Answering the Call:

A Climate Project Trainee comes home

By Melissa Everett

It's a mild January day at the Nashville Airport. The crowd at the shuttle stand is clearly checking each other out. "Is anyone here part of The Climate Project?" I ask. Everyone nods and smiles.

We about to join two hundred others, part of the thousand speakers being trained to deliver the presentation developed by Al Gore and used in An Inconvenient Truth. We have signed an agreement to give at least ten presentations in the next year, and not to accept payment for it. In the next two days, we will work directly with Mr. Gore, a couple of scientific advisors, a speaking coach and each other. We will also consume enormous amounts of jamabalaya and hush puppies, and coffee.

My presenter kit includes a minimalist cardboard notebook containing printouts of 427 slides, each with talking points and background references; and a bundle of tiny earth decals that stick onto any phone: "Climate Project: Answer the Call."

We gather in a big meeting room with color-coded stations. Each regional group has a "mentor" from a previous training session. Our easygoing mentor, Keith Bergman, is Town Manager in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was awakened to the issue by flood risks and land management issues close to home.

Orientation gives way to dinner: a stand-up buffet at the gorgeous renovated opera house across the street. Through the crowd moves the former Vice President, systematically shaking 200 hands. A few people hug him. Nobody slows him down.

Next morning, he gives us the movie-length presentation straight through. "There's a lot to this and you'll make lots of mistakes. Keep at it. I've given this 1,200 times," he notes. After a break, we delve deeper with a slide-by-slide review that lasts the rest of the day.

We know, and we don't know, how much human civilization has altered the earth's chemistry, land and water cover, species distribution, and climate. The facts are at our fingertips. The meaning is hard to take in.

The presentation's opening look at the earth from space inspires wonder, and it also shows directly how thin the atmosphere is, relative to the scale of today's polluting technologies. We access the inconvenient story through the explorations of key scientists who began measuring the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane and the rest. We learn how the deep history of GHG concentration and temperature variance are tracked using methods like ice core sampling. We also review the comparison photos of the world's major glaciers losing their ice cover, and the statistics on first-ever weather events – doubling of the number of tropical storms, first hurricane in the southern hemisphere, record temperatures, heat wave fatalities, floods and droughts. Against a photo of Swiss villagers trying to transact business in a knee-deep flood, we take in the comment: "It's like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation."

How do we work with this apocalyptic material? With the range of audiences in all our communities? With our own comfort levels and quirks? With a heavily-animated, sound-rich motherlode of more than 400 slides? The presentation walks through a planetary wake-up at the broadest level, and the necessary knowledge and strategies for "getting out of denial without overshooting into despair." As the training wraps up, we practice, working with specialists on some policy and technology solutions, learning psychology and presentation technique.

In facing denial, a tempting cliché is the metaphor of the frog in hot water. If the critter jumps in suddenly, it will jump out. If the water is heated gradually, the frog sits passively. Gore warns, "You must rescue the frog, or you will sink your audience." Sure enough, we have slides of a benign hand doing just that, and the frog on a lily pad nursing a tall drink.

One road map back from the brink is provided by Princeton scientists Pakala and Sokolow, who modeled the probable contribution from a series of responses including energy efficiency, renewable energy, transportation breakthroughs, expanded green space including vegetative roofs for carbon uptake and natural cooling, and the capture of greenhouse gas pollutants by chemical means. The path would bring the U.S back to pre-1970 levels by 2050. This is on par with the commitments made by the European community as well as by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Over 400 U.S. cities, towns and villages have echoed the commitment to do their part.

Heading back to the Hudson Valley, I'm prepared to jump in with an initiative we call Cool Communities – helping municipalities respond to climate change in ways that improve quality of life and get people involved. To ride the wave of momentum from the training, I've already scheduled an informal presentation to my own community in uptown Kingston. But there hasn't been time for more publicity than a few emails. On a damp winter weeknight, I walk down to the spot, Inspired Books, expecting half a dozen people. Instead, the place is packed. Strengthened with the knowledge that 200 others, around the country, are also also stepping up to the plate in their home communities, I walk in.

Melissa Everett, Ph.D. is Executive Director of Sustainable Hudson Valley.

Information and action:

Cities for Climate Protection, a program of ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, see HYPERLINK "http://www.iclei.org" www.iclei.org

Union of Concerned Scientists, Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment at HYPERLINK "http://www.ucs.org" www.ucs.org

New York Department of Environmental Conservation – proceedings of December 4, 2006 conference, "Climate Change in New York's Hudson Valley." HYPERLINK "http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/hudson/hvcc.html" http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/hudson/hvcc.html.

Sustainable Hudson Valley supports communities, businesses and households in responding to global warming with local innovation: HYPERLINK "http://www.sustainhv.org" www.sustainhv.org. On April 14, a national day of climate awareness and action, SHV will host a Global Warming Café for community discussion and strategizing - at Art On Wall, 288 Wall Street in Kingston from 3 – 6 pm. RSVP: 845-331-2670.