AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

(Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim)

Los Angeles, D.C., Cannes and Kyoto

May 18th, 2006

After the Los Angeles premiere of An Inconvenient Truth Tuesday night, we were in our nation’s capitol last night for an event at the National Geographic Society. Here’s a story from cbsnews.com with a great photo gallery of some of the stars that came out including Sharon Stone, Jessica Alba, David Duchovny, Radha Mitchell, Larry David and many others.


GLOBAL WARMING ACCORDING TO AL GORE

The new consensus: The world scientific community is now in near-unanimous agreement on five key points:


Global warming is real.


Mankind is primarily responsible for it.


The effects are catastrophic.


The effects are accelerating.


It's not too late to turn it around.

The effects: Drastic climate change, extreme hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, insect plagues, epidemics and other health problems, killer heat waves, the extinction of many plant and animal species, the swamping of our coastal cities as the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt and the oceans rise, rings of social, political and economic chaos rippling out from the centers of environmental disaster.

The causes: Greenhouse gas emissions (mostly spewing from automobile tailpipes and coal-burning power plants) trapped in the Earth's atmosphere; declining plant life (which breathes in carbon dioxide as it grows and breathes out oxygen).

The chief bad guy: The United States of America, which has only 5 percent of the world's population but is responsible for a quarter of the world's carbon emissions (6 billion tons a year, and rising) and is virtually alone among nations in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

The cure: A massive global effort to protect forests, reduce emissions, and develop and make available new clean energy technologies such as wind power, solar power, hybrid electric engines and alternative fuels.

The timetable: Five to 10 years, before the effects become irreversible.

What you can do: See "An Inconvenient Truth" and read its companion book, go to http://www.climatecrisis.net/ to learn how to get involved, make a personal commitment to reduce your own personal greenhouse gas emissions, demand our leaders make the fight against global warming their No. 1 priority