Former Vice President Al Gore has recently devolved into a rant about climate change during the World Economic Forum which took place in Davos, Switzerland, and condemned the recently purported detainment of well-known activist Greta Thunberg.
Formerly a Democratic presidential candidate, Gore stated as part of an angry tirade at the conference that carbon emissions are raising the temperature throughout the troposphere, the section of the atmosphere that holds oxygen, to an almost entirely unsustainable degree. He made the claim that these increased emissions are linked to extreme weather events and what he calls the boiling of the oceans.
“We’re still putting 162 million tons into it every single day, and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth,” he stated. “That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice, and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach one billion in this century.”
Gore also once again repeated his claims that David Malpass, the president of the World Bank and an appointee of former President Donald Trump, is a “climate denier” that goes after environmental policies without the needed passion. The accusation this past year followed speculation that President Joe Biden would choose Gore to work as the next leader of the international financial institution.
“We are not winning. The crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying these solutions, and we need to make changes quickly,” stated Gore. “Emissions are still going up. All these promises of the last few years to cut emissions, emissions are still going up. When are going to bring these emissions down?”
Having previously served in the administration of former President Bill Clinton, Gore also openly condemned the recent detainment of Greta Thunberg in the wake of her actions with other activists who protested the expansion of a coal mine in Germany. The 20-year-old was at first pictured smiling as a group of German police put took her into custody and left with her. Video later emerged which showed the police effectively allowing the media to take pictures and film Thunberg prior to taking her out of the area, sparking a number of accusations that the entire ordeal was just a stunt for publicity.
“We’ve heard about divides at this conference between the north and south, and the east and west. There’s another divide, increasingly, between those who are old enough to be in positions of power and the young people of this world. Greta Thunberg was just arrested in Germany. I agree with her efforts to stop that coal mine,” Gore concluded. “Young people around the world are looking at what we’re doing.”
