Choosing to solve the climate crisis

"We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we choose to solve it I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed".

Al Gore has come a long way in the four years since the publication of An Inconvenient Truth. That - and the Oscar winning documentary that accompanied it - was polemic: a diatribe that at times beat the reader over the head with the bar-graphs and statistics of global warming.

Our Choice, by contrast (and as the title implies), is much more inclusive. The man who introduces himself these days as, "the man who used to be the next President of the Unites States," has mellowed.

Of course that doesn't mean he's any less certain. If anything, he says, the scientific picture is even more complete, the evidence even stronger.

What has changed is that the former vice president seems to have decided to try and take people with him. As the African proverb he quotes at the beginning of the book says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."

Al Gore wants to go far, and Our Choice is about the solutions to the climate crisis rather than the problems.

And he's surprisingly optimistic. Speaking on the programme this morning Al Gore acknowledged that the Copenhagen climate talks were unlikely to deliver the kind of comprehensive, legally binding agreement, he had hoped for. But the opportunity was still there to commit nations to changing course, and to reducing incredibly harmful global warming pollutants.

"The Glass" he says, "is more than half full".