Wow! Astonishing, given the doom and gloom assessment of most prognosticators who dare to place climate change in their crosshairs. And perhaps Gore’s assessment is strategic: the more we think we will prevail, the more energy we have to make sure we do. And it’s true: hopelessness can lead to lethargy, futility, a passive going-down-with-the-ship pessimism, or else a selfish, grab-whatever-you-can-while-you-can hedonism. In any case, I am grateful for Gore’s wide-ranging experience and comprehension of at least some of the factors responsible for climate change, and I applaud both his point of view and his reasoning from precedents, showing that we humans have made many changes in the past, much more quickly and thoroughly than expected. Here’s a review of the article, in grist.org.

Al Gore thinks there’s hope for humanity after all

Here’s the original article, in Rolling Stone, July 3-17, 2014 issue.

The Turning Point: New Hope for the Planet

Excerpt:

For those (including me) who are surprised at the speed with which this impending transition has been accelerating, there are precedents that help explain it. Remember the first mobile-telephone handsets? I do; as an inveterate “early adopter” of new technologies, I thought those first huge, clunky cellphones were fun to use and looked cool (they look silly now, of course). In 1980, a few years before I bought one of the early models, AT&T conducted a global market study and came to the conclusion that by the year 2000 there would be a market for 900,000 subscribers. They were not only wrong, they were way wrong: 109 million contracts were active in 2000. Barely a decade and a half later, there are 6.8 billion globally. 
These parallels have certainly caught the attention of the fossil-fuel industry and its investors: Eighteen months ago, the Edison Electric Institute described the floundering state of the once-proud landline-telephone companies as a grim predictor of what may soon be their fate.