Put your knickers back on - it's all about getting out your knockers now How to play fruit machines Slug and lettuce Search executive jobsSearch all jobs One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of An Inconvenient Truth, his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow.
We had moved on to complexity theory, in which Gore would really immerse himself if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, 'Isn't that AL GORE?!' There was no ignoring this fan.
As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. 'I'll move them,' I said; and Gore, before he could think, said: 'No, don't.' realclimate.
org concluded that Gore had handled the science 'admirably', with only a few minor errors. Perhaps the most remarkable summary came from James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and one of Gore's own gurus), who wrote, in the New York Review of Books, 'Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides.' An Inconvenient Truth did a great deal for Al Gore as well.
The last time he appeared in the consciousness of most Americans, six years earlier, he was to all appearances an unhappy guy running against a happy guy - and Americans like their presidential candidates to be happy. Gore now attributes this impression to a 'meta-narrative' diabolically scripted by Karl Rove - but meta-narratives stick for a reason. Gore seemed to find the confines of a presidential campaign asphyxiating.
And now, on screen, you could see that he was breathing free. He was earnest, but he was also wry; and though his torso still looked as blocky as a suitcase, he moved around the stage as if someone had loosened a vertebra or two. You could feel his enthusiasm, his alarm, his indignation.
An Inconvenient Truth erased the taint of partisanship from the Gore persona. By last autumn he had become the chairman and prime mover of the Alliance for Climate Protection. Meanwhile, An Inconvenient Truth had been winning new converts, as the slide show had before.
Kevin Wall, a celebrated rock promoter who designed the 'media architecture' of the Live 8 global concerts in 2005, attended the premiere and found himself thinking, as Lawrence Bender had the year before: 'How do we take what Al has done with this movie to the next step, and reach billions of people and really move the needle?' That next step was the global concert. Wall signed up the BBC and NBC to broadcast the events, and MSN to provide broadband coverage.
Wall wasn't thinking about Gore, but when the two met, Gore suggested that the concerts, to be held on 7 July, serve as the alliance's launching pad. Live Earth will be one of the biggest global events in history, and all the profits will go to the alliance. Concerts will be held on 'all seven continents', including Antarctica.
The European concert, at Wembley Stadium, will include Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, the Beastie Boys, Duran Duran and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, while the American concert will feature the Police, Smashing Pumpkins, Ludacris, Alicia Keys and others. The host sites will have wall-to-wall radio, broadcast, cable and online coverage while satellite television and radio broadcast will be available in 100-120 other countries. Live Earth is only the beginning.
On his laptop, Gore showed me a diagram with a fleur-de-lys at the centre and lines radiating out to indicate every facet of the vast campaign. An Inconvenient Truth is a mighty instrument all by itself: the book version has sold 850,000 copies worldwide, with a young-adult version fresh off the presses and a children's version in the works. Gore has paid to have the slide show translated into 28 languages and will be training volunteers to deliver the show in India and China.
He will be holding 'solutions summits' with corporate, political and scientific leaders; he was getting to work on a new Solutions book as soon as he knocked off The Assault on Reason. A children's TV show was in the works, and a reality show as well. It's going to be all global warming, all the time.
But the core of everything is the three-year programme of mass persuasion to be conducted under the aegis of the Alliance for Climate Protection. The alliance will not lobby or even propose specific solutions to global warming; rather, it will seek to break the climate crisis out of the crunchy confines of environmentalism. Global warming is going to have a giant product rollout.
Gore talks constantly about the need to move public opinion; he is convinced that what now seem like forbidding political and technical obstacles to drastically reducing carbon emissions will give way once we marshal the will to act. And Gore says he believes that once people understand the science, they'll share his sense of urgency. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, and balmy winters, and animals evacuating their habitats, and all those terrifying pictures of melting glaciers, that sense may already be taking hold.
Al Gore has given a great deal of thought to why some people still don't recognise the cliff we're about to drive over. The Assault on Reason is Gore's own attempt to explain, as he put it to me, 'why our public discourse is so vulnerable to the kind of rope-a-dope strategies that Exxon Mobil and their brethren have been employing for decades now, and why logic and reason and the best evidence available and the scientific discoveries do not have more force in changing the way we all think about the reality we are now facing'. The very fact that Gore feels that this requires an explanation shows what a high-minded rationalist he is.
He says he believes that ideas were given a fair hearing on their merits until television came along and induced a kind of national trance. This is a hoary line of argument, but Gore adds a novel neuropsychological twist, explaining that the brain's fear centre, the amygdala - 'which as I'm sure you know comes from the Latin for "almond"' - receives only a trickle of electrical impulses from the neocortex, the seat of reasoning, while sending back a torrent of data in return. This explains why 'we respond to spiders and snakes and fire, but we are less likely to feel alarm if the threat to our species is perceptible only by connecting a lot of dots to make up a complex pattern that has to be interpreted by the reasoning centre of the brain'.
Well, it's quite a challenge for the explainer. Whatever the merits of the TV-and-neurological-pathways argument, I couldn't help thinking that Gore was consoling himself, in a typically depersonalised and abstract fashion, for, as he told me, '30 years of beating my head against the wall'. Gore first learned about the build-up of greenhouse gases at Harvard, and he began trying to publicise the issue soon after reaching Congress in 1977.
He made it a prominent part of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1988, at a time when public awareness of global warming was close to zero. Finally, when he became Bill Clinton's vice president, he had the chance to raise the issue at the highest levels. This proved to be a time of tremendous frustration that came to a head in 1997, with negotiations over the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions, which the business community, and above all the energy industry, vehemently opposed.
Timothy Wirth, a committed environmentalist and then US under-secretary of state for global affairs, assembled a bipartisan advisory group of a dozen or so senators to build support for the treaty. 'I could not get a single White House official to come to any of these meetings,' Wirth recalls. 'They would not identify themselves with Kyoto.
It was a goddamn scandal. It was horrible.' Wirth stepped down a few weeks before the treaty was to be finalised.
Gore was quite taken aback when I relayed Wirth's remarks. 'He's not talking about me,' he said. 'I don't know who he's talking about.
' But he also adds: 'If I had been president, would I have bent every part of the administration and every part of the White House to support this? Yes, I would have. Does that translate into criticism of President Clinton for not doing this?
No. I was vice president, not president.' Or maybe Gore would rather not do the translation.
When the international negotiations looked as if they were about to collapse, in part owing to American resistance, Gore suggested that he fly to Kyoto to demonstrate Washington's commitment. David Sandalow, who worked on environmental affairs at the National Security Council, recalls a meeting with a dozen advisers 'in which nobody recommended he go, with the range of opinion running from neutral to strongly against'. 'His arrival was galvanising,' Sandalow says.
(Others are less convinced.) Gore returned in triumph - and instantly encountered, he recalls, 'resistance in the White House to even signing it, much less submitting it to the Senate for ratification'. Gore used his last dram of political capital to persuade Clinton to sign the Kyoto pact; it was never sent to the Senate, where it surely would have died an ugly death.
For Gore, it was a humiliating denouement. Gore's advisers in the 2000 campaign worried that he would commit political suicide by global warming. The issue had advanced far enough in public consciousness that George Bush saw fit to endorse regulating carbon emissions (a position he promptly ignored once taking office).
But it was still a net loser. Gore believes that he lost West Virginia, and possibly Kentucky, by calling for restrictions on coal-fired utilities. Gore could be excused a case of epic bitterness, but his total immersion in a cause he deeply believes in appears to have seen him through.
The only what-if in which he indulged during our time together was to say, only half-jokingly, that if he had had the 'presentation skills' he has since learned, 'I think I'd be in my second term as president'. Ah, the presidency. There are websites, and even a political action committee, dedicated to promoting a Gore candidacy.
James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told Rolling Stone flatly: 'He's going to run, and he's going to be formidable.' Several of Gore's aides from the 2000 race are said to have assembled a shadow campaign team should Gore change his mind. But the people closest to Gore say, as one, that he does not so much as raise the subject.
'Al knows where the sirens are,' says Roy Neel, who has been with Gore since the early days in Congress, 'and he knows when it's not real.' He adds that Gore 'has rejected offers to do any sort of planning'. He has not, however, stopped others from planning on his behalf.
When I asked Gore why he hasn't dismissed all the speculation by issuing a refusal to stand, as he did in 2002, Gore said: 'Having spent 30 years as part of the political dialogue, I don't know why a 600-day campaign is taken as a given, and why people who aren't in it 600 days out for the convenience of whatever brokers want to close the door and say, "This is it, now let's place your bets" - if they want to do that, fine. I don't have to play that game.' This sounded a lot like 'I can get in late'.
(Indeed, the buzz among the former aides is that Gore could jump in at the end of 2007 should the current contenders show significant weakness.) A few moments later, he said: 'I'm not issuing a statement because that's not where I am. I'm not ruling it out for all time.
Although I cannot presently foresee any circumstances, such circumstances could emerge.' 'And such circumstances could emerge in 2008?' 'It's extremely unlikely, but not impossible.
' Meanwhile Gore is writing, and travelling, and presenting, at a maniacal clip. He's even eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a reception like a man who doesn't know when his next meal will be coming. Still, he may have been thinner in 2000, but he's happier today.
I told Gore that he seemed to be experiencing that pleasure-in-the-midst-of-work that the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called 'flow'. 'Is that how you pronounce it?' Gore said.
'His first name is Mihaly. He also co-authored a cover story for Scientific American a few years ago on television,' and on and on. I told Gore that he was far more deeply versed in the work of Csikszentmihalyi than I was.
He laughed so hard that he turned purple.
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