Al Gore's Fight Against The Climate Crisis

As the world heats up, so does Al Gore. Every melting glacier, every catastrophic storm, every record-breaking hot spell is a planetary-scale endorsement of his belief that tackling global warming is the biggest challenge of our time. Gore may not have announced his candidacy for president - not yet, anyway - but he is already running one of the most aggressive campaigns in American history. His Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, brought the harsh facts of the climate crisis to millions of people around the world. He's in the midst of an intensive tour to promote his new book, The Assault on Reason, which savages the Bush administration for its deceitful war in Iraq, its illegal wiretapping and its reckless refusal to take action on climate change. And he's gearing up for Live Earth, the global rock concert he has orchestrated for July 7th.

Gore understands that confronting the climate crisis will require not just new kinds of technology but a new kind of politics. In a sense, he is following a path blazed by filmmaker Michael Moore, using his own presence and political outrage to focus public attention on a broader cause. In the two years since he wrote "The Time to Act Is Now," the introduction to the special issue on global warming we published in 2005, Gore has not only shifted the national debate on planet-warming pollution, he has found his true voice - at once reasoned and impassioned, urgent and optimistic. At the end of May, he sat down with ROLLING STONE in his office in Washington, D.C., to discuss the threat posed by catastrophic climate change - and why he believes it's not too late to stop it.

The world's leading climate scientists - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - issued a report earlier this year that shows global warming is far more advanced than even the most dire predictions had led us to believe. Is there any one finding from the most recent wave of science that alarms you?
The degree of certainty the scientists are willing to assign to their conclusions has gone up. But what's more interesting to me than the IPCC report is the stream of evidence just in the last five months since that report. Many scientists are now uncharacteristically scared. The typical pattern in a dialogue between scientific experts and the general public, of which I'm a part, is for the scientists to say, "Well, what you've heard is a little oversimplified. It's a lot more textured than that, and you need to calm down a little bit." This situation is exactly the reverse. Those who are most expert in the science are way more concerned than the general public.

Why?
For the first time, we can see in the numbers that the rate of increase in global warming is accelerating. One of the studies that has come out since the IPCC report shows that the Arctic ice cap is melting three times faster than the models predicted. And in the Antarctic, near the South Pole, an area the size of California has melted ? with temperatures up to forty-one degrees Fahrenheit for an extended period of time. That's really unexpected.