Michiganders preach Al Gore's global warming gospel

[Doondoo]

A dozen Michiganders are helping Al Gore carry the message of his movie "Inconvenient Truth," preaching the gospel of global warming with his slides and their words. Gore has personally trained 1,000 disciples. Part cheerleaders, part angels of gloom, they are fanning across the country with copies of his climate change slide show (330 slides) and the goal of getting their audience roused enough to demand action from their leaders.

Speakers are encouraged to customize their presentations, adding slides or discussing facts about the effects of global warming in their own states. In Michigan, those talking points could include predictions that by 2100, summer here will feel like summers now in Mississippi and that the levels of lakes Michigan and Huron could drop by 5 feet.

Kathryn Savoie is among the unpaid volunteers setting up projectors in living rooms, church sanctuaries and VFW halls to show graphs of scary numbers and slides of shrinking glaciers. In 20 to 90 minutes, volunteers lay out the highlights. Each trainee promises to give 10 talks in the next year. Savoie, an ecologist who lives in Detroit, was among the first 50 people Gore trained last September in Nashville.

"He told us he'd been waiting for 30 years for the cavalry to come and we're the cavalry," she said. "It felt historic."


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