In a Miami conference center the size of a football field, 1,200 climate activists are getting ready to watch a slide show. “Wow,” says Mario Molina, the director of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, by way of introduction. “This is a big room.” The activists have come to this room from all over the nation and all over the world—Bangladesh, Mexico, Nigeria, 80 countries in all—so that they can learn to present the same slide show back in their own communities. And when Al Gore walks on stage to teach them how to do it, they leap to their feet and cheer.

“OK, sit down,” he says in that familiar professorial tone. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

Yes, it’s that slide show, the one that thrust climate change into popular culture, generating the 2007 Academy Award and Nobel Prize in the process. Gore is still doing it, and training a global cadre of mini-Gores to do it as well; there have been 30 Climate Reality trainings, from South Africa to Australia to India. Fifteen years after he missed out on the White House by the narrowest of conceivable margins, Gore is still schlepping around the world to try to save it, spreading his unique brand of alarmism backed by data leavened with hope.

The former vice president still begins and ends his presentation with photos of the earth from space, iconic reminders of what’s at stake. He still lectures in that much-mocked wooden style, with sporadic flashes of passion detectable more by changes in volume than delivery. The big difference in the updated version of the slide show is that a decade ago, Gore mostly warned about what could happen. Now he shows what’s already happening.

Click here to read the full transcript of Michael Grunwald's interview with Al Gore.

It’s scary stuff, and it’s supposed to be. Some of it is visually scary, like a downpour that looks like an airborne tidal wave descending on Tucson, Arizona, or a helicopter rescuing residents of an apartment complex floating down a Japanese street. Some of it is intellectually scary, like charts illustrating how 14 of the 15 hottest years ever recorded have been recorded since 2000, how extremely hot days have become 100 times more common in just three decades, how climate change is driving unprecedented droughts, floods, wildfires and mudslides. Gore constantly updates his presentation: At least a dozen of his slides in Miami were from the previous few months, including news footage of Biscayne Bay flooding local streets the previous night.

“I’ve got thousands of these slides, from all over the world,” he said. “It’s like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.”

Most of the show is itself a deluge of apocalyptic extreme-weather images: body bags stacked like firewood after a recent heat wave in Pakistan, a “This Is Where I Belong” sign in front of a house burned down by a California wildfire, the rope-assisted rescue of a Brazilian woman (but not, alas, her dog) from a raging flood, the roof of the Metrodome collapsing after a record snowfall and a clump of 35,000 walruses forced onto an Alaska beach after their sea ice melted. Gore explains how a climate-driven drought that ravaged 60 percent of Syria’s farmland and 80 percent of its livestock drove rural Syrians into cities, laying the groundwork for the current refugee crisis. He even suggests that climate-driven food shortages helped trigger the Arab Spring.

But toward the end of his presentation, Gore adds a new twist, another element that his slide show lacked nine years ago: Good news. If the biggest change from the 2005 version is proof, the second-biggest is legitimate grounds for optimism.

Now there are graphs showing how wind and solar prices are plummeting while wind and solar installations are soaring, how global investment in renewables exceeds investment in fossil fuels, how “green bonds” have expanded 1,500 percent in two years. There are images of solar panels on a grass hut in Africa and in a slum in Bangladesh, where two new solar systems are deployed every minute. There’s one of Gore with one of those clunky 1980s mobile phones, the point being that no one expected them to get so ubiquitous so quickly, either.

“You know when you’re at a football game and the momentum shifts, and you can just feel it in the stadium?” Gore asked the trainees. “Well, the momentum is shifting! We’re winning! We’ve got to win faster, but we’re winning!”

IT IS HARD to see Gore in Florida without thinking about him not winning the 2000 election by 537 votes in the Sunshine State—or, if you prefer, one vote on the Supreme Court—to George W. Bush. You get the feeling that Gore thinks about it, too, and not just as a climate activist angry that Bush broke his campaign pledge to crack down on carbon emissions shortly after he arrived in the White House.

At one point during his Climate Reality conference, while Gore was moderating a discussion about the Florida government’s hostility to solar power, someone mentioned shenanigans involving a statewide ballot referendum. “You’re saying there was political interference with an election process in Florida?” he gasped in mock horror. “Hard to believe!” Later, when Gore and I were discussing the Republican presidential field for 2016 and its steadfast opposition to climate action, I mentioned that elections have consequences.

“I can confirm that,” Gore deadpanned.

Gore did not rule out running for president in 2016, although he has given no indication of any interest in the race; his stock answer is that he’s a recovering politician, so the longer he sticks with his recovery, the more remote the possibility of a relapse. He’s been separated from his wife Tipper for five years; he seems weary of the polarization and monetization of modern politics. Republicans now mock him during every cold front as the ultimate symbol of climate radicalism; they gleefully attack him as an eco-hypocrite who spews carbon jetting around the world and makes millions off green-energy investments. Meanwhile, many Democrats view him as a hapless politician who lost a gimme election. He never seemed overly comfortable on the campaign trail, and he now comes off as a liberated man who can finally say whatever he pleases—except when the subject is Democratic politics. I asked him about Hillary Rodham Clinton, his onetime rival in her husband’s White House, but he would only say that all the major Democratic candidates have said some good things about climate.

Gore did discuss President Barack Obama, giving him high marks on climate issues for his first few months in office and for his entire second term, but accusing the president of abandoning the mission for the bulk of his first term, in part because of his “historic web of ties to the coal industry in Illinois.” I also asked whether Gore had ever talked about climate with Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who presided over the 2000 recount that secured the presidency for his brother.

“I’ve never talked to Jeb Bush, period,” Gore said.

These days, Gore is busy with his eco-activism. He’s also chairman of a London-based sustainable investment fund, senior partner at the Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins and a board member at Apple. But he still thinks a lot about politics, especially climate politics, and especially politicians he sees as part of the problem. When he discussed the persistent sunny-day flooding in Miami, the top-ranked global city in terms of assets at risk from climate change, Gore wondered aloud how Florida Gov. Rick Scott could possibly refuse to acknowledge the problem.

“I don’t mean that in an ad hominem way,” he said. “I’m genuinely curious.”

Actually, Gore did sort of mean that in an ad hominem way, because he has strong beliefs about the politics of denial. The short and simple version of Gore’s current philosophy is that American democracy has been “hacked” by corrupt special interests; he thinks most politicians who oppose carbon reductions have been bought off by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel beneficiaries. The longer and more nuanced version is that even good politicians can get trapped in a bad system that requires members of Congress to spend four hours a day dialing for dollars. He says that when he first ran for his father’s old House seat in 1976, Gore didn’t hold a single fundraiser, and when he arrived in Congress, he concentrated totally on doing his job.

“Honestly, this will sound corny, but I could almost metaphorically hear the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ being hummed in the background,” he told me. “Really, honestly, truly, it was thrilling to have these town meetings with farmers and shopkeepers and housewives and then go back to Washington to advocate… Human nature being what it is, if you’re spending most of every day begging rich people for money, that’s going to have an effect. You’re going to start to think a little less about your constituents and more about how it’s going to affect tomorrow’s phone calls.

“And over time, it begins to encourage people to get into the system who are OK with that, who think that’s fun. People who really want to play that role that Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton designed, they’ll be a bit more reluctant.”

From now on, Gore says, every election needs to be a climate-change election. His goal is to put a political price on denial, so that low-carbon action becomes the default option for finger-in-the-wind politicians. Polls suggest that most Americans want to do something about global warming, but it isn’t a high priority for them. That’s why Gore came to Miami, to build his grass-roots slide-show army, to spread his message that climate change is here and now and scary as hell.

THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL sequence of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary about Gore’s slide show, was an animated illustration of how the combination of rising seas and worsening storms could flood the Ground Zero memorial in Manhattan. At the time, even the official estimates for sea-level rise were relatively modest because the models on ice melts were still hazy. In his Miami presentation, Gore recalled how critics attacked him for outrunning the established science.

“They said: ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration,’” he said.





Al Gore delivers his updated slide show in Miami. | Climate Reality

On cue, an image of Obama appeared on the screen behind Gore, warning of a devastating storm threatening the Northeast, followed by a series of images from Superstorm Sandy. There was a clip from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s news conference: “The Hudson River was pouring into the Ground Zero site.” Gore doesn’t explicitly say he told you so, but that’s a major theme of his slide show.

“Oh, it’s not, ‘I told you so,’” Gore told me, not very convincingly. “It’s more, ‘If you doubted this, please take another look. It’s even worse than scientists thought.’”

Gore’s avalanche of statistics and images is designed to overwhelm, to make the reality of climate change undeniable. The heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, he explains, is the equivalent of exploding 400,000 atomic bombs every day. “The denialists challenge everything I say, but they’ve never challenged that one—and believe me, they would if they could,” he added. July was the hottest month on record, featuring a 165-degree heat index in Iran. A 2013 typhoon in the Philippines was the strongest storm ever recorded at landfall. California’s snowpack is at 0 percent of its normal levels. Antarctica lost 160 billion metric tons of sea ice last year. “Some of it,” Gore noted, “is now on the streets of Miami.”

Gore’s unemotional narration of his disaster porn—the drying up of China’s largest lake, a methane explosion beneath a Siberian lake, the evacuation of the island of Kiribati, a disturbing “firenado”—starts to feel apocalyptic after a while. “You’ll see a warehouse float by here in just a moment,” he says during a clip of a recent flood in Chile. And it does. Gore says the old caveat about how no individual storm can be attributed to climate change is no longer true; warmer oceans and higher humidity are now permanent features of the environment, adding fuel to every storm. He portrays a world spiraling out of control thanks to greenhouse gases, detailing how global food and water supplies are at risk, infectious diseases and invasive pests are migrating, and climate refugees are creating geopolitical instability. He even blames climate change for making poison ivy more poisonous.

“That,” he said, “is not a good thing.”

IT’S DEPRESSING STUFF, and Gore knows it. In fact, before he began his presentation, he warned the trainees that when they delivered their own versions, they would have to work within a time budget, for obvious reasons; a complexity budget, because there are only so many tough concepts an audience can digest; and a “hope budget,” because audiences also have limited tolerance for doom and gloom.

“Despair is paralyzing,” he told the crowd. “When people feel like there’s no hope—well, might as well party on; let’s not worry about the problem. We need to deliver the message that we’re winning. The hope is real. It’s not a forced smile.”

Gore gives his audiences plenty of reasons to hope—the decline of coal in the U.S., the global solar boom, the upcoming climate talks in Paris, the vocal support of Pope Francis. He cites Wall Street reports on how clean energy is getting cheaper than coal in much of the world. He notes that Costa Rica was powered entirely by renewables for 100 straight days, and that Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican who is a top United Nations official, was a graduate of his slide-show training.

At times, though, his smile seemed a bit forced. I told him later that I think of him as a glass-half-empty guy. On the campaign trail, it always looked like his handlers had to remind him 10 times a day that America loves optimists, and after his wrenching defeat in 2000, he seemed even more like a missionary who was spreading the gospel because he knew it was the right thing to do even though he doubted the heathen would get the message. But he told me no, he’s very much an optimist. I mentioned the hope budget, and he said that’s just a tactic for building political will because unrelenting bad news can create a feeling of futility.

“That doesn’t mean I’m prone to that feeling,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I’m not vulnerable to that.”

A moment later, though, he revised and extended his remarks.

“I guess I would modify that slightly,” he said. “Anyone who works on the climate issue has an internal dialogue, the struggle between hope and despair. All my colleagues struggle with that. But I’ve always come down on the side of hope.”

Gore truly believes the world has reached a tipping point in its transition away from fossil fuels, a transition he describes as the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. He says that carbon-polluting industries can delay that transition, but they can’t stop it any more than King Canute could stop the tides. Meanwhile, though, he’s still leading his audiences on that nature hike through Revelations, a tour he still completes with the blue marble portrait of the earth from space.

“There we are. That’s our home,” he says. “Don’t let anyone tell you we can escape to Mars; we couldn’t even evacuate New Orleans. The earth is the only planet habitable for human beings. We’re going to have to make our stand right here.”

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