[Vision2020] Gore Tells Doomsday Tale to Boise Crowd

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (January 23, 2007) Lewiston Tribune -

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Gore tells doomsday tale to Boise crowd 

By DEAN A. FERGUSON
of the Tribune 

BOISE -- The crowd's roar, 10,000 strong, hit decibels high enough to hurt
ears in Boise State University's Taco Bell arena -- and they were cheering
for an academic lecture. 

Say what you will of former Vice President Al Gore's wooden demeanor on the
2000 presidential campaign trail, his comedic timing was tuned tight Monday
night. The Boise-crowd laughed, gasped, cheered and jeered on cue. 

"Preach it!" a man hollered from the arena seating. 

"Ha!" Gore interjected in delight. 

As keynote speaker at the 23rd annual Frank Church Conference on Public
Affairs, Gore told a doomsday tale. 

A child could grasp the moral: We're headed for a world of hurt if we don't
start listening to scientists, if we don't start ignoring skeptics, if we
don't stop pumping unnatural levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Oceans are dying. Glaciers are quickly receding. Animals are in full retreat
from nature herself. 

Gore's famed slide show, based on his cautionary book about global warming,
"Inconvenient Truth," shocked the crowd with images of devastation. Flooded
them with pictures of floods, hit them with hurricanes and smacked them with
hard-cake basins where lakes used to be. 

"The so-called 'skeptics,' are a group diminishing more rapidly than the
glaciers," Gore said. 

Gore blamed oil industry misinformation campaigns for distracting the public
from a decline climatologists have fretted over for decades. 

In 1970, on the first Earth Day, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, warned of
global warming: "Some scientists foresee a 'greenhouse effect.' This
presumably could lead to a warming of the surface of the Earth, thereby
melting the polar ice caps ..." 

Church, a friend of Gore's father, warned us then, Gore said. Now, the world
is at a tripping point. 

"The changes we are about to bring about are larger than all of the changes
in a natural cycle," Gore said. 

A partisan fever flared from the crowd. 

Gore pilloried the Bush administration for inaction. He showed a slide of
the new Ground Zero memorial where New York's twin towers once stood. The
memorial may someday be inundated by water, he said. 

"Never again. We need to focus on terrorism, yes, but we need to focus on
other threats to our security and start taking this seriously," Gore said. 

Earlier in the day, U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, went to the television
cameras to combat Gore's call for change in how the U.S. fights climate
change. Craig, who opposes Gore's views, talked about building nuclear
reactors, building the economy. 

Gore said scientific consensus overrules skeptics. 

He even took at shot at Idaho's political establishment by flashing on the
projector screen a quote from former Gov. Jim Risch who said of global
warming, "There's science either way." 

Gore ridiculed the statement: "I don't know. The earth could be round. It
could be flat." 

The crowd, which included Church's widow Bethine and former Idaho Gov. Cecil
Andrus, roared. 

We have entered a "period of consequences," Gore said. "Never before has the
entire civilization been at risk." 

But technology exists to change the direction. There is time left, he added.


The show lasted two hours. Gore waved to the rock concert-like commotion, a
fair mix of teenagers to elderly, and left to spread the message elsewhere.
Among his final words were: "In the United States of America, political will
is a renewable resource." 


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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho 

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown