Al Gore and the battle for climate opinion

— -- Al Gore isn't going away. And neither is global warming.

With Gore's latest high-profile global warming-awareness event, " 24 Hours of Reality", now over, political science still looks like the trickiest discipline in the entire realm of climate science.

"Lots of people out there are wondering why floods, droughts and storms are more powerful than in the past," Gore says. "While the political system too rarely is responding."

The event saw speakers in cities worldwide provide hourly presentations on local effects of climate change to some six million viewers. It came as the National Climatic Data Center announced the northern hemisphere had felt its fifth-warmest summer on record.

At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would delay regulations of power plant greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases, such as the carbon dioxide produced by burning oil, coal and natural gas, are the leading source of about a 1.4-degree warming to the surface atmosphere seen in the last century, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and numerous other reports. Anywhere from about 2 to 11 degrees more warmth is likely coming, according to those reports, largely depending on how much more greenhouse gas is pumped into the air.

But who cares? Well, about 83% of people nationwide (plus or minus 3%) agree that the "(w)orld's temperature has been going up in the past 100 years," in a Stanford University-supported poll taken this month of 1,134 adults. (That's a jump up from 75% agreement a year ago in the same poll.) And about 42% of them thought global warming was "extremely" or "very" important. Meanwhile, the folks who thought global warming was "(n)ot important at all," in the poll increased to 14%, up from 9% a year ago.

Reaching the public is the reason for Gore's campaign, which he calls, "a kind of sequel to An Inconvenient Truth," the 2006 film that —along with Hurricane Katrina— helped push climate change to the top of the news. Unlike the movie, a primer on climate science, the " Climate Reality" effort looks to let people know about regional effects, such as heat waves and flooding, that scientists such as Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, are pointing to as already worsened by global warming now.

"We are also answering the three or four most common 'denier' arguments, just by presenting the science," Gore says, referring to habitual climate science naysayers.

Part of it includes talking about similarities between tobacco company tactics to deny lung cancer was caused by cigarettes, and oil and coal company-funded folks who attack climate scientists. (A recent book by science historian Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, documents this history). "It is very cynically the same strategy," Gore says.

Well, that's great, but will it convince anyone not already convinced about global warming? "There still could be people in the middle," says sociologist Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has looked at the political battle over climate and public perceptions going back to the 1980s.