Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Bill McKibben’s occasional optimism notwithstanding, he and Al Gore are the two most visible alarmists on climate change. Even in the worst of circumstances both find reason to point out our remaining options for actually doing something.

Our thanks to David Gelles and the New York Times for rounding out the doom and gloom with a bit of hope:

Al Gore on Extreme Heat and the Fight Against Fossil Fuels

The past few weeks have him even more worried than usual.

It’s been 17 years since former Vice President Al Gore raised the alarm about climate change with his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, he’s been shouting from the rooftops about the risks of global warming more or less nonstop.

But the events of the past few weeks have Gore even more worried than usual.

“Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level,” he told me in an interview. “The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”

We can’t always say that a specific weather event was caused by climate change, but it is making certain extremes more likely. And this summer, the extreme weather chaos that Gore predicted in “An Inconvenient Truth” seems to have arrived all at once.

“Every night on the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” Gore said.

‘We know how to fix this’

Despite the apocalyptic weather news, Gore is also hopeful.

Clean energy is cheaper than ever, and electric vehicle sales are surging, turbocharged by government subsidies. Put that all together, and Gore thinks developed economies could draw down their emissions with surprising speed.

“If you sketch out what the potential curves take you to by 2030 or 2040, it becomes increasingly realistic to say, ‘Yes, these expansive goals definitely are achievable,’” he said.

To make the point about how quickly renewable energy is growing, Gore quoted the economist Rudiger Dornbusch: “Sometimes things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

But Gore was quick to add that every second counts. The faster we stop burning fossil fuels and releasing other planet-warming emissions, the more quickly global temperatures can stabilize…

Read the whole article here.