| Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses spiritual argument on climate Nobel winner adapts fact-based message to reach those who believe they have a moral duty to protect the planet in Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate CrisisAl's Gore's much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.In his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the man who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow on disappearing polar ice and other consequences of climate change, concludes: "Simply laying out the facts won't work."Instead, Gore tells Newsweek magazine in a pre-publication interview, that he has been adapting his fact-based message - now put out by hundreds of volunteers - to appeal to those who believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet. "I've done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It's probably my favourite version, but I don't use it very often because it can come off as proselytising," Gore tells Newsweek.Gore's book arrives at a time of intense international scrutiny of America's moves on the environment ahead of an international meeting on global warming at Copenhagen, now just more than a month away.It draws on the scholarly approach Gore developed for Inconvenient Truth. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together from fields ranging from agriculture to neuroscience to discuss possible solutions to climate change.The book draws on 30 such "solutions summits", as well as Gore's countless telephone conversations with scientists at America's best institutions. According to the book's press release, "Among the most unique approaches Gore takes in the book is showing readers how our own minds can be an impediment to change."New polling last month showed a steep decline in the numbers of Americans who share Gore's sense of urgency in acting on climate change.The book aims to reach those Americans by familiarising readers with emerging alternative energy sources, such as geothermal, biomass and wind power, as well as the possibilities of making cleaner coal power plants, and developing a more efficient and responsive "smart" electrical grid. Gore also explores how deforestation, soil erosion, and the rising world population are multiplying the effects of rising greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the material was developed through the series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless telephone conversations with scientists at America's best institutions."He is one of the only politicians that takes the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn't ask us how our results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four or five times for the book. "Nobody that we have dealt with has ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science and all the different complications and what it all means as Al Gore."Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies - published only last week - that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide - while the focus of the politics of climate change - produces around 40% of the actual warming.Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions. "Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that's still justified," he told the magazine. "But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all" of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.The former vice-president has been working behind the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power.On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, he was "almost certain" Obama would attend the negotiations. The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action. The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious debate about the costs of dealing with climate change - with conservative Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America's use of oil will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change. Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate's environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready to move ahead without any Republican participation.Climate changeAl GoreReligionUnited StatesSuzanne Goldenbergguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of the decade: your best books of 2001 It was the year of Atonement, The Body Artist and The Corrections, but what was your favourite book from 2001?It was the year our era began, with unprecedented abruptness, in obscene rolling news. But, blessedly, literature moves at a much slower pace, and it would be some years before the convulsions of September 2001 began to resound in serious fiction. Saturday, Ian McEwan's post-9/11 novel, was four years away, and his Booker disappointment this year was for Atonement.Its story of a young girl who ruins at least three lives with a single lie, nonetheless won a lot of hearts in the year's best-of lists. I wasn't entirely convinced by McEwan in country-house attire, his prose dressed up a bit like Elizabeth Bowen, but the section where he switches his attention to the damned male lead, lost amid the bloody chaos of the Dunkirk retreat, is probably the most powerful thing he's ever written.Pipping McEwan to the Booker post with an unseemly second win was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, an astonishing success for what must be Carey's most uncompromising book, which reclaims one of Australia's most stalely mythologised figures, ventriloquising Kelly's uneducated (and barely punctuated) voice with raw, bleeding power.Don DeLillo reappeared after the almighty Underworld with the very short, and very chilly, Body Artist. The calm of a performance artist's intimate retreat with her husband is emptied into bleaching grief when he kills himself. While she is attempting to recompose herself in their remote rented house, she discovers a "foundling" is also living there, an eerie creature whose faculties are so impaired that he has no settled identity, but does possess an uncanny knack for ventriloquising words he has overheard in the house. Among other things, The Body Artist is a meditation on the metaphysics of space and time, and shows DeLillo pushing at the limits of what prose can express. It's probably the book from 2001 I most want to re-read.Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club provided more straightforward entertainment with his story of brainy grammar school boys in Birmingham, whose conventional teenage obsessions - with music as much as girls - provided a very touching, and surprisingly resonant, portrait of Britain's post-war settlement giving way to the Thatcher years: the end of progressive rock being strangely in tune with the demise of progressive politics. Its sequel was a bit of a disappointment, but that's another year.The year's most cheered breakthrough came from Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a seriously ambitious novel about the condition of America that was also an international bestseller. Its winning "formula" was to combine its attention to shifting sociological shapes with a very traditional kind of family novel, directing amused sympathy to all the Lambert clan's fractious members. If you could make it beyond the coercion of its "must-read" status, it was brilliantly involving.On a less spectacular scale, Andrey Kurkov made unusual headway into Anglo-letters for a translated writer. Bringing something of Gogol's spirit to post-Soviet Ukraine, Death and the Penguin deployed the sentimental appeal of the eponymous orphaned zoo animal in a chilling black comedy. And over in the land of plenty, Eric Schlosser's blazing investigation of junk eating and dying, Fast Food Nation, was going like hot something or other.And lest we forget, this was also the year when Philip Roth tested the embarrassment threshold of the critics with The Dying Animal, in which an ageing alter ego embarks, in his 60s, on an affair with a besotted young woman less than half his age. For those who could look past the rather Woody Allenish casting of the lead, Roth's inimitably impassioned depiction of a male mind in turmoil was as invigorating as ever. How things change.That's the 3 for 2 table at the front of 2001's shop, but as we all know, the best stuff is usually further back. (Non-fiction? You can get non-fiction?) Can you point me to the stuff it's worth paying full price for?FictionBest booksLindesay Irvineguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Holiday Books: Fake News This spinoff from The Onion captures the trajectory of fake news from gag to serious critique. feeds.nytimes.com |
Terry Pratchett talks to the Guardian book club The bestselling Discworld author talks to the book club about fiction, football and academia in his new book, Unseen AcademicalsAndy GallagherChristian BennettJohn Mullan feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Poem of the week: Waiting by WE Henley WE Henley's "Waiting", from his "In Hospital" sequence of poems far outshines his better known "Invictus"Slightly misquoted, two lines of a well-known poem headlined an interview with Gordon Brown in Sunday's News of the World: "My head is bloody, but unbowed…I am (the) master of my fate.") The poem, "Invictus" by WE Henley, was also printed in full.Mr Brown told the newspaper's head of politics, David Wooding, that he had looked up the poem after watching the movie of the same name. In the film, Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) passes the verses on to the captain of the Springboks, spurring the rugby team, a symbol of apartheid for many South Africans, to victory in the 1995 world cup. Mandela is indeed on record as saying that "Invictus" inspired him during his long imprisonment on Robben Island: he recited it and taught it to other prisoners. "It is about determination," Mr Brown told his interviewer, "It summarises my view." Mind you, Mr Brown is not in entirely good company: the last verse of "Invictus" was chosen by the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, to console his final moments.The critic John Ciardi described "Invictus" as "perhaps the most widely-known bad poem in English". "Bad" is a shade strong. It's not the kind of poem that appeals to the imagination, that's for sure, but, as a series of declarations to rally the inner troops, it might well be the kind of poem that you would take into battle, spiritual or physical - especially if you were in danger of losing your footing. The poem was first published under the title "I. M. R. T. Hamilton Bruce". "Invictus" (meaning "invincible") was substituted at a later date, probably by Arthur Quiller-Couch when anthologising the poem. The Hamilton Bruce thus commemorated was a flour merchant and patron of the arts. We don't know why Henley initially dedicated the poem to his memory. What we do know is that the heroic sentiments in the poem are genuinely connected to Henley's own life.The poet suffered from tuberculosis of the leg, and early on required a partial amputation. Later on, it was thought that his healthy foot would also need to be amputated. He firmly resisted this drastic intervention, but, in 1873, he spent a prolonged period of treatment in the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, an experience he commemorated in a remarkably vivid sequence of poems, "In Hospital". Henley later went on to become a successful journalist and editor: he helped other, younger writers, and attracted considerable attention himself as a poet. He was much admired by Robert Louis Stevenson (and apparently provided the model for Long John Silver). The two writers went on to collaborate on several plays."Invictus" does not form part of the "Hospital" sequence. These poems are vastly superior. Descriptive rather than declamatory, they record with a crisp, unflinching but not unsympathetic realism, the ordinary lives and deaths amid the "corridors and stairs of stone and iron." Henley sketches brilliant, kindly little sonnet-portraits of the various nurses, surgeons and patients. He also expands into free verse for the more impressionistic material, finding rhythms to suggest the dazzling derangement as consciousness succumbs to chloroform, or, during nights of insomnia, to make us feel how "the mattress…glows like a kiln" and the bedclothes "ramble and roll." There is no trace of self-pity, not even when he presents "Case Number One" (clearly himself), "Stripped up and showing his foot/ (Alas for God's Image!)/ Swaddled in wet, white lint/ Brilliantly hideous with red." Happily, the work ends with the patient's discharge, and a cry of joy: "Carry me out/ into the wind and the sunshine,/ into the beautiful world."I've selected "Waiting" from the sequence as this week's poem. It wastes no words (Henley was the least over-blown of Victorian poets). But the three unrhymed quatrains show a complete and detailed scene, conveying both the foreboding mood and the varied activity of the hospital waiting-room. The faintly sinister equipment; the patients, forlorn or garrulous; the insouciant dressers: all are sketched with Hogarthian sharpness. It might have been a depressing poem, and some of those end-of-line nouns weigh heavily, especially in the last stanza. At the same time, it seems enlivened by the reporter's quick eye and hurried, skilful note-taking. There are glimmers of wry humour. Even the despondency of the last line is mitigated by the parenthesis ("I think").The tone of "Waiting" expresses bravery in a homelier manner than "Invictus," while reminding us how necessary every ounce of courage must have been to the patients of Henley's days. Hospitals were places of great suffering and limited prophylaxis, and "determination" was indeed a virtue to be encouraged.Whether "Invictus" has an entirely useful message for the prime minister, I wonder. "Waiting" might be a melancholy read for the country's leader in this tense pre-election period, but at least it could be a reminder that others share the harshness of the human condition. The will to alleviate a little of life's "blunder" and "shame" (not to mention the queues in the hospital waiting-room) is what Labour party politics really ought to be about.WaitingA square, squat room (a cellar on promotion), Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight;Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware;Scissors and lint and apothecary's jars.Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from,Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted:Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach,While at their ease two dressers do their chores.One has a probe – it feels to me a crowbar.A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone.A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers.Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame. PoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |