The former vice president was on campus earlier tonight for a speech as this year’s Tom Kean Forum speaker (last year, the first time it happened, Bill Clinton came). You might have heard, for a while now he’s been going around giving a slide presentation concerning global warming. This is exactly what we got. If you don’t find the idea of a slide presentation given by Al Gore, of all people, particularly appealing, you certainly aren’t alone. However, the whole thing was surprisingly entertaining, and the man showed more than a little passion throughout the affair.
I went into the thing already aware of global warming, as I stay up-to-date on the relevant literature as much as I can, aside from things leaning too far to the technical side, so many of the graphs, charts, statistics, and so on that he showed were nothing new. What the presentation and the man giving it did bring to the topic were an emotionalism concerning the subject. He starts out with several pictures of Earth taken from space, and goes from there into the subject with a laid-back humor and quiet sense of urgency and awe about the problem. It was pretty damn good.