Gore to speak at Stanford – open to the public

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Al Gore to Speak at Stanford

March 21, 2013

Former Vice President Al Gore will give a lecture on climate change on Tuesday, April 23, in honor of former Senior Fellow Stephen Schneider, a world-renowned climate scientist who died in 2010.

Former Vice President Al Gore, chairman of The Climate Reality Project, will share his thoughts on addressing climate change within our democracy and take questions from students at Stanford University on Tuesday, April 23, when he gives a lecture in honor of Stephen H. Schneider, the Stanford professor and world-renowned climate scientist who died in 2010.

The program, which is open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6:15 p.m.) in Memorial Auditorium on the Stanford campus. Tickets are free, but seating is limited. Stanford students and postdoctoral fellows need only show their Stanford identification card to be admitted. All others should contact the Stanford Ticket Office on the second floor of Tresidder Union or by calling (650) 725-2787.

“Al Gore worked closely with Steve to sound the alarm about climate change, long before the average person understood there was a problem,” said Terry Root, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, which is sponsoring the event along with the Stanford Speakers Bureau and two student groups on campus: Students in Government and Students for a Sustainable Stanford. Root frequently collaborated with her late husband Steve Schneider on understanding environmental consequences of climate change.

The title of Gore’s address is “Peril and Opportunity: Solving the Climate Crisis and Reinvigorating Democracy.” He is the author of the best-sellers “Earth in the Balance,” “An Inconvenient Truth,” “The Assault on Reason” and “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” as well as a new book titled “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.” He is the co-recipient, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980 and 1982 and the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on Jan. 20, 1993, and served eight years.

Steve Schneider was a leader in science communication and a world expert on interdisciplinary climate science. At the time of his death, he was the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute. His most recent work centered on communicating the possible risks, vulnerabilities and impacts of climate change to ensure that leaders were sufficiently informed to apply smart risk management strategies in climate-policy decision making.

Schneider founded the interdisciplinary journal “Climatic Change” and continued to serve as its editor-in-chief until his death. He consulted with federal agencies and/or White House staff in every U.S. presidential administration since the Nixon era. He was an author of the first four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Memorial Auditorium is located at 551 Serra Mall on the Stanford campus. The free Marguerite shuttle can be taken from downtown Palo Alto or the Caltrain Palo Alto stations to Serra Mall. Shuttle information is available here. For parking information, click here.

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Mark Bofill
March 29, 2013 2:04 pm

At the link, I see Al Gore, “Peril and Opportunity: Solving the Climate Crisis and Reinvigorating Democracy”.
Anybody care to help me crack the code and figure out what ‘Reinvigorating Democracy’ is doublespeak for in this context?

Ian H
March 29, 2013 2:10 pm

Clever of Gore to agree to speak at a memorial event of this nature. If anyone makes a noise in the audience or asks awkward and nasty questions they run the risk of appearing insensitive and disrespectful of the memory of Steve Schneider.

March 29, 2013 2:12 pm

I’ll look forward to any comment from the Solar Sage of Stanford

Laurie Bowen
March 29, 2013 2:14 pm

And just in case you need to remind yourself of who he was . . . . http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/july/schneider-071910.html

Mike McMillan
March 29, 2013 2:18 pm

I’m certain it will be an interesting lecture. We should all make an effort to attend.

John Bell
March 29, 2013 2:19 pm

All this global warming and climate alarmism reminds me of “The Sokal Affair” which you can read about on Wikipedia. The way lefties all recite and repeat the alarmist meme and how the MSM will “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions” [taken from the wiki article]. I have a friend who is a pretty big name here in the Detroit area skeptical community, he is a big skeptic and atheist like me, except he is “about as liberal as you can get” as he described himself. But he believes in AGW and in my eyes that is not a true skeptic because he has not done his homework and dug up the facts.

Laurie Bowen
March 29, 2013 2:21 pm

This was also interesting . . . . Unearthed video: Global warming alarmist Stephen Schneider caught on a May 1978 episode of the TV show In Search Of…The Coming Ice Age
http://algorelied.com/?p=2839

March 29, 2013 2:22 pm

” … will share his thoughts on addressing climate change within our democracy and take questions** from students.”
**(i.e. questions pertaining to solving the global warming crisis, why the public is badly informed about the issue, the role of the fossil fuel industry as a roadblock, and other similar tangents thereof. Questions giving any support to, or in favor of, the skeptic community, e.g., the status of polar bear populations, Arctic ice extent, sea level rise, IPCC graphs, the urban heat island effect, and ClimateGate will NOT be answered. Also, this offer to take audience questions of any description is subject to cancellation at any time without explanation, and Mr Gore reserves the right to have suspect audience members removed at any time during his presentation. Other conditions also apply, see Stanford U for details.)

March 29, 2013 2:23 pm

I just hope that a video recording of this non-event is made and made available to all!

March 29, 2013 2:24 pm

Last time I checked, good old Al looked a little like something filled with a lighter gas than CO2. Hope the structural integrity of the stage is better than his intellectual integrity. (Or the REAL world could come crashing down upon him..)

JaneHM
March 29, 2013 2:24 pm

Sorry to hear it’s going to be unseasonable cold in Menlo Park on April 23

Jimbo
March 29, 2013 2:26 pm

“Al Gore worked closely with Steve to sound the alarm about climate change, long before the average person understood there was a problem,” said Terry Root,……

Did he work closely with Schneider in 1971?

Abstract
………Rasool, S.I., and S.H. Schneider, 1971: Atmospheric carbon dioxide and aerosols: Effects of large increases on global climate. Science, 173, 138-141, doi:10.1126/science.173.3992.138.
……………….If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.

Did Gore learn from Schneider? No because Gore forgot the “being honest” bit, he just offers up “scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Mediarology/Mediarology.html

Why not just be honest and damn being effective? This is what climate scientists need to do. They are not the only ones who care about the planet. Many of us also have children and a stake in the future of this planet.

Jimbo
March 29, 2013 2:27 pm

Oh noes, I messed up the html. Sorry. 🙁

Tom in Florida
March 29, 2013 2:29 pm

“Former Vice President Al Gore will give a lecture on climate change…”
Let me fix that to improve the accuracy:
“Former Vice President Al Gore will give his opinion on climate change…”

March 29, 2013 2:33 pm

A video of an uncensored question and answer period might be fun to watch. (Assuming the questions themselves aren’t censored.)

John Bell
March 29, 2013 2:44 pm

The Stanford.edu article that Laurie Bowen cites, says; “”He had been struggling with a health problem for maybe seven years now and all of his friends were warning him to slow down and he was so dedicated to getting the climate science right and getting the public properly educated on it that he absolutely refused to slow down,” said biologist Paul Ehrlich, who shared bird-watching expeditions around the globe with Schneider.”
So I presume that Ehrlich and Schneider jetted around the globe on airplanes, creating CO2 along the way. And I take it that elites like them [and Gore] should be allowed to fly on jets but deniers like me should not, is that what they want?

Peter in Ohio
March 29, 2013 2:45 pm

Mark Bofill says:
March 29, 2013 at 2:04 pm
……..Anybody care to help me crack the code and figure out what ‘Reinvigorating Democracy’ is doublespeak for in this context?
—————————————–
I have to agree that this is more Gore doublespeak. I’m willing to wager his vision goes something like this: Our democracy must be “modernized” to allow for immediate government action on issues where “the science is settled”. A “modern” democracy cannot allow deniers and flat-earthers to delay or subvert government control over anything and everything anthropogenic, or whatever the government defines to be anthropogenic.

Other_Andy
March 29, 2013 2:46 pm

OT
Find it slightly disconcerting that, whenever I open WUWT, I get bombarded with WordPress adds for organisations (Clinton’s Clinton Foundation, Obama’s Let’s Move) supported by global warmers.

Steve from Rockwood
March 29, 2013 2:46 pm

“Al Gore worked closely with Steve [Schneider] to sound the alarm about climate change, long before the average person understood there was a problem” [this article]
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet” [Al Gore, 1999 on Wolf Blitzer]
Someone (probably Al) is going to great lengths to craft this man as a visionary. Perhaps another Presidential run?

John Tillman
March 29, 2013 2:47 pm

Skeptics in the audience are liable to be few & far between, unless they migrate over from the Hoover Institute:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/138101
But I’m glad that Prince Albert has emerged from hibernation, now that his stores of accumulated fat must be running low at his sea-level, high carbon foot-print stately manors. He must be through counting the Big Oil bucks he got for his unwatched TV channel, to go with those he inherited from his dad’s Commie crony & those he was awarded by hugely electricity consumptive Google.
And, unencumbered by the less wooden, more vaguely humanoid Tipper, mother of his political prop kids, he can put all those ill-gotten gains to good use hiring hookers brought into his rotund presence by the SS, so that honest American masseuses no longer need to fear his mashing & awkward unwanted advances.

Rhoda R
March 29, 2013 2:48 pm

Mark Bofill says:
“Anybody care to help me crack the code and figure out what ‘Reinvigorating Democracy’ is doublespeak for in this context?”
“Snuff” as in depress or smother…

Ben Wilson
March 29, 2013 2:49 pm

Pardon my skepticism, but. . . .
what has any “Climate Scientist” anywhere ever done that would make them deserve to be world famous?

John Tillman
March 29, 2013 2:50 pm

Laurie Bowen says:
March 29, 2013 at 2:21 pm
This was also interesting . . . . Unearthed video: Global warming alarmist Stephen Schneider caught on a May 1978 episode of the TV show In Search Of…The Coming Ice Age
http://algorelied.com/?p=2839
—————————————————————————————-
Stephen was also one of the usual suspects with the astronomical Dr. Sagan & Ehrlich touting Nuclear Winter. But in private conversation, he was more circumspect about the physical assumptions behind the group’s “science”, as for instance regarding soot.

March 29, 2013 2:57 pm

I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting for Al’s memorial service.

Matt
March 29, 2013 2:58 pm

Have they issued a winter weather advisory for Palo Alto yet?

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