Al Gore: The Case for Optimism on Climate Change

Our atmosphere is not as large as most people believe, according to Mr. Gore's opening

statement in his presentation. He displays this image obtained from the International Space

Station to serve as a reminder that our planet's atmosphere is but a thin shell. We keep spewing

megatons of heat-trapping carbon pollution into this fragile shell on a daily basis. According to

Mr. Gore, "right now, the thin atmosphere is the open sewage for our industrial civilization as it

is organized." He charts the evolution of our carbon dioxide emission rates throughout the talk.

Vice President Gore says, "The accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution

that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by

400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year. That is a lot

of energy. You can see the amount of carbon emissions really started to increase here after World

War II. Additionally, the additional heat energy is heating up. the entire system of Earth. The

presented graph depicting the typical temperatures between 1951 and 1980 was displayed by Mr.

Gore. Days that are blue are cooler than usual, days that are white are typical days, and days that

are red are warmer than average. In the last ten years, Mr. Gore notes, "very hot days are 150

times more frequent on the surface of the world than they were just 30 years ago."

According to NOAA and NASA, 2015 was the hottest year on record since humanity started

keeping data in 1880. NASA is currently navigating a rover across the surface of Mars. That

Republican colleague who went to Iowa and believed that the cold refuted climate change

condemned that conclusion as "pseudo-scientific nonsense." According to the World

Meteorological Organization, the last five years have been the warmest five-year span on record,
and 14 of the 15 hottest years ever recorded have occurred in this young century. The threat of

climate change is urgent, but Mr. Gore notes that we are surprisingly doing well and possess the

knowledge and the skills to produce energy from new sources. According to Vice President

Gore, the best predictions made at the time indicated that 30 gigawatts of wind power might be

installed globally by 2010. We outperformed that benchmark by 14.5 times. The same is true for

solar power, which is expanding even more swiftly than wind power. The best predictions,

according to Vice President Gore, were that we would install one gigawatt of solar power

annually by 2010, but by the time 2010 rolled around, we had surpassed that goal by 17 times.

We outperformed it by 58 times last year. We expect to surpass it this year by 68 times. Even

though, as Vice President Gore notes, "fossil energy is presently still subsidized at a rate 40 times

larger than renewables," these advancements helped bring down the cost of renewable energy to

parity with fossil fuel power. "After the last no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the future

world hinges," Mr. Gore quotes the renowned American poet Wallace Stevens. I think Mr. Gore’s

optimism regarding this is applicable to our country as well. Let us remember that America and

the Philippines have been allies for a long time. If our people will do the right measures and

negotiations, I think we can also achieve such achievements.