Al Gore awarded Global Environmental Citizen Award from Harvard

And gives a great speech.

http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_26982.shtml

(Excerpt)

I joked earlier about hubris in personal terms, but hubris has a distinguished pedigree as a noun. When we exceed the boundaries that creation has placed around our place in creation we run the risk of consequences. Fifty-five years ago, a little less, another kind of storm was brewing on the continent of Europe. Winston Churchill, in England, warned his countrymen that this storm was different from anything they had ever experienced before. The marriage of the industrial revolution, electronic mass communication, and totalitarian politics created a concentrated destructive force that was new and much more powerful than anything politics had ever encountered.

And he said the time for vacillation, for dithering, for indecision is now over. We are entering a period of consequences. Hurricane Katrina convinced many Americans that we have now entered a period of consequences. The images of Americans starving, in extremis, abandoned, helpless, fearful, nowhere to go, no salvation in sight, labeled as refugees in one of our great cities was a startling realization that we have entered a period of consequences.

More than 200 American cities set all time records for high temperatures this year. One of them was New Orleans. And the waters around New Orleans also set an all time record. When Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida it was a category 1 hurricane, but then it crossed over the Gulf, and the extraordinarily warm waters of the Gulf, warmed beyond the boundaries of previous human experience, fed the energy of that hurricane and it grew to a category 5. And it collected much more water than hurricanes have in the past and it drowned one of our greatest and most elegant cities.

There were warnings, but they went unheeded. The chief meteorologist in Louisiana working for the Federal government was beside himself trying to get attention for the clear scientific consequences of what he saw developing. We will see conditions, he said, that are unprecedented in modern times.

Who wold have some respect for future generations? The elections of 2000 stole from us our hope for the future. I hope we have enough time left to regain it before Mother Nature decides we need to pay our dues...

And by "go" I mean, go run for freaking president, will ya?!

:patriot:

We were SO robbed in 2000.

Am I wrong for wishing we had a president who can speak his native language at least as well as visiting foreign dignitaries?

Am I wrong for wishing we had a president who I didn't suspect was less intelligent than a large percentage of the population?

It would be poetic justice in the extreme for Al Gore to win the presidency in 2008.

section carefully:

Four years ago, in August, during another time that is often described as the dog days, there was a warning that, and I quote, that "Osama Bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States of America." And that warning was not heeded either. If it had been, if a meeting had been called, and if the head of the FBI and the CIA had been asked to collect the available intelligence from their field offices they would have found the full names of 80 percent of the hijackers who later flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania. They would have found the plot, they would have found the training on how to fly planes received by people who were not curious about how to land the planes, they would have found enough evidence to prevent that tragedy.


Can you imagine that Gore wouldn't have ordered the FBI and the CIA to go and find everything they had about al Qaeda suspects in the summer of 2001?
No way. It was done in 1999 Dec, during the Millenium Threat.
It would have been done again in the summer of 2001.