Al Gore appears at Cannes film festival

At the Cannes Film Festival, Former US vice-president Al Gore warned that the world is facing a "planetary emergency" due to global warming. A documentary based on the politician's environmental campaigning is being screened at the festival. Mr Gore said the world faced a stark choice between the end of civilisation and a future for its children and that global warming was a "challenge to our moral imagination to understand it and then to respond to it urgently".

The documentary An Inconvenient Truth is based on lectures Al Gore has been delivering about environmental crisis for many years. The film shows photographs of changes to glaciers around the world, with snow disappearing from the Alps, Antarctica and the South Pole.

"People have been moved by it," Mr Gore said. "People coming out feeling a sense of urgency." He stressed the problem was moral, not political, and said he hoped the current US government would re-think its environmental strategy and sign up to the successor to the Kyoto treaty. "I even believe that there is a chance that within the next two years even Bush and Cheney will be forced to change their position on this crisis," he said. "One can only attempt to create one's own reality for so long. Reality proper has a way of insisting itself upon you. Mother nature has joined this debate with a very powerful and persistent voice."

But he said he was not thinking of running for president in two years.
"I don't plan to be a candidate again for national office," he said. "There are other ways to serve."

From the BBC - see the full report here.