Al Gore addresses climate change effects at Climate Reality Leadership Corps

Nobel Peace prize winner and Former American vice-president Al Gore, spoke on the second day of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Johannesburg on Thursday.

The event attracted environmental activists and thinkers from around the world. The corps is a global movement in aim to teach people about climate change and help them reajust to a changing world. 

In his offering, Gore gave an analysis of how humans were driving climate change and how it was currently affecting conditions around the world.

He illustrated how the entire globe was getting hotter on average, explaining the last decade was the hottest on record. “As the average goes up, the extremes go up," due to humans pumping gases into the atmosphere and driving global warming. With the atmosphere being as thin as a coat of varnish on a globe, the impact was devastating.

Since the 1980s, extreme hot and cold weather previously occured 0.1% of the time, now they happen 10% of the time. 

Such extreme changes have brought an important shift in how scientists discuss global warming now viewing all events like floods and droughts are influenced by global warming.

Most recent example was Typhoon Haiyan, which striked the Philippines last year. The ocean it passed over was 3°C warmer than usual, gaining more energy and more water. Hurricane Sandy was also fuelled by the oceans warmer than average 5°C brutally damaging the north-eastern coast of the United States.

The key was to move towards adapting to climate change – changing the way we live to survive the change reducing our greenhouse gas emission

The vision is to have 80% of the world's population living in countries where solar electricity is cheaper than fuel from coal and other sources by 2020.

Al Gore faith in us winning this struggle is in the future in renewables.