Former Vice President Al Gore showed that he isn’t giving up on sounding the alarm on global warming and its catastrophic consequences in an appearance on Current TV’s “The War Room with Jennifer Granholm” on Thursday.
Gore, who owns CurrentTV and appeared alongside former Obama administration “green jobs czar” Van Jones, explained that “dirty energy and dirty money” are thwarting a green economy. And that, according to the former vice president, is behind “dirty weather” due to “extreme climate events.”
“Let me add if I could briefly,” Gore said, “As Van said, it’s the intersection of dirty energy and dirty money. And we can’t forget it’s creating dirty weather because the extreme climate events that the scientific community has been telling us are connected to global warming are getting worse. We had 12 events last year here in the U.S. that cost more than a billion dollars that were connected to climate. And it’s getting worse. And now, we have this extensive drought in big areas of the country, dramatic floods, stronger storms — completely consistent with what people have been predicting.”
Gore has been criticized in the past for his doom-and-gloom message but said that isn’t going to deter him from carrying on.
“And I know that there are a lot of people who say, ‘Oh, don’t talk about that because that, you know, people roll their eyes,’” he continued. “Well, this is our future and by solving it, we can create jobs and strengthen our economy and we have a moral obligation to the future, to our children and grandchildren and to ourselves. It’s affecting us now, already.”
Later in the program, Gore continued with his plea for a so-called green economy this time by connecting it with climate data.
“I do think people are catching on to this in large numbers,” Gore said. “But it’s something like 326 months in a row that the temperature has been warmer than the 20th century average. And the 12 months from a year ago April to the last month was the hottest 12 months in all of history. And every year now, it is either breaking the record or in the top four or five years in temperature, and it continues to go up.”
Gore also maintained that there is a strong consensus in the scientific community, despite a long list of documented dissent, that these consequences are real and “horrendous.”
“And the consequences according to the scientific community are horrendous,” he continued. “Every single national academy of science in the world, every professional scientific society in these related fields in the world; but the coal companies and oil companies buy these all these ads, spend all this money … they seed the organization with these lobbyists, grants and experts that go out and try to gin up this Astroturf deal.”
