Al Gore presentation at TED conference
Thursday, May 15th, 2008So what’s Al Gore been up to lately? One of the things he’s been doing is giving a presentation at one of the TED conferences: these bring together “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers” in the areas of technology, entertainment and design. Other speakers have included J.J. Abrams, the creator of TV’s Lost and Alias; entrepreneur Richard Branson; physicist Stephen Hawking; and biologist E.O. Wilson. Other speakers are not famous - they’ve simply done something extraordinary in their community and want to share their story. They’re all asked to spend about 18 minutes giving the talk of their life, something Gore is already familiar with.
Gore’s recent talk is an update on his famous slideshow that was made into the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In it, he covers recent evidence for climate change, the fact that Australia has now signed Kyoto and how our drought affected public perception of climate issues, and the coverage (or lack thereof) of climate change in the current US presidential race. As always, he doesn’t shy away from the hard facts, but manages to be inspiring. He follows up with a Q&A session where some hard questions are asked of him.
You can watch the presentation on the website, or download a video or audio version here: New Thinking on Climate Change. His earlier (2006) talk can be found here: Averting the Climate Crisis (with a transcript so you can read it if you haven’t got time to watch it).
The TED conferences have had quite a few talks on environmental issues, which you can see listed here: A Greener Future? The talks that I particularly liked apart from Gore’s were Majora Carter’s “Greening the Ghetto” and William McDonough on “The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle”, but I haven’t watched them all yet. The non-environment talks are well worth checking out too - philosophers, entertainers and scientists all speaking about whatever makes them passionate. I don’t always agree with them, but they present a challenge to us all to think creatively when trying to solve complex problems.
