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Gore warns of climate crisis
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
The most prominent voice on global climate change came to UB last week to sound an alarm on global warming and illustrate, through a series of powerful images, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the United States and the rest of the world.
Former vice president, author and environmental activist Al Gore spoke Friday in Alumni Arena as the final guest in the 2006-07 Distinguished Speakers Series. In addition to a sold-out evening address to an audience of 6,000, Gore presented a free afternoon lecture to more than 3,500 students from 82 high schools throughout the region. (See related story in Top Stories.)
"We need to tell the truth to each other about the crisis that we're facing," Gore said. "We have to be honest about our circumstances. We have to have a different perspective this time because never before has all of civilization been at risk."
The impact of the recent population explosion—from 2 to 6.5 billion in a single generation—as well as the rise of technologies that "threaten to overwhelm the human scale" mean that people must start to see their actions as being strong enough to impact the entire planet, Gore said.
"Our tools have steadily grown in power," he said. "We're a force of nature now. We're the biggest force of nature."
Massive coal-fired power plants, 60-mile-wide fishing nets that kill all life in their path, mining practices that tear the tops off mountains and ill-planned irrigation schemes, such as the one that destroyed the Aral Sea in Central Asia, all were cited by Gore as large-scale projects that inflict lasting harm on the Earth.
Although scientists have observed a gradual rise in the Earth's overall temperature since the 1970s, Gore said little action has been taken to curb the persistent increase in greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere during the past three and a half decades. Photos of melting glaciers and charts of climbing temperatures illustrated the result.
"In recent decades," Gore said, "[temperature] increases have been relentless and inexorable. The 10-hottest years on record are in the last 14 years. The hottest of all was in 2005. The hottest of all in the U.S. was in 2006."
The consequences of these record highs include the loss of Lake Chad to drought in Africa and the heat wave that killed 35,000 in Europe in 2003, Gore said, noting that closer to home, the freak snowstorm that struck Buffalo in October seems to support recent scientific projections that higher ocean temperatures will cause significant increases in precipitation in other parts of the planet, including Western New York.
Gore pointed out that warming oceans also are linked to more severe storms, such as the series of record-breaking hurricanes—Katrina, Rita and Wilma—that decimated the southern coastal states in 2005.
"Those warnings were ignored," Gore said, referring to the efforts of scientists and engineers to warn that the levees in New Orleans were too weak to face the full force of a powerful hurricane. "Will these warnings be ignored because they're inconvenient?"
The greatest "canaries in the coal mine" in terms of climate change are the Arctic and Antarctic, Gore said, both of which are experiencing thinning ice and glacial melt. The sudden collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002 surprised the scientific community, he said, but noted that the greatest concerns involve land-based ice on Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Shelf because the loss of either geographic area threatens to raise global coastlines by up to 20 meters.
As little as a one-meter increase in ocean levels creates 100 million "climate refugees" worldwide, Gore said, adding that a 20-meter increase will put the proposed World Trade Center memorial under water.
"This is not a political issue," he said, "It's a moral issue. Scientists around the world have issued four unanimous reports in 15 years and they've said this would be a catastrophe if we allowed this to happen...If we let this happen, it would be the most unethical and immoral thing any generation of human beings has ever done to their children and grandchildren."
Studies suggest the media contributes to the popular perception that there is no scientific consensus on global warming, said Gore, who engaged several major misconceptions on the subject. He noted that environmental policies at General Motors and Wal-Mart suggest environmental and economic goals need not be in conflict, and pointed to the international ban on substances that damage the ozone layer to argue that solutions can be reached to problems as large as global warming.
"It's up to us to change the United States," Gore said, noting that the list of states and cities that have endorsed the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases includes New York State and Buffalo, and praising UB President John B. Simpson for signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment.
"We have everything we need to save our home on behalf of our children, except for political will," he said, "but political will in America is a renewable resource—so let's get fighting and working to save this planet."