Nothing could make progressives miss Al Gore more than the president of the United States saying “I don’t believe it” about his own administration’s climate change report.
Ahead of his eighth annual 24 Hours of Reality special coming next week, Gore visited The Daily Show Wednesday night to give his usual warnings about the dangers of a rapidly-warming planet. But this time, he had an orange “face” to go after directly. “I mean, this is a global emergency after all,” he told host Trevor Noah.
“Here’s the thing: We are treating the atmosphere as an open sewer,” Gore said. “It’s a very thin shell around the planet, and we’re changing it dramatically by dumping 110 million tons of man-made, heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every day.”
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“The cumulative amount now traps as much extra heat energy every day as would be released by 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours,” he continued. “It’s a big planet, but that is an enormous amount of energy. That’s why the temperatures are going up, the water cycle’s being disrupted. And the fires! Look at the fires in California just recently.”
Noah countered by presenting some evidence from “a very famous scientist who lives in the White House” and claimed in an interview this week, “You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean.”
Laughing, Gore replied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s really significant, Trevor, that Donald J. Trump is now the face of climate denial. And there are those who are still giving him their loyalty and trust. And I get that, believe me, but the vast majority of Americans, not to mention all around the world, are really kind of—they’ve had it with the constant craziness, if you want to call it that way.”
“I think we do want to call it that way, yeah,” Noah said.
