‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and Al Gore’s talk

An Inconvenient Truth opens in wide release this week. It could be the most important you’ll ever see.

As I blogged earlier this month, I saw Al Gore’s slide presentation in San Francisco and blogged about it here, but I didn’t have a chance to trranscribe my brief notes because I was about to leave the country on a trip. Here are a few highlights from Gore’s talk:

Gore quoted Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

He said the snowcap atop Mount Kilimanjaro will be completely gone in 15 to 20 years.

“We’ve lost 40 percent of the arctic ice cap in the last 40 years.” The glaciers are disappearing from Glacier National Park in Montana. And “the skeptics are retreating faster than the glaciers.”

Left unchecked, in 50-70 years, “the ice cap will be completely gone” during the summer months.

“This not a political issue. This is a moral issue, an ethical issue, a spiritual issue.”

If left unchecked, the consequences will be “utterly catastrophic for human civilization.”

“The hottest 10 years on record have all been in the past 14 years,” with 2005 as the hottest.

He quoted Winston Churchill, who in 1936 said, “We are entering a period of consequences.”

Last year’s wave of hurricanes — “We not only broke the record, we absolutely shattered the record” — may be only the beginning.

The most chilling stats came when Gore displayed maps of the new global coastlines, after sea levels rise by 10 feet or more. Beijing: 20 million people displaced. Shanghai basin, 40 million. Amsterdam, half flooded. Lower Manhattan and South Florida, submerged.

“It is our time to rise and meet this challenge,” he declared.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.