australian Conservation Foundation
Felix Riebl’s band. Note – click on the notes for links
Gore is as successful as he is because he has a big ally – reality:
“When someone says, ‘Thank you for changing people’s minds’, I say, ‘Well I have a big ally – reality’. Reality is knocking ever more loudly, ever more insistently on mankind’s door saying, ‘Wake up there. Your world is changing. You are changing it. You need to change’.”
This is a key difference between Democrats and Republicans – Democrats deal with reality; Republicans don’t. And because they cannot make any meaningful contributions and have no new ideas to add to the debate, they instead engage in pathetic smears like this smear (who cares if the leadership wanted their picture taken together and John Kerry was asked to step aside? I would not be embarrassed or humiliated?) or claiming that a Democratic victory was a victory for terrorists or giving chocolates or gameboys to 36 “Cuban dissident” groups whose people never worked an honest day in their lives.
Many Republicans believe that there is still a debate over Global Warming. Actually, according to the rest of the world, the debate has already been settled and it is now only a matter of how much global warming there will be. To show you how far the GOP will go to cling to the same old politics as usual, they elected Blunt and Boehner as their leaders as though they had actually won the election. Not surprisingly, the Republicans are brawling over at Red State over this issue.
The need for change in response to climate change shows why Conservatism is dead as an ideology. It is no longer relevant and does not address the problems the world is facing. Conservatism is inherently rigid as an ideology, assuming it has all the answers. Therefore, it assumes that things are just fine and dandy like they were 20 years ago and that we need not change – if there is acid rain, after all, go get an umbrella. Even if the Conservative accepts the reality of climate change, they may think government is the problem, not the solution. Therefore, they think that we should let the private sector lead the way on climate change. But that is an abdication of responsibility. It is a fact of life that the President of the US is a leader on this issue and that people will watch his cues. Therefore, if they see the President doing nothing on this issue, people will assume it is OK to do nothing as well. And for many corporations, the Bottom Line is the only language they understand – they see record profits and think everything is fine.
There is another brand of Conservatism – the head in the sand approach. It refuses to vote for Al Gore because, after all, he is for abortion, and human life is more important. But even if it could be shown that the fetus is a living being, we should still vote for Al Gore for life reasons – if we do not address the problem of climate change at all, none of us will be around in 100 years.
It could be argued that we’ve had the coldest winter on record – or variations of that argument; therefore, we should not worry. But weather can vary a lot within years. But the fact that there are individually cold winters somewhere in the world do not change the fact that as an average, the world temperature is rising and it can only be accounted for by carbon emissions.
Our key to our survival will be our adaptability – our ability to change in response to new realities. Therefore, if we do not adapt, we will not survive – as so many species before us have failed to adapt to changing conditions. Conservatism is dead as an ideology because it shows an inability to adapt to changing circumstances and changing times. The election of Blunt and Boehner is a good example.
In order to stop the menace of climate change, we must show the ability to work together as individuals, as businesses, and as governments. Already, business leaders, political leaders, and inventors are coming together at the Embedded Systems Conference in April 2007 to discuss the latest inventions in climate change. The solution involves us, as a world community, coming together to address and solve the problem.
