Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Day 2: The Slide Show




This was the most impressive day.

7:00 a.m.; I take my place in the front row (I wanted to make sure I got a good seat to be close to Mr Gore when he gave the presentation). I also brought my camera, hoping to take some good photos.

Mr. Gore arrived and gave us a brief intro on what he was going to share with us. Even though he has given this presentation about 3000 times, they are obviously tailored for the audience. In our case he is giving us the standard “long” version, which is about an hour and a half.

In giving our presentations, Gore says that we have to find the right balance–depending on our audience, and three budgets, (i) “time” budget – how much time audience is giving you (ii) “complexity” budget – how deep do you go into the science w/o losing your audience and the (iii) “hope” budget – while what are witnessing is pretty horrendous, we need to also give people hope. “It’s amazing how many people go from denial to despair,” Gore told us. We need to find the middle, “keep enough hope in your hope budget so they don’t check out on you”



Than he gives the slideshow in Keynote.

Even though I have seen the movie a few times – in fact only a few days ago on the Alitalia flight – I was still riveted! It was absolutely awesome!!! There is nothing like seeing this live – (especially being 10 feet away from presenter!)

So I spent the next hour and a half between listening and looking at everything single Keynote slide, taking notes (16 pages in my little green notebook), and, of course, taking pictures.

You’ve seen the movie: it pretty much is broken into into three phases:
(i) Global warming does exist and it is man-made, the more CO2 in the atmosphere = warmer temperatures).
(ii) Look at how it is affecting us, and what could happen (melting glaciers & ice caps, species lost, extreme weather conditions – Katrina).
(iii) How we can help reverse global warming (taking the lead in new energy technology, Toyota, GE).



The presentation–as in the movie–is very factual, and tries to steer clear of politics – but does make it very clear that this current administration has its head in the sand in regards to this issue.

As Al Gore says, “global warming is not a political issue it is a moral issue.”

How can anybody who sees this not be moved to take action? In fact, all of us who volunteered our time to attend these sessions are doing so because we were moved to ACT – to do something to revert this catastrophic event that is upon us.

Next came the “Scenes Behind the Movie”, if you will.

We spent the next 6 hours with Mr. Gore and a top climatogy scientist, Dr. Michael MacCracken, PhD going over the 250 slides of his presentation. Together, they explained the rationale and science behind each slide of the presentation. This was an opportunity to go in deeper into some of the science behind the facts.

It was also an opportunity to learn about the flow of the presentation, things that we should highlight. And of course depending on the audience, what to explore deeper or not even present.

He asked us to please keep the questions to a minimum, if not we would get bogged down on the presentation. If you have any questions write them down, and Mr. Gore or Dr. MacCracken will answer each one.

But of course, when you have a chance to have Mr. Gore answer a question, I guess people cannot help it – the questions came in a flurry during the first part of the presentation, and it did start to bog down, until finally they cut off all questions so we could finish.



I wrote down six questions I wanted answered, the ONE burning questions I wanted Mr. Gore to answer was: “Has President Bush seen the movie or one of his presentations?”

No, I did not ask that during the slide review but I did get a chance to ask Mr. Gore that question afterwards.

His response, “I offered to make this presentation to him, but he refused. Why? I honestly do not know. He is a very bright person, but I am beginning to think that he lacks curiousity about many things”

Can you believe this? The one person on this planet who should see the movie, lacks curiosity!

When An Inconvenient Truth came out The New Yorker said, “this movie was made for an audience of one”.

And even though this has become the second highest grossing documentary in history, with millions across the world having seen it, the one person it was made for, has not! Unbelievable!

Does that mean it’s a failure? It is, if WE do NOT pick up the slack. I mean, we can’t afford to endure two more years of inaction from this White House.

We, collectively with OUR MOVEMENT, have to fill the void left by our government, and lead the way.

So after about 10 hours of getting our brains pumped with information, it was time to chill a bit.

What better way to chill out, than an evening at BB King’s?

We saw four singer/songwriters (including Jimmy Flowers the guy who wrote “Living on Tulsa Time”) put on a really good show for all of us! And if you all think that a bunch of “enviros” don’t know how to party – well you got that wrong!

But the photos speak for themselves!

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