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Sharing an Inconvenient Truth
Two UCSD Executive Directors Attend Climate Change Training Session Led by Al Gore
Ioana Patringenaru | April 16, 2007
What do two key UCSD administrators, actress Cameron
Diaz and a stay-at-home mother from Alabama all have
in common? They all wanted to learn more about Al
Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” So,
they attended training sessions where Gore himself
taught how to give the slide show about climate change
that is the backbone of his Academy Award-winning
documentary. They also got to rub shoulders with the
former vice president, albeit for a few minutes.
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| Al Gore with a group of trainees. Birch Aquarium Executive Director Nigela Hillgarth is first from the left in the bottom row. |
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Gore took the slide show on the road years ago. Now, he is teaching others to do the same. Called The Climate Project, the outreach effort aims to train 1,000 volunteers, who will then pledge to give the presentation in their communities. Gore advised participants to offer hope and solutions, said Lisa Shaffer, executive director of UCSD's Environment and Sustainability Initiative, who went to Nashville in December to attend Gore’s training session.
“You have to balance the hope budget and the despair budget,” Shaffer recalls him saying.
“It’s a source of hope that so many people want to hear the talk,” she added.
Nigela Hillgarth, executive director of the Birch
Aquarium, traveled to Nashville for the training session
in January. Hillgarth will give the presentation at
4 p.m. today at the Price Center during the first
day of Earth Week celebrations at UCSD. She also will
give the talk once the aquarium’s exhibit, “Feeling
the Heat: the Climate Challenge,”opens May 19.
Hillgarth pointed out that “An Inconvenient
Truth” relies heavily on science done at UCSD’s
Scripps Institution of Oceanography. During Hillgarth’s
training session, Gore described Scripps as an extremely
important institution, she said. In the documentary,
he talks at length about Scripps founder Roger Revelle,
who taught Gore at Harvard. He also talks about the
work of Charles Keeling, a renown Scripps scientist
who died in 2005. One of Gore’s slides is based
on the Keeling curve, which shows the rise of carbon
dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere since the
late 1950s.
“That’s one of the most important datasets in the history of science,” Hillgarth said.
Other slides are based on work by Scripps researchers, including Tim Barnett and Jeff Severinghaus, as well as UCSD science historian Naomi Oreskes. Shaffer confessed she had originally resisted seeing the movie for that very reason. “It felt like work to me,” she said.
Meeting Gore
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| Lisa Shaffer with Al Gore. |
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Shaffer and Hillgarth also said that meeting Gore
was part of the training sessions’ appeal. They
both came away with a good impression. The former
vice president now looks like a solid football player,
Shaffer said. “But his energy is phenomenal,”
Hillgarth said. Shaffer said she was incredibly moved
after Gore gave the slide show to her group on the
first day of training. She knew the science. She had
recently seen the movie. “I was in tears at
the end,”she said. “It was really inspiring”
Gore spent the rest of the first day going through the presentation in detail, explaining the science behind each slide. Shaffer and Hillgarth said they were impressed by his extensive knowledge. “He’s incredibly smart and incredibly well-read,” Shaffer said. Gore had read every article she had just read, only more in-depth, she added.
Gore also comes across as genuine and sincere, both
women said. He stood in line at the buffet just like
everyone else to get his food at dinner. He held hands
with his wife, Tipper. He graciously answered questions.
“He was as pleasant as can be,” said Shaffer.
She and Hillgarth exchanged only a few words with
Gore during their respective sessions. Shaffer gave
him Ellen Revelle’s regards. The following month,
Hillgarth talked to him briefly about Scripps.
The other participants
But the training wasn’t just about Gore, Shaffer said. Meeting other participants also was an important part of the experience, she added. Hillgarth’s training session included Cameron Diaz. The actress had asked for privacy – and no press coverage. She seemed to be paying close attention and took copious notes. “I was very impressed,” Hillgarth said. “It clearly was something important for her.”
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| Scripps scientist Jeff Serveringhaus shows a piece of ice to one of the women who attended Gore's training session. |
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Shaffer’s group included less well-known folk. Some came from as far as Uganda and Slovenia. One of Shaffer’s roommates was a stay-at-home mother from Alabama, who didn’t own a computer or a projector. She had follow-up questions about slides based on research by Scripps scientists Barnett and Severinghaus. After the training, she drove down from Fresno, where she was visiting her sister, to San Diego, where Shaffer had arranged for her to meet the two researchers. Severinghaus let her hold a sample of ice he used to determine carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere.
Giving the slide show
Teaching general audiences about the science of climate change is what the training sessions were all about, said Hillgarth. Since they came back, Shaffer and Hillgarth have given the presentation to a wide range of groups and in a wide range of settings. Hillgarth first gave the talk in March on a ship in the Amazon, during a trip she took with Birch Aquarium members. It went well, she said. “They didn’t throw me overboard.”
Last week, she gave the presentation at Kearny High School in San Diego. She told students they were the most important audience she had talked to that day, which got her a big cheer. She meant it, she said. These students are the generation that will have to deal with the consequences of climate change, she explained. Hillgarth’s presentation had an impact, Kearny High senior Leslie Cook wrote in an e-mail. “I think a lot of the kids walked in thinking it was just another assembly but walked out having something to reflect on, and really understanding why (…) the solar energy and hybrid cars displayed outside were such viable sources of energy to consider for future use,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Shaffer gave the presentation to sixth graders in Del Mar. None of them knew that Gore had been vice president. Some of them knew he won an Academy Award. But all of them knew about recycling.
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Additional Information
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Click here to learn more about Earth Week activities at UCSD.
Or visit the UCSD Earth Week Web site.
Click here to read about UCSD sustainability leaders to be recognized.
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