Al Gore Emerging -- Presidency Secondary to Global Warming?

May 10, 2006 — -- Al Gore, at the beginning of the upcoming documentary feature "An Inconvenient Truth," introduces himself to an audience gathered to hear about global warming by saying, "I'm Al Gore. I used the be the next president of the United States."

After the laughter dies down, he says, with an affable straight face, "I don't find anything particularly funny about that," and he gets an appreciative, though just slightly uncertain, second laugh.

Then he launches into what he calls his slideshow -- a clear and concise explanation that he has reportedly given about a thousand times around the world, aided by impressive animated mega-graphics on an enormous screen behind him -- of what Gore (and a growing number of others) calls a planetary emergency.

Whatever your politics, it is an authoritative and compelling demonstration of the unassailable reality and dangers for humanity of the continuing addition to the atmosphere of greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and gas.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports that Gore is also launching "an educational group" called the Alliance for Climate Protection.

One participant tells the Journal it "will look like a political campaign." It will spend millions to convince Americans that global warming is an extremely urgent problem.

Inevitably, many people seeing this movie and learning of this group will ask whether Gore is running for president again, despite his statements that he's not.

You learn in "An Inconvenient Truth" that Gore has focused on global warming longer than he's been a politician; he studied at Harvard under Roger Revel, one of the first scientists to realize that the industrial age has created a new and unnatural injection into the atmosphere of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that would change the climate of the entire planet.