Al Gore’s Slide Show and Training Programme about CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL WARMING

Following the success of Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, in film and book forms, the former US Vice President is now ‘training’ people around the world to spread the word about the danger of climate change. The University of Cambridge Programme for Industry (CPI) brought Mr Gore’s training initiative to the UK for the first time last week [26-27 March].

Mr Gore delivered a brilliant two-hour slide show on two successive evenings, in the Guildhall and Corn Exchange, to almost 2,000 people and he trained two smaller groups for day-long sessions. These 200 or so ‘trainees’ came from all over Britain and included scientists, teachers, journalists, environmental campaigners, religious and civic leaders, business people – and even Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager.

Dressed in a long jacketed dark suit and tie-less shirt, Mr Gore could easily have been taken for a great 19th century preacher or a movie mogul from the 21st.  His hair was slicked back so that it didn’t stray and his face was remarkably immobile. This mask-like effect enhanced the impact of Mr Gore’s voice. Indeed, such is the extraordinary resonance and timbre of his voice and the persuasive power of his oratory that it was almost as if he was an oracle through which the gods were speaking.

The trainees were each given copies of the slides and speaking notes, so that they could use them as teaching tools on returning to base. Mr Gore spoke about the merits of ‘book-ending’ talks with similar beginnings and endings and the necessity for including  ‘Ah Ha’ moments and ‘budgets’ for time, complexity, hope and humour. He emphasised it was important not to leave the audience paralysed with despair – and certainly his own jokes were very amusing. There was also much valuable advice about the architecture of images shown in presentations: apparently the human eye can best take in visual information that goes from the upper left hand side to the bottom right hand side. Similarly, layering new information on top of familiar outlines helps viewers to take in additional and increasingly complex information.

Each set of trainees was divided into 10 “table groups” in the morning and invited to come up with questions for Mr Gore, to be written on yellow Post-it pads. These questions were hotly debated at the round tables. In the time available, few of the questions were answered by Mr Gore or the thoughtful Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, his science advisor for the occasion. The trainees were told that answers to other questions would be conveyed to them later.

In the afternoon the trainees split into different groups, based on their work, and came up with suggestions for action on climate change in their own fields. These ideas were communicated back to Al Gore and the other trainees in a final plenary session. Gratifyingly, there was some correspondence between the ideas. For example the media group wanted climate scientists to communicate more actively with them – and the scientists said they should do more to communicate with the media. 

The issue is so vast that even over a whole day Mr Gore did not have the time to go into detail about his favoured actions to address the climate crisis. He supports carbon taxes and carbon trading and can hardly wait for the replacement of cars (‘99 per cent inefficient’) with some cleaner, more appropriate form of transport. Small local grids for electricity generation are another way forward, along with a ban on incandescent light bulbs. He advocates planting trees in the developed world, quoting the adage ‘low hanging fruit grows back’. The discipline of economics needs a radical overhaul, in his view, because so many important things don’t yet have price tags attached and are therefore not being valued or considered. (He spits out the word ‘externalities’ as if it were an obscenity he wished to ban.)

Mr Gore is so full of excellent, positive ideas for technological, economic, social and political solutions that these will surely be the focus of another film and publication. Meanwhile, in a separate initiative, a library of books on climate change and global warming is being set up at King’s College, Cambridge. The collection is wide-ranging and international in scope. Fast approaching 1,000 books, this new resource is available to any member of the University.

That Al Gore’s Cambridge visit was so expertly and energetically organised by a handful of people at the CPI provides a reminder that it can only take a few to bring about great things.

P.S. Al Gore’s next book, THE ASSAULT ON REASON: HOW THE POLITICS OF BLIND FAITH SUBVERT WISE DECISION-MAKING, will be published in May by Bloomsbury in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA.

Caroline Davidson, 30 March 2007