Al Gore Sees ‘Dirty Weather’ Ahead
By EMMA BRYCE
On Sunday, Al Gore was in New York — well, he appeared in a video screened there — to promote the second iteration of “24 Hours of Reality,” an event streamed online to help people connect the dots between climate change and its diverse impacts around the globe. This year’s version, scheduled for Nov. 14-15, is titled “24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report.”
“The weather’s just that – dirty,” Mr. Gore said in the video, which was shown at the three-day Social Good Summit conference. “It’s fueled by dirty fossil fuel and misinformation.”
For the November event, Mr. Gore’s Climate Reality Project will stream content about “dirty weather that’s occurred around the world in the last year,” said Maggie L. Fox, the project’s chief executive, who appeared in person to announce the segment.
Ms. Fox did not identify any specific weather extremes that would be depicted or cited. While many of the weather events witnessed over the last year — heat waves, flooding, droughts and so on — are consistent with what scientists would expect as the earth warms, researchers have found it challenging to link specific occurrences to human-caused climate change.
In an interview, Ms. Fox said that people were nonetheless beginning to understand that the climate is changing — and that humans’ heat-trapping emissions are a factor. “You know and I know that all through time there have been weather changes,” she said. “But now we have something different: this is dirty weather, not cyclical global weather.”
In an interview, Ms. Fox said that people were nonetheless beginning to understand that the climate is changing — and that humans’ heat-trapping emissions are a factor. “You know and I know that all through time there have been weather changes,” she said. “But now we have something different: this is dirty weather, not cyclical global weather.”
“With the frequency and the intensity of events, these stories are not making it into the press,” she said, so the November presentations will publicize “the events that don’t get coverage.”
As was evident in Mr. Gore’s taped speech, the event will focus not just on the fossil fuel industries but on organizations that sow doubt that climate change is under way, Ms. Fox said.
By filtering ideas, knowledge, and awareness of climate trends, she said, social media can be a tool for “overtaking the noise” created by climate skeptics.
By filtering ideas, knowledge, and awareness of climate trends, she said, social media can be a tool for “overtaking the noise” created by climate skeptics.
More broadly, the Climate Reality Project’s goal is to forge connections between nongovernmental organizations working on climate change issues around the globe with individuals to spread awareness, Ms. Fox said in an interview. “There are something like two million environmental N.G.O.’s around the world working on climate,” she said. “We actually believe we have the numbers — but we don’t have the mass.”
She suggested that social media could create that mass: “we actually can find each other.”
Sponsors of the “Social Good” summit in New York, which ends today, include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Mashable and the United Nations
Foundation, among others.
Foundation, among others.
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