Al Gore:

The language the IPCC used in presenting it is torqued up a little bit, appropriately. How do they get the attention of policy-makers around the world?

The man-made global warming pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, and it stays there a pretty long time. And it now traps as much extra heat energy every day as would be released by 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day.

It's a big planet, but that's an enormous amount of energy. And more than 90 percent of that extra heat energy is going into the oceans. And that's distorting and disrupting the water cycle by evaporating much more moisture into these storms. And even without hurricanes, we get these so-called rain bombs that just devastate the places where it falls.

North Carolina with Hurricane Florence is another example. And as the scientists have pointed out — this wasn't true of Hurricane Michael this week, but Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Harvey just stayed in place for days and days and days. That's something new too.

And it's because we're beginning to see the disruption of wind currents, along with ocean currents. And so the Northern Hemisphere jet stream that normally moves these storms out to the east is getting loopier and wavier and sometimes disorganized.

So this is really serious stuff. We have a global emergency. And you use a phrase like that, and some people immediately say, OK, calm down, that it can't be that bad. But it is.

And what the scientists have warned us in this recent report is that if we do not take action quickly to switch away from dirty fossil fuels, and shift to electric vehicles, and make agriculture and forestry much more sustainable, and deal with the waste loops in manufacturing, all things that we can do — we know how to do them. And we ought to be doing these things for other reasons anyway.

But if we do not begin taking action very quickly — and creating jobs in the process, by the way — then the scientists warn us that the consequences down the road would be far, far worse than what we're experiencing now, and could actually extend to an existential threat to human civilization on this planet as we know it.