Al Gore's views on climate change, extreme weather and Keystone XL

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/14/al-gore-climate-change-transcript?intcmp=122


Nobel laureate and former vice-president, Al Gore, speaking in Aspen, Colorado in February 2011. Photograph: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis

On whether Obama's re-election and the aftermath of Sandy represent a moment for climate change action

I think it definitely is a time when more and more people are focused on the extreme weather that has disrupted so many lives. People who have not really devoted a lot of time to thinking about the climate crisis in the past are now saying to their family and friends: "this is clearly a new time. The weather is just not what it used to be".

We call it dirty weather because dirty energy creates dirty weather. As the leading edge scientists have been telling us for a few years now, we are long past the point where it is sufficient to say that you can not connect one storm to the climate crisis.

In fact, all weather events are now effected by global warming pollution. There is a difference, as others have said, between systemic causality and linear causality – just as you can't often say that a person with lung cancer got it definitely because he or she smoked cigarettes throughout their life. You can say smoking cigarettes does cause lung cancer. The fact that the oceans are warmer due to man-made climate change means that storms have more strength and force from the ocean heat energy.