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Al Gore: Global warming skeptics are this generation’s racists

Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that he has been fighting for a noble and important cause for years now. Global warming is one of the greatest challenges we have to handle as a species, and it won’t be easy at all. Even as it is, it’s hard to change things […]

Mihai Andrei
August 29, 2011 @ 5:05 am

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Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that he has been fighting for a noble and important cause for years now. Global warming is one of the greatest challenges we have to handle as a species, and it won’t be easy at all. Even as it is, it’s hard to change things for the better, but if we’re not united on this one, and some people are still skeptic about climate change, fighting against the needed measures, then it’s almost impossible; and some day, these global warming skeptics will be looked back upon in the same light as racists, at least according to former vicepresident Al Gore.

In an interview with former advertising executive and Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky, he makes a valid point, saying that in order for climate change alarmists to succeed, they must “win the conversation” against those who deny there is a crisis.

“I remember, again going back to my early years in the South, when the Civil Rights revolution was unfolding, there were two things that really made an impression on me,” Gore said. “My generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators and we went, ‘Whoa! How gross and evil is that?’ My generation asked old people, ‘Explain to me again why it is okay to discriminate against people because their skin color is different?’ And when they couldn’t really answer that question with integrity, the change really started.”

Al Gore than stated that the best approach here would be to defeat the climate skeptics in the same way, and show both to the world and to them how wrong they are.

“Secondly, back to this phrase ‘win the conversation,’” he continued. “There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won.”

skeptics might do as much Well, I’m not really sure what to say, but I do believe this is the right approach. The thing is, at the moment, it’s pretty difficult to draw a good and bad line as with racism; but then again, in the long run, climate skeptics could do a lot more damage to the planet than racists.

“This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity, and to slander them with the lie that they are making up the science in order to make money,” Gore said.

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